The Evolution of Science and the Interactive Universe

Two thousand five hundred years ago, Democritus observes the dynamic world around him. Surfaces erode from rain, wind pushes against him and physical objects are constantly morphed, reformed and changed. Democritus conceptualizes “Atomos”, the indivisible unit that all matter is made from. Many great thinkers after him attempt to account for everyday experience that every child intuitively understands, such as the fact that they must apply a force to a ball in order to make it move. The harder they kick the ball, or in other words the more force they apply, the farther it goes. All adults understand that they are tied to the Earth, that they will not randomly float away one day. Every animate and inanimate object seems to be subject to these physical rules that are well understood intuitively but not scientifically. Two thousand one hundred years after Democritus, Sir Francis Bacon invents the Scientific Method — the cornerstone of modern day science. He posits that anecdotal evidence must be disregarded, that the only scientific truth is one which is testable, repeatable and independent from the observer. Bacon influences and is influenced by two other great thinkers: Galileo and Copernicus. These two scientists demonstrate to the world that the Earth is not the centre which all heavenly bodies revolve around. They show that Earth is simply one of many planets, that it has no special status astronomically speaking. Shortly after the birth of modern day Science and a new understanding of the Universe, Isaac Newton gifts the world the Fundamental Laws of Motion, Gravity and Calculus. It is no longer a mystery why the ball moves proportionally to the force applied to it. It is no longer a mystery why the ball will land where it lands. With Newton’s equations, he accurately predicts these facets of everyday phenomena that all bodies from small rocks to the Moon are subject to. The physics that he comes up with is known as Newtonian, classical physics — the physics of the everyday world. One hundred and fifty years later in the early 19th century, John Dalton discovers the atom, proving its existence thousands of years after Democritus first conceived of it. This marks an evolution in science from the days of Newton, which centred around studying large macroscopic objects that the human eye could see to now studying microscopic objects well beyond what the human eye can see. The atom is poorly understood for well over a century after its discovery. It becomes readily apparent through experiments that the physical rules which atoms abide by are vastly different than that of the macroscopic world Newton had so accurately defined with his classical physics. One of the most glaring discrepancies between classical, Newtonian physics and atomic physics comes from the scientific investigations of the brilliant physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. Boltzmann uses classical physics just before the turn of the 20th century to explain why the specific heat capacity per atom of a solid is a certain value, a value that had been measured but never explained until he came along. Heat capacity is a measure of how much energy it takes to raise an object by a certain temperature. This value is approximately the same for all solids at room temperature with the exception of Diamonds. Boltzmann imagines that every atom is in constant motion and every atom is sandwiched between two other atoms inside a solid. When the atom in the middle moves away from its position, it is pushed back on by its neighbouring atom. The atom in the middle gets pushed all the way towards a different neighbouring atom, which pushes it back to its original position. This constant back and forth motion that all atoms in a solid experience because of each other is best described by a spring motion. Boltzmann realizes that heat capacity is related to a system’s ability to store energy. The more you push or pull on a spring away from its natural resting position, the more potential energy gets built up inside the spring. Thus, energy is stored as a combination of the kinetic energy of each atom and the potential energy of their spring-like motion. Any object subject to a linear restoration force, such as a mass attached to a spring, can be described by a concept known as the simple harmonic oscillator. With this understanding of the inner working of atoms in a solid, Boltzmann is able to come up with a model that accurately captures the specific heat capacity of an atoms in a solid at room temperature, with the exception of Diamonds. The glaring discrepancy comes from the fact that what Boltzmann described only holds true for most solids at room temperature but not for solids at lower temperatures. The specific heat capacity per atom of a solid mysteriously drops close to zero as the temperature drops. It appears that there is a problem with relating the movement of atoms as if they are attached to fictional springs but the problem isn’t obvious. One decade later, a 28-year-old polymath provides the missing piece of the puzzle. He begins with the spring model of the atom and makes one key modification to it. He realizes that the spring-like motion that atoms experience in a solid is not relatable to the springs we experience in our day to day lives in the classical, macroscopic world. He takes a leap of faith and proposes something fundamentally revolutionary: that the energy of the spring system is quantized. That means that only certain energy states are allowed while other energy states are not allowed and not defined in the spring.

Consider how counterintuitive that is. An analogy for this phenomena in the classical, non-quantum mechanical world that we experience everyday would be the following: Imagine if you took an empty cup of water that stored a total of 100ml and placed it on a table. The cup has a total potential energy calculated by the equation p = m*g*h where m is the mass, g is the acceleration due to gravity and h is the height of the cup of water relative to the ground. It is a simple linear equation where if we increase the value of any one of the variables (m, g, h), the potential energy increases. Thus, when we fill the cup with water, the potential energy increases since we are increasing the mass of the cup while the strength of the gravitational field and the height of the table remains constant. Now imagine that the cup has markings that divide the 100ml into groups of 10ml so you can tell when the cup contains 10ml, 20ml, 50ml of water and so on. You go to fill the cup with water and you find that the cup rejects the water unless you pour enough water to fill it up to and exactly the 10ml marks. That is, if you put in only 5 ml of water, no water is filled into the cup at all. If you put in 10ml of water, the cup gets filled to the 10ml mark. If you put in 15ml, the cup gets filled to 10ml but no more.

Wouldn’t that disturb you if this happened in real-life? The absurdity is that it does happen in real-life, only at microscopic scales described by the electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear forces, where quantum mechanical rules dominate. This is what the 28 year-old-polymath says is happening to the atoms in a solid, where their spring-like motions are only allowed to take on specific energy states and if they do not have enough energy to reach the next state, they simply will not occupy any state in between their current state and the next state. As a result it makes perfect sense why the specific heat capacity of the atom in a solid drops as the temperature drops, there isn’t enough energy to bring the atom’s potential and kinetic energy to the next energy state. Since the energy state defines the specific heat capacity of the atom, the higher the energy state the higher the heat capacity, the atoms never reach those higher energy state levels and therefore higher specific heat capacities. The reason you never observe this phenomenon with the cup of water or anything related to macroscopic objects is because gravity plays an overbearing role at the macroscopic role. Gravity however, does not behave in any obvious way that can be described with a quantum mechanical treatment.

Of course if you haven’t guessed already, that polymath who figures all this out is Albert Einstein. The frequency at which these analogous springs oscillate describing the true energy state of atoms in a solid and therefore their specific heat capacity is known as the Einstein Frequency. Every solid has a unique Einstein Frequency. Einstein discovers this at a time when Quantum Mechanics as a field does not exist in its final form which comes around three decades later with the advent of the Schrödinger equation and Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle. Schrödinger, Bohr and Einstein, some of the fathers of Quantum Mechanics realize that there is something deeply absurd about Reality that was not at all obvious in the days of Newton. It leads to an intellectual battle regarding the true nature of Reality that continues on to this day. At the heart of the issue is the “Measurement Problem”. To describe the problem simply, consider the following thought experiment:

Take a regular everyday cup of water and place it on your table. Now take a dial where the arrow can point North, South, West, East or any direction in between. Imagine that the dial describes the state of the cup of water. If the cup is on the table, the cup is in the “on” state and the dial points exactly North. If the cup is lifted off the table, it is in the “off” state and the dial points exactly South. In the classical world we experience everyday, we are only used to objects having definite, easily distinguished states. Macroscopic objects are either in one state or another state. The cup is either off the table or it is on the table for example. Now let us suppose that we put the state of the cup into a quantum superposition of the “on” and “off” state. That is, the cup is in a superposition of the states where it is on the table and is lifted off the table. Let’s further suppose that the cup is in an equal superposition of the “on” and “off” states. What does this physically mean? Well, let’s look at the dial first and see how it would represent such a state: the dial would now be pointing East in order to represent an equal quantum superposition of the two states, or half way between the North and South pole of the dial. We know that when it is pointing North, the cup of water is on the table. When it is pointing South, the cup is off the table. So perhaps when the dial is facing East and halfway between the two poles, it represents the cup hanging halfway off of the table…but this would be wrong. The cup is still effectively sitting on top of the table in such a scenario, so its physical state would be described by the dial pointing North even when it is hanging halfway off of the table. If we lift the cup, the dial turns to face South. Then what does the dial facing East (an equal quantum superposition of the two possible states) physically represent? If you’re struggling to answer this question and cannot seem to answer it, you’ve come to the right answer. There is absolutely no way to visualize such a scenario where the cup of water is in a superposition of the on and off states. The best we can do is use mathematics and symbolic representation. When we go to measure a system in a quantum superposition, such as the cup of water in its superposition state, the system collapses to any one of the two possible states we could find the cup in (ie. on the table or off the table). We are used to the objects we interact with having definite, easily distinguished states such as on or off the table. There is no such thing as a physical object existing in a superposition of states or “in-between” state that we ever observe in the classical everyday world around us and we should be thankful for that. We enjoy that our phones, laptops and friends exist in singular, definite and distinguishable states from each other. Life would be truly Alien if this were not the case. To drive home the point, if the cup is in a quantum superposition of the two states, then the dial is facing to the East, but if you go to measure the state of the cup the dial will immediately face North or South. The cup can only be found as being on the table (North) or off the table (South) when we go to measure it. It is impossible for us to visualize it being any other way. That is not because we lack the intelligence to do so, it is because the world we experience around us is classical in nature and the very act of measurement renders only classical results. Thus, we only ever observe the classical world that Newton (and many great scientists after that) beautifully described: The macroscopic world that is observed with our macroscopic bodies. The measurement problem is therefore a problem of not understanding the correspondence between the classical world of macroscopic objects that we observe everyday and the underlying quantum world that leads to our classical macroscopic world. Despite the absurdity of quantum superpositions, we put systems into quantum superpositions all the time. Further, we manipulate those quantum systems with unitary actions using gates inside Universal quantum computers such as those found at IBM, Google and Rigetti. The strange nature of quantum mechanics is that when we go to measure a system in a superposition of say two states, the system instantaneously picks one state to be in. This is the paradox of the world we live in. No object or human is ever observed in a superposition of two different physical states. This fact of life is so Universal that it affects our dreams too.

When we dream, the dream world we observe and measure is physically distinguishable from the waking world. This is easily confirmed by the fact that when we’re dreaming, we can’t just walk into our kitchen, pick up an orange and insert it into our dreams and hand it to our dream characters. The best we can do is lucid dream an orange into existence, but that doesn’t count as it is not the physical orange from your kitchen. Thus, even the dream world is subject to this classical constraint we have where we can only observe or find systems in one definite, distinguishable state no matter what they were doing before we measured them. A neuroscientist or a psychologist may challenge this statement by saying that dreams are just simulations caused by neuronal activity, which is why we cannot place a physical orange into the dream.

Well, let’s say you’re an Alien super-genius from another planet and you’ve figured out the solution to the measurement problem. What powers, what capabilities would that afford you? For starters, you would be able to insert objects into the dream world of a human being. To do this, you would turn the macroscopic object (for example an orange) into a quantum superposition. Then you would put the person’s brain whose dream you want to insert the physical object into, into a quantum superposition that gets entangled with the orange which is also now a pure quantum system. As a result every electron and sub atomic particle in the brain would be entangled with the orange, making the brain and the orange effectively the same quantum physical object. At this point, the quantum information that is described by the orange could be converted into brain-code which would then allow the dreamer to see the orange in their dream. The object they are interacting with would have the exact same classical properties, look and feel of the orange because it is that orange. Remember, the orange we observe in the real world before it was entered into the dream behaves classically. In the dream world, the orange would also behave classically, yet the quantum information comprising it would be coming from the original orange which has now been dematerialized and recreated within the brain’s synaptic networks.

The implications of this form of technology are two fold: if one can forgo their macroscopic bodily constraints while retaining the quantum information that comprises their physical being, they would not be bound by macroscopic constraints such as the speed of light. If quantum information had a speed limit in how fast it is transmitted, quantum entanglement wouldn’t be real and that is out of the question as of decades ago. In 1964, physicist John Bell proposed the Bell’s Inequality experiments, a set of experiments that would statistically prove or disprove the existence of quantum entanglement. With increasingly loop-hole free Bell’s inequality experiments confirming the reality of quantum entanglement since then, it is almost impossible to escape the conclusion that only classical information is bounded by the speed of light while quantum information is not. Given that space-time is a macroscopic phenomena, then a purely quantum organism (for lack of a better term) would not be restricted by distance or time. It would be meaningless concepts to them, they could theoretically travel anywhere in the Universe and to any time in the Universe — future, present or past. The second implication is that this type of physical object-mind-uploading technology would have tell tale signs if it were being used. The experiencer of such a technology would be convinced they are interacting with physical objects and they would be correct, but those physical objects may not be observable to others if the uploader chooses for that object not to be seen by others. The uploader could appear in any sentient being’s state of consciousness and appear physically real (they would be indistinguishable from physically real and a simulation, there would effectively be no difference at all). Whether they are dreaming, awake, under the influence of psychedelics or in other natural and synthetically induced altered states of consciousness.

In 1994, over 120 school children in a school in Zimbabwe swore up and down that they encountered small alien beings who came down in a traditional flying saucer shaped UAP and communicated messages to them. Not all school children saw these beings despite being in the same exact location or just a few feet away from each other. How is that possible if they saw a real physical object? If we are to trust the children and the conclusions by world leading psychiatrist John Mack of Harvard University that they were sane and not lying about their experience, then they were physically affected by virtue of the neurones in their brains being stimulated by something that not everyone could see. Thus, for all intents and purposes it’s very well possible that for them, there truly was something physically there. In order for the technology I described to be real, one would have to solve the measurement problem. In order to solve the measurement problem, Albert Einstein showed that the answer cannot come from within quantum mechanics. He showed in a cold and calculated fashion that quantum mechanics as we know it is incomplete and paradoxical, that to truly circumvent the problem will require a fundamentally new physics making different assumptions from the ground up.

When we consider the experiences of credible witnesses who have interacted with UAPs such as Commander David Fravor, we see an object that out-manoeuvres state of the art Navy technology (an F-18 Hornet in this case) without leaving any propulsion signature, without having any flight surfaces to counteract the Newtonian forces every aircraft we’ve ever built has to counteract. In short, we are looking at truly new physics not describable by Quantum Mechanics or General Relativity. If Einstein is right about the measurement problem and if these UAPs are employing truly advanced physics beyond what we know today, then it is very well possible that the creator of these UAPs have solved the measurement problem. If that is true, it is also entirely possible they possess this physical object-mind uploading technology too.

Science in its current form is not suited to address what Commander David Fravor saw. Science is built around the concepts put forward by Sir Francis Bacon 400 years ago, which relies on a Universe that is static and unchanging. When we go to perform experiments in the atmosphere, we accept the results of the experiment on the premise that the results are repeatable and observer-independent. A voxel is a three-dimensional version of a pixel. Therefore the scientific method only works if every voxel of the Universe is static in its behaviour, that the rules that govern each voxel do not change. As an example, when I go to sample the atmospheric composition of the air that Commander Fravor flew his jet through on any given day, the scientific method as it is currently defined would work perfectly well because the nature of the atmospheric composition is static. If the atmospheric composition changes, the same experiments and instruments used to measure the composition do not need to change in order to register the composition change because the Universe is static in the way it behaves. What worked the first time will work again. However in the specific instance of the appearance of the Tic Tac, if I went to sample the atmospheric composition of the air that Fravor was flying through, I would also have to account for the composition of the Tic Tac, of which absolutely no known atmospheric experiment can account for or provide an answer for!

In that specific instance, the voxels of space that the Tic Tac occupied, for all intents and purposes, was alive and interactive. They were not representative of a static, unchanging Universe whose voxels always behave in an expected and predictable manner. The same can be said for the Ariel School children of Zimbabwe in 1994, where some of the voxels that they saw day in day out came alive for a few moments on that anomalous day consisting of seeing apparent alien beings. This is what I mean by the interactive Universe and the evolution of Science. I believe it is time to acknowledge that the Universe we live in is not a static medium whose rules are only governed by known and unknown physics alone. Every voxel of the Universe is subject to become spontaneously interactive when we go to study it, as was the case for Commander Fravor, the Aerial School children and frankly thousands if not millions of individuals over the years who have had run ins with the truly unknown components of reality. In the future we will cover in depth what that new Science should look like, as well as the very real physical results we can expect from practicing it. After all, there is no point in doing Science if it does not increase our understanding of the Universe and allows us to leverage that knowledge for the betterment of mankind.

Speaking of leveraging knowledge for the betterment of mankind, I strongly recommend a world-wide effort to peacefully capture or recover crashed UAPs should they occur. Such an effort must be at least as serious and on the level of the Paris Agreement which brings the largest governments in the world to cooperate on the issue of Climate Change. What we need is a mass global collaborative effort in peacefully retrieving at least one of the physics-defying UAPs that are causing incursions in both military and civilian air space around the world and then study them. When I say peaceful, I mean we have to do everything we can to safely detect, track and capture a UAP without causing damage to it or its constituents. The recovered UAP should belong to no individual entity or group of entities. It should be treated as a gift to the entire world and one whose value every Human on Earth should benefit from in a positive, non-violent way. Extremely rigorous technologies, policies and protocols will have to be put in place to ensure that the technology and science gained from studying such recovered UAPs are distributed freely but ethically and safely so that it does not lead to weaponization. Anyone who attempts to weaponize this knowledge should be punished accordingly. I believe this is the only way to circumvent the National Security threat that comes with the possibility of reverse engineering technologies well beyond known human capability. It is the only solution we have to the way UAPs are currently studied — in total secrecy. This new system of studying UAPs if executed properly has the potential to change life on earth for every human alive.

Finally, my last closing thought is this: When we study the infinite dark void of space, the void just might be studying us back. An interactive Universe, the evolution of Science.

Deep Prasad
Founder & CEO
Quantum Generative Materials (GenMat)
The world belongs to the curious