Trekking On The Sands Of Time

On our trek, we now come across Marcus Chown’s “The Universe Next Door”. He was (is?) the Cosmology Consultant for New Scientist Magazine. In his book, he outlined twelve mind-blowing ideas contributed by exceptional individuals that offer possible mind-blowing explanations and answers to questions like:

• Can time run backwards?
• Was life on Earth seeded from space?
• Are there multiple realities playing out all possible histories?
• Was our universe created by superior beings in another universe?
• Are there hidden space dimensions?
• Can we live forever?

Go read the book and discover the “weird and wonderful universe we find ourselves in- one that continually reveals itself to be far stranger than anything we could possibly have invented.”

After we have been briefed by Prof Martin Rees on his wondrous vision of an infinity of Universes, of which we are but on one, we start our trek and meet Fred Alan Wolf, a physicist and author of at least 5 books, including Taking The Quantum Leap, which won an American Book Award.

In his book, “Parallel Universes”, Fred Alan Wolf covers the broad spectrum of human knowledge embodied in Quantum Physics (”Bringing in an Observer”), Relativity (”Relationships-Weird and Wonderful”), Cosmology (”A Search for the Beginning”) and Psychology (”Consciousness and Machine Intelligence”), a new notion of time and parallel universes in the quest to reconcile the ideas contained within each of them.

Fred Alan Wolf explains why he wrote “Parallel Universes - The Search for Other Worlds” :

” The fact that the future may play a role in the present is a new prediction of the mathematical laws of quantum physics. If interpreted literally, the mathematical formulas indicate not only how the future enters our present but also how our minds may be able to “sense” the presence of parallel universes.

Are we pressing the laws of Physics too far? “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and so far as they are uncertain, they do not refer to reality,” wrote Albert Einstein. Einstein was undoubtedly referring to the mathematical laws of quantum physics in that these laws describe only possibilities of reality but never reality itself. Can mathematics describe reality? I believe that the answer is yes, provided we take the new view given us by parallel universe theory. The laboratory of parallel universe experimentation may not lie in a mechanical time machine, a la Jules Verne, but could exisit between our ears.

If the parallel universes of relativity are the same as those of quantum theory, the possibility exists that parallel universes are extremely close to us, perhaps only atomic dimensions away from us and perhaps in a higher dimension of space - an extension into what physicists call superspace. Modern neuroscience, through study of altered states of awareness, schizophrenia and lucid dreaming, could be indicative of the closeness of parallel worlds to our own.

It is in the hope that these radically new and, I believe , quite exciting ideas will turn out to be evidences of truth that I have written Parallel Universes.” - Fred Alan Wolf

On your trek, read Wolf’s “Parallel Universes” and comment.