Monthly Archives: August 2020

Deepak Chopra explains how there is one mystery after another nested inside everyday experience. (Photo by: Nathan Congleton/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)

As we go about everyday life, we are embedded in a mystery no one has ever solved. The mystery was voiced by one of the most brilliant quantum pioneers, Werner Heisenberg: Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think. (There are variants of the quote that use reality for universe, and the remark has also been attributed to other famous scientists, but the gist is always the same.)

If we take this remark seriously, it turns out to be truer today than it was in 1900 when the quantum revolution began and the revolutionary new theory of quantum mechanics was put together. How can reality be stranger than we could possibly think? Look at the framework of your life. You pick up your morning coffee, and instantly you are acting in space and time. Your perception of the cup in your hand depends upon the five senses as communicated through the brain. You can think about anything you fancy as you sip your coffee.

These might not seem so mysterious, but there is one mystery after another nested inside everyday experience. Science can reach no consensus on the following:

Where did time come from?

Why do properties of physical objects have their origin in invisible waves of the probability of observation?

Where does a thought come from?

How did matter transform into mind?

Is consciousness solely a human trait or is it everywhere in the universe?

The pioneers of quantum physics werent the first to ask such questions, but quantum physics got to the nub of how the physical universe is constructed. Everything in existence emerges from ripples in the quantum field, and underlying these ripples is an invisible or virtual domain that goes beyond spacetime, matter, and energy. In the virtual domain, the universe and everything in it is a field of infinite possibilities, and yet the virtual domain cannot be observed directly. As a result, contemporary physics can take us to the horizon of reality, the womb of creation, but it cannot cross the boundary between us and our source of existence.

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Almost all the recent models that have gained popularity, including superstrings, the multiverse, and dark matter and energy, exist in so-called mathematical space, or Hilbert space, in recognition that they are not going to yield direct empirical evidence that can be perceived with our senses. Astrophysics had already gotten used to the fact that just four percent of the created universe is accounted for by the matter and energy visible to the eye or to telescopes. With dark matter and energy added in, most of what we see is not really what the universe consists of.

Leaving the technicalities aside, it has become far more difficult to foresee that the human mind can fully comprehend the nature of reality when so many crucial aspects are beyond the setup that our brains can grasp. The thinking mind needs the brain in order to operate, and the brain is a creation in spacetime consisting of matter and energy, that is in spacetime. We wear mind-made manacles. When this fact dawned on the late Stephen Hawking, he ruefully conceded that scientific models might no longer describe reality in any reliable or complete way.

When we discussed these issues in our book, You Are the Universe, the title reflected another approach entirely. Instead of founding the universe on physical things, however small, or even ripples in the quantum field, which are knowable only through advanced mathematics, reality can be grounded in experience. Everything we call real is an experience in consciousness, including the experience of doing science. Mathematics is a very refined, complex language, but there is no language, simple or complex, without consciousness.

The vast majority of scientists will continue to engage in experimentation and theoretical modeling without this venture into metaphysics, which is a no-no word in science (a famous put down when things get to speculative is Shut up and calculate). But it was quantum physics that brought the mystery of reality into the laboratory in modern terms, even though Plato and Aristotle also wondered about what is real.

A younger generation has proved more open-minded, and a growing cadre of cosmologists now hold to the notion of panpsychism, which holds that mind is built into reality from the start. This is a huge turn-around from the view that the mind evolved out of matter here on earth as a unique creation. The fact is that nobody in the physicalist camp could explain how atoms and molecules learned to thinkcreating mind out of matter was dead on arrival, even though the vast majority of scientists still hold on to this view as an assumption or superstition.

Ironically, to say that reality is stranger than we can think isnt confined to the queer behavior of atoms and subatomic particles. You cannot think about consciousness, either, any more than the eye can see itself or the brain know that it exists (without cutting through the skull to see the brain from the outside). A fish cannot know that water is wet unless it jumps out of the sea and splashes back down again. We cannot think about consciousness without a place to stand outside consciousness, and such a place doesnt exist in the entire cosmos.

The source of space isnt inside space; the source of time isnt in time. Likewise, the source of mind isnt inside the mind. The ceaseless stream of sensations, images, feelings and thoughts that run through your mind are the products of consciousness. Consciousness itself has no location. It is infinite, without dimensions in space and time, unborn and undying. Can you really think about such a thing as consciousness? And yet you know without a doubt that you are conscious. This is what allows us to make peace with reality being too strange to think about.

We can simply drop the strange part. Reality can be founded on knowing that you exist and that you are aware. Existence is consciousness. If science is dedicated to the simplest, most complete explanation of things, existence, consciousness is the simplest and most complete explanation. There is no need for religious or spiritual beliefs in order to accept this foundation for reality since it is based on what science has arrived at. By removing our outdated allegiance to things existing independently of consciousness, the basis of reality can be seen clearly. In our everyday life, we navigate with existence and consciousness at our side, indivisible, secure, inviolate, and unchallengeable. A whole new future may spring from accepting this simple but awe-inspiring fact.

Menas C. Kafatos contributed to this article

DEEPAK CHOPRA MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. Time magazine has described Dr. Chopra as one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.

Menas C. Kafatos is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University. Author, physicist and philosopher, he works in quantum mechanics, cosmology, the environment and climate change and extensively on philosophical issues of consciousness, connecting science to metaphysical traditions. Member or candidate of foreign national academies, he holds seminars and workshops for individuals, groups and corporations on the universal principles for well-being and human potential. His doctoral thesis advisor was the renowned M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has authored 334 articles, is author or editor of 20 books, including The Conscious Universe, Looking In, Seeing Out, Living the Living Presence (in Greek and in Korean), Science, Reality and Everyday Life (in Greek), and is co-author with Deepak Chopra of the New York Times bestseller You are the Universe (Harmony Books), translated into many languages and at many countries. You can learn more here.

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The spread of 'stranger than we can think' - Yahoo Lifestyle

HUNTSVILLE, Ala., Aug. 18, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --Raytheon Technologies (NYSE: RTX) gave a $4 million grant tothe newly formed Alabama School of Cyber Technology and Engineering (ASCTE) to help prepare students for cybersecurity careers in government and industry.

"The school offers an incredible opportunity for students to learn from leaders in STEM education, as well as subject matter experts within industry like those from Raytheon Technologies," said Matt Massey, ASCTE President. "This initiative is exciting for the entire state of Alabama with even further-reaching impact."

ASCTE is Alabama's only fully public, residential high school for students from across the state's 137 school districts seeking advanced studies in engineering and cyber technology.Tuition and housing for ASCTE are free.

"Alabama students now have the opportunity to access one of the most advanced engineering and cybersecurity preparatory programs anywhere," said Roy Azevedo, president of Raytheon Intelligence & Space, which includes the company's cyber business. "Raytheon Technologies' partnership with ASCTE, Huntsville and the state of Alabama will help our nation meet the demand for a future cyber and engineering workforce, while providing students with the education and skills they need to thrive in these careers."

The curriculum at ASCTE will address America's shortage of qualified cybersecurity and engineering development talent. According to a 2019 (ISC)2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study, the current cybersecurity workforce needs to grow by 145 percent to meet global demand.

"Advanced cybersecurity capabilities are critical to our national defense today and in the future," said Wes Kremer, president of Raytheon Missiles & Defense. "Through collaborative partnerships like ASCTE, we will grow our capacity in cyberspace to ensure its security for generations to come."

The City of Huntsville has donated 25 acres of land in Cummings Research Park for construction of the school's campus. The permanent facility will open in August 2022, but an interim site at Oakwood University opened its doors on August 17th to ASCTE's first cohort of 75 students.The school expects to grow to over 350 students by 2024.

"Leadership from the private sector will play a big part in maximizing the potential of the Alabama School of Cyber Technology and Engineering," said Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, who sponsored state legislation passed in 2018 to establish ASCTE. "All of us involved in creating this unique school thank Raytheon Technologies for its generous donation and its leaders for their pledge of ongoing support."

Raytheon Technologies invests millions of dollars in STEM education programs around the world every year to develop future technology leaders and give back to local communities. These programs include:

About Raytheon Technologies Raytheon Technologies Corporation is an aerospace and defense company that provides advanced systems and services for commercial, military and government customers worldwide. With 195,000 employees and four industry-leading businesses Collins Aerospace Systems, Pratt & Whitney, Raytheon Intelligence & Space and Raytheon Missiles & Defense the company delivers solutions that push the boundaries in avionics, cybersecurity, directed energy, electric propulsion, hypersonics, and quantum physics. The company, formed in 2020 through the combination of Raytheon Company and the United Technologies Corporation aerospace businesses, is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Raytheon Technologies 870 Winter Street Waltham, MA 02451 USA

Media Contacts Ryan Elliott C: +1 469.933.8913 [emailprotected]

Briana Gabrys C: +1 520.354.0871 [emailprotected]

SOURCE Raytheon Technologies

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Raytheon Technologies invests in new transformational STEM high school - PRNewswire

While Spirit was found equally in men and in women, great ability with Earth and/or Fire was found much more often among men, with Water and/or Air among women. There were exceptions, but it was so often so that Earth and Fire came to be regarded as male Powers, Air and Water as female. Generally, no ability is considered stronger than any other, though there is a saying among Aes Sedai: There is no rock so strong that water and wind cannot wear it away, no fire so fierce that water cannot quench it or wind snuff it out. It should be noted this saying came into use long after the last male Aes Sedai was dead. Any equivalent saying among male Aes Sedai is long lost.

Glossary, The Eye of the World

I, like many other fans and critics, have written before about my dislike of the gendered nature of channeling in The Wheel of Time. You dont have to be a gender studies major to recognize the problems with suggesting that the driving power of the universe is divided into two halves, which are diametrically different from each other and which each correspond to human gender.

Even if you (incorrectly) believe that there are only two genders (nope) and that these genders are recognizable by a strict and limited set of physical traits (nope again), this premise still doesnt make a lot of sense. Sure, it corresponds to the general societal assertion that men and women are basically different species. But if you think about it for more than five seconds, the idea becomes pretty laughable, especially when you consider the complexities of physics and philosophy that Jordan employs in other aspects of his world-building in The Wheel of Time.

Consider, if you will, how the One Power is accessed. A woman channeling saidar must surrender to its river-like flow, opening up to it like a blossoming flower and letting herself be filled, then guide in the direction she wants. A man, on the other hand, has to seize control of the wild torrent of saidin, fighting it every step of the way and bending it to his will before he can wield it, like a tool or weapon. It does make sense to think of the One Power as a river (and the Wheel of Time as the waterwheel over which it flows) and a great river will have both rough, turbulent parts as well as slow-moving, deep parts. But what happens to a male channeler who is not a dominant type of person? Can he not learn to channel well? Are only men with the proper commanding and aggressive tendencies given the ability in the first place? Or is the insinuation that this is just what men are like, all men, and so saidins nature makes perfect sense?

The problem becomes even more obvious when we consider women and saidar, since we have so many more examples to choose from. What, I ask you, is particularly yielding about Moiraine, or Siuan? Or Elaida, for that matter? How about Nynaeve? I mean, it makes sense, given her personality, that she would have a block around channeling. But rather than that block being overcome only in moments when she can convince herself to relax and let go of her need for defensive control over everything, it is overcome only by her anger and rage. That sounds to me like a technique that would be far more effective with saidin.

The obvious connotation between concepts of yielding and subduing respectively is an uncomfortably physical one, referencing traditional ideas of heteronormative sex, and the concept really isnt born out in any other way within the narrative. It would have made a lot more sense for ones access to saidin and saidar to have to do with temperament: People who prefer to work more calmly and sedately, people who are open and empathetic and calm, are channelers of saidar, while those who are bold to the point of brashness, who prefer big deeds and feats of strength and daring, are channelers of saidin. If you remove the gendered element from these categories, it actually gives you a lot of room to play with character types, with how channelers work together and what sorts of strategies different types of people employ. Instead, Jordan has written himself into a bit of a corner, presenting us with a host of fierce, stubborn, brilliant female characters and then either ignoring or finding ways around the assertions about their character that his own world-building is making.

The Five Powers present a similar problem. When we were first introduced to them I thought they were merely a human concept, a way of categorizing what you can do with the One Power. But given what we have seen of channeling and flows now, it seems they are actually alike to the classical elements, they are the base components that are being manipulated by channelers. This also feels a bit simplistic, but perhaps that is because the greater understanding of things like atomic particles have been lost to the Aes Sedai of Rands time. I appreciate how the gendered lines are blurred a little heremen are generally better with Fire and Earth and women with Air and Water, but not always. (Shout out to Moiraine who primarily uses Earth and Fire, at least as far as the first four books, and to Egwenes impressive skill with Earth). Im curious how all five elements are equally manipulatable by saidin and saidar; the difference seems to lie solely in the strength and natural tendency of the channeler. If were going to mark saidin and saidar as being two halves of the substance that makes up all of creation, how is it that any part of creation can be touched and manipulated by only one half of that whole?

The narrative does address this to an extent: More than one character has spoken about how the feats of channeling that can be achieved by men and women working together are far greater than either gender can accomplish alone, and I think that might be one of my favorite concepts in regards to channeling. With the taint on saidin and the subsequent gentling of all male channelers, its hard to say what this teamwork really looked like, and I hope we get to see our Emonds Fielders figuring some of these things out going forward.

I think what rankles me most about the binary structure of the One Power is the fact that Jordan has some truly complex ideas for the makeup of reality in The Wheel of Time. Take the mirror worlds, for instance, in which all the choices of ones life are reflected in other realities in which a different choice was made. The Aes Sedai only know a very little about these worlds, but they appear to be only echoes of the real world, and there are some that are quite close to Rands reality while others are much farther away, and much more different. This idea, that every choice might be played out to each possible conclusion, resembles the theory of daughter universes, developed from the observation of how subatomic particles behave. Rather than just one outcome to an event, there is, in fact, every outcome, reflected in multiple realities.

There appears to be a distinct difference between the mirror worlds and parallel worlds, and I love the way Jordan is exploring these ideas. There is also much I love about the One Power. But the oversimplified and binary nature of it hampers complex storytelling in many places, especially when it comes to character building. Jordan even goes so far as to reinforce this binary throughout the different cultures he creates, which are quite culturally varied and yet seem to more or less have the same ideas about men and women, which matches, and makes impossible to escape, what the natures of saidin and saidar imply about gender.

After seeing what Jordan can do with mirror worlds and Telaranrhiod, I wish the concepts of quantum mechanics were brought out a little more fully in other aspects of world-building. Quantum mechanics, after all, defies neat categorization, boxes and labels. And it definitely defies a binary.

Sylas K Barrett is not a scientist, but was inspired to learn just a little bit more about Quantum Mechanics after seeing this video from Amrou Al-Kadhi on quantum physics and queer identity!

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The Wheel of Time and the Storytelling Problem in the Concept of a Binary - tor.com

Were quickly learning more about time crystals, strange phases of matter that appear to break time-translation symmetry something that was thought impossible until recently. Now scientists have observed two time crystals interacting for the first time, which could be the first step towards using them for practical applications like quantum computing.

Regular crystals are defined by their highly-ordered atomic structures in a sense, their atoms repeat through space. But could there also be crystals that repeat through time? That was the hypothesis put forward in 2012 by Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek, and in 2016 these time crystals were created in the lab for the first time.

Time crystals have the bizarre ability to repeat patterns of motion through time, even when theres no external force driving them. The weirdness is best illustrated as a bowl of Jell-O if you tap the dessert, youd expect it to jiggle for a few seconds then stop, until you tap it again. But time crystals might take a few seconds to start jiggling, then stop, then start again on their own, repeating indefinitely. They might not make sense to our everyday experience of physics, but believe it or not they arent violating any laws of thermodynamics.

Scientists continue to investigate these weird structures, and now a team has made an important breakthrough observing two time crystals interacting. The researchers, from Yale, Lancaster and Aalto Universities, as well as Royal Holloway London, started with a superfluid form of helium-3.

Aalto University/Mikko Raskinen

The team cooled the helium-3 down to a hair above absolute zero (-273.15 C, or -459.67 F), then created two time crystals in the superfluid and let them touch. They observed the two time crystals passing particles back and forth between each other, leading their motions into an alternating pattern. This is a sign of a phenomenon called the Josephson effect.

Controlling the interaction of two time crystals is a major achievement, says Samuli Autti, lead author of the new study. Before this, nobody had observed two time crystals in the same system, let alone seen them interact. Controlled interactions are the number one item on the wish list of anyone looking to harness a time crystal for practical applications, such as quantum information processing.

Currently, the main problem with quantum computers is that its hard for the information to remain coherent, or stable, for long periods. But time crystals do so with relative ease, meaning they could help us overcome these issues. They could also lead to advances in more precise timekeeping, such as atomic clocks, and the systems that rely on them, like GPS.

The research was published in the journal Nature Materials.

Source: Lancaster University

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Physicists witness time crystals interacting for the first time ever - New Atlas