JUNK/PUNK Science

Punk Science Primer

Dr Manjir Samanta-Laughton

Reading this article will help put a framework on the scientific links associated with it. It is a brief summary of the book, Punk Science which should be read for further information and if scientific references are needed.

The age of science

We are at the start of the new millennium and our daily lives are riddled with technology from Blackberrys to intelligent washer-dryers. It seems that we live in an age of science, in which humanity is no longer a slave to natural forces, but can control them. It is the scientific quest of the past few centuries that has put us into this position. We have been gathering empirical evidence from the deepest cosmos to the far reaches of our own planet, to into the tiniest nano-worlds.

We appear to have a handle on our universe, enough to control its forces. People are even talking about the end of science as if there is nothing else to discover.

But back up a bit. As we peer deeper into our universe, from the gene to the galaxy, instead of finding answers, we simply throw up more questions. A confident front is presented to the media, after all scientists have to convince the public that their billions of funding are producing something important. Yet behind the façade, many cherished scientific ideas are crumbling. The universe throws up a relentless plethora of mysteries that refuse to conform to our suppositions about how it should behave.

The clockwork universe

This is one of the most exciting moments in scientific history as we are about to breakthrough into a new paradigm. For the last few centuries we have been living with a scientific paradigm without a soul, with a worldview that sees the universe as a machine made of small parts. The idea is that if we understand the parts of the machine we can understand the whole. This is known as reductionism.

Except what if it is wrong and this is not how the universe works. What if there is a lot more to our world than we currently suppose. In my book, Punk Science, I outline a radical new vision of reality that gives us a framework for a new scientific paradigm, one that turns our current view of the cosmos on its head and has implications for everything from our climate to our DNA and even how we educate our children.

Of course, I’m not going to repeat the entire book in this article, but summarise a few major points. In order to do this, I am going to focus on a few areas of science including cosmology: the science of the universe as a whole and specifically on black holes.

At the moment cosmologists are pretty jubilant because they have just officially become proper scientists. Before, they could speculate about the universe, but had no way of corroborating their ideas. Now they have new telescope data that can back up their ideas. Except the telescopes are beaming back a very different picture to they one they expected.

Using the latest techniques, cosmologists are finding that the universe is even weirder than they can imagine. Time after time, anomalies are appearing that bring the received wisdom of how the universe behaves into question.

The story so far

Let’s just recap on the story of the universe. About 15 billion years ago, the universe exploded from a tiny infinitesimally small something known as the singularity. We don’t know what banged and why, but that doesn’t generally bother cosmologists.

In the first few moments of expansion, the universe was very hot and spread out rapidly in a period of exponential growth known as inflation. Particles started to emerge as the temperature began to cool, both particles of matter and its mirror counterpart antimatter. For some unknown reason a mighty battle was fought and the matter started to annihilate and overpower the antimatter, leading to the situation we have now where there is more matter in the universe than antimatter.

Gradually these particles of matter clumped together to form the elements with their different atomic nuclei. As the universe cooled further still, galaxies, stars and planets began to form.

Eventually, on an obscure planet (third one out from a smallish star in the Milky Way), a few molecules came together and formed simple life-forms which eventually evolved into human beings able to dissect the hitherto mention simple life-forms and build giant telescopes to look into the deepest regions of the cosmos.

This story is the product of the past few hundred years of scientific enquiry. The universe seems to have appeared inexplicably with a Big Bang followed many years later by the spontaneous appearance of life in some ‘warm pond’. This process of creation and evolution, we are told, has enabled us to be able to examine our universe and use computers like then one you are using now.

The Mirror Cracks

There are just a few problems with these ideas. The deeper we look into our world, the more it seems that reality does not behave in the way we expect. I’m going to summarise and highlight just a few of these areas here.

Relativity

The theory of relativity was perhaps the first major blow to reductionism. Until what is known as Albert Einstein’s annus mirabilis of 1905 in which he published papers that would affect many areas of physics and change our worldview, we thought of time as a static universal clock that remained the same no matter where you were. Einstein showed that actually time is fluid and changes according to where you are in the universe. For the first time in science, your perspective in the universe mattered.

Quantum Physics

The next body blow to the reductionist model of reality and the one that is capturing the imagination of many people at this current moment is that of quantum physics. This seemingly crazy, anti-intuitive world of subatomic particles is one of the most successful theories in science ever and is used in much of our everyday technology.

It firmly introduced the idea that reality requires our participation with experiments that demonstrate that particles behave one way when we look at them and another when we are not looking! Suddenly our own consciousness counted with some quantum physicists proclaiming that consciousness is fundamental to reality and all matter emerges from it.

This blow to reductionism however, has not been immediate with the implications of quantum physics not filtering through to the general public for many years and many physicists discounting the significance of the results for the wider nature of reality. With films like ‘The Secret’ and ‘What the Bleep do we know?’ firmly entering into public consciousness however, quantum physics as the new view of reality seems to have got the popular vote.

Biology that beggars belief

The arena of genetics is one of the prize cows of reductionism with neo-Darwinists such as Richard Dawkins firmly leading the crusade against the perceived tyranny of ‘irrational’ beliefs. It is true that biology has led us to the most amazing triumphs of human knowledge. Who can forget the iconic photographs of Nobelists, James D Watson and Frances Crick proudly standing by their DNA models, triumphant in the knowledge they had found the secrets to life?

For over half a century we have laboured under the belief that this miraculous molecule holds the secrets of all life and all our human characteristics are encoded in its alphabet of A,T,G & C. But even biology, the feather in the cap of reductionism is, hitting the same brick wall that all of science is now coming across.

The cracks started to show when investigating the very symbol of science over superstition: Darwin’s theory of evolution. It was not so much the evolution part that first started to fail, but the origin of life. A myth had been born by some early experiments that placing a few amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) together in a solution and adding some energy produces proteins that are essential for all aspects of life including making DNA. The case seemed solved.

Except nobody has since succeeded in making complex proteins spontaneously out of a mixture of amino acids; they form small chains and then simply fall away again. The likelihood of the level of complexity found in just one simple cell appearing spontaneously out of random collisions of organic molecules is incredibly small. And there are many other examples of the reality of the evolution of life not living up to the theory.

That we don’t know how life arose is conveniently overlooked by biologists who are more keen to put out headlines announcing the discovery of a cancer gene or similar. Yet even in this area, the story of biology is disintegrating.

Genome Shenome

The gold standard of biology was supposed to be the human genome project which mapped all the genes present in a human. With the unravelling of this code we hoped to get the secrets to life itself – everything that gives us our characteristics. Only trouble is, it stopped a little short. Turns out we don’t have all that many genes. We have fewer genes than a rice plant and about the same amount as all other mammals including mice. There is very little to distinguish us from other species.

Orthodox biologists are being forced to conclude that it is not our genes that make us human, we have to look to another explanation as to who we are and why we have the characteristics that we do. Biologist Bruce Lipton’s work is part of the new wave of biology that places the control of the cell in the perception of the environment.

In Punk Science, I outline how the fundamental control of the biological organism is not the gene, but consciousness itself that is imbues in all things, from the atom to the molecule to the cell and beyond. This is based on conclusions from quantum physicists who say that consciousness is the fundamental of reality. We do not have to turn to religion to solve the discrepancies in biology; by applying science from other specialities like physics, we can come up with possible solutions.

Galactic Federation

Then we turn to cosmology, which deals with the workings of the universe as a whole and the level of large-scale structures such as galaxies and stars. Until recently, cosmology was not an official science. That’s because when you are dealing with the level of the whole universe it is difficult to get definitive data to actually back up your theories.

The main story of cosmology is the one I have outlined above from the Big Bang to now. In recent years it was felt that this picture had been proved conclusively when data was analysed from particular types of telescopes that measure the microwaves present in cosmos.

These microwaves were predicted to be the leftover echo of the Big Bang so when they were first detected the 1960’s it was a triumphant moment for science and the co-discoverers won a Nobel prize.

The recent data has corroborated the story for many and cosmologists are keen to announce that they have the universe all wrapped up with only a few minor details to iron out.

But not so fast! With every telescope that beams back data from the cosmos comes unexpected findings that don’t fit our picture at all. This is enough to have caused discontented rumblings amongst maverick cosmologists suggesting a return to the drawing board on all that we know about our reality.

The anomalies are too numerous to mention here, but I’ll give a few examples. Over the coming months, I shall give more examples of this type.

Big Bang goes that idea

If the Big Bang model is true, as is widely accepted, then we ought to see a certain picture of the universe, one that alters according to where we look. Looking deeper into the universe should be like looking further back into time as the light has taken so much longer to actually travel towards us. The further we go, the more we should be seeing into the early universe, therefore we should see younger and younger stars. This is not what we see. No matter how far away, we still see a mixture of old and new stars.

There are further discrepancies between the observed and expected conditions of the early universe such as the horizon problem. If you can imagine the early universe expanding, light travels through it at a certain finite speed. It can’t reach the whole universe at once, a bit like a travelling horizon. This would result in the early universe having patches of light and patches where the light has not reached, causing differences in areas of the universe depending on whether the light had reached that area or not. As the universe cooled and further expanded, these early differences should still be detectable billions of years later. However, we do not find this to be the case. The universe is the same, wherever we look.

And that is not all. There are many surprises cropping up. The Sun does not behave as it should; its oxygen composition is unexpected, its temperature patterns unexplained. Red dwarfs are spitting out X-rays when they should be retiring gracefully as faded stars.

Many more such anomalies are being gathered by our telescopes as we speak, but is there anyway we can understand why? Seen as separate pieces of information, they may not mean much, but as the evidence adds up, it becomes clear that we need to have a new framework to place all those anomalous observations as they clearly do not fit the old story. That is what I have outlined in Punk Science – a new framework that not only fits the observations, but also makes predictions about reality. To understand this framework we have to crack open another chestnut: the speed of light.

Warp speed reality

One of the main ideas in Punk Science, relies on the conclusions of quantum physicists that have been previously outlined in this article that consciousness is fundamental to reality. This is a conclusion that is becoming well – publicised through films like ‘The Secret’ and many current books. As a result of this activity we are becoming more familiar with the concept that consciousness gives rise to matter and not the other way round.

What I am proposing in Punk Science, is that the speed of light is not the speed limit of our universe at all, but the limitation of this dimension of consciousness and that there are many further dimensions of consciousness beyond. The limit of our consciousness therefore becomes relabelled as the Perception Horizon.

The concept of the speed of light being unlimited is surprisingly not a concept out of the realms of orthodox physics. In the first few years of the new millennium a team of physicists did the unthinkable and suggest that light moved at faster speeds in the early universe. Actually physicist Joao Magueijo at Imperial College, London went on record saying light is infinite and is expressed in different dimensions.

In fact, Einstein’s theory of special relativity, that originated the concept of light being the ultimate speed limit of the universe, incorporated the idea of perspective. So, our observational perspective or our consciousness was always a part of the theory of relativity anyway.

So now we understand that our universe is not limited to the speed of light and that we can go beyond the Perception Horizon (as long as we do not have any mass) what is it that lies beyond?

Could this be the place where the missing dark matter and dark energy reside? Do dark energy and dark matter actually appear dark to us because they are higher dimensions of light that are beyond our normal perception? Are these the realms of the mystical experiences of higher consciousness that can only be experienced with the subtle bodies such as the astral? Of course, what we have previously thought to be the darkest realm of the universe now becomes the lightest; we are now ready to explore black holes.

To infinity and beyond

I am going to outline what I call the Black Hole Principle here, in what will be the new framework with which to view the astrophysics data that will be posted to this site. We have discussed how the ‘darkest’ areas of our universe could in fact be beyond our normal perception and areas of very bright light.

We are now ready to redefine black holes. Black holes originated as a concept from relativity – if a star of a certain mass reaches the end of its life, it can collapse down into a singularity of infinite mass and density. This would give it infinite gravity capable of sucking in anything around it, including light – hence the term black holes.

For almost a hundred years, black holes remained a theoretical concept, until the last decade when they have been cropping up everywhere even in our own galaxy. Cosmologists are starting to revise their picture of black holes accordingly and using the buzz word ‘co-evolution’ to describe their relationship to galaxies.

Black holes being in the centre of all known galaxies was not the only surprise. It turns out that black holes are not so black after all, but spewing out material: antimatter, matter, X-rays, gamma rays, microwaves and more. They often have a signature bipolar pattern because the material being ejected is being concentrated into two fine jets at right angles to the surrounding accretion disc and along the axis of the black hole itself.

This has proved very difficult to explain with current cosmology. Black holes are not supposed to give out material, so the jets have been blamed on the surrounding accretion disc which is supposedly material being whipped up to tremendous speeds by the black hole before being sucked down its gravity plug hole. Yet the calculations do not make any sense when it comes to proving this; we cannot easily demonstrate that the accretion disc is spewing out these concentrated bipolar jets.

Furthermore, the energy of these jets is surprising; very often they are travelling at the speed of light. What could be creating such speeds? Weirder still these patterns are not limited to the supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies, but occur all over galaxies in black holes of all different sizes as well as some totally unexpected places including stars, planets and even comets.

There is something weird going on. Why does everything we look at show the same pattern as black holes?

Black Hole Principle

What I am proposing in Punk Science is that we have got the story of the universe all wrong and that is why, when we look at the evidence, there are so many gaping holes in it (no pun intended). Black holes are not the end points of stars, they are the creative force of a universe that did not appear in a Big Bang, but is being created at every moment and at every level from the light of infinity.

At the centre of all black holes is the light from infinity which proceeds in a step-down fashion from higher dimensions, usually hidden from our view, down to our own dimension at the Perception Horizon when it splits into matter, antimatter and other aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum. We see these particles as if they have come out of nowhere, travelling at the speed of light.

Sometimes these particles of matter and antimatter recombine and form gamma rays. This is exactly the picture that we find with our telescopes. This is likely to be the source of the gamma ray bursts that we find all over our cosmos. Certainly this fluctuating picture would fit our gamma ray burst data better than the idea that they are caused by explosions.

Not only is this the way galaxies are created, but also the way everything from galaxy clusters to stars and planets are created. Going further, atoms also show these patterns. Again, orthodox physicists such as Brian Greene have discussed the black hole atom or electron. Werner Heisenberg himself, one of the fathers of quantum physics found that the universe consists of black holes popping in and out of existence from infinity, but did not believe his own results.

Black holes are the creative force of our universe and express themselves at different levels in our fractal universe. The reason why the Big Bang data does not add up is that it never happened. Creation did not happen 15 billion years ago, it is happening all around us, with light creating from infinity in every moment in every level of the universe.

What about the microwave data that is the feather in the cap of cosmologists? Well, even that is showing some interesting signs. If the microwaves were created at the Big Bang then they should certainly not be aligned to current structure in space such as out own solar system. But this is exactly what we do find and more such anomalies. Furthermore, we have data that our own Milky Way is emitting microwaves from its central black hole. If the Black Hole Principle occurring at every level is creating the microwave background then such alignments make perfect sense.

Conclusions

Our current sense of reality is crumbling and our scientific concepts need to be modified. Our most cherished ideas are not standing up to the scrutiny of evidence. We need new frameworks of all areas of life, from biology to cosmology. Over the months to come, I shall be posting articles that provide evidence for this new vision of reality. Happy Exploring!

Copyright 2007 Dr Manjir Samanta-Laughton MBBS, Dip Bio-energy