BEYOND STAR TREK by LAWRENCE KRAUSS

Author:LAWRENCE KRAUSS [KRAUSS, LAWRENCE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ePub Bud (www.epubbud.com)
Published: 2010-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know

Thinking is very far from knowing.

—Proverb

Stare deeply into the eyes of someone you love, and you are sure to feel that you know what they are thinking. Their thoughts are as real to you as your own. Everything about this person seems tuned to your own visions and desires. You send out the signals, and wait.

Indeed, if you know someone well enough, you often do know what they are thinking! I recently had lunch with a physicist who said he read his daughter's mind on occasion. This statement surprised me considerably, but later on in our discussion it became clear that he really meant something more along the lines of what I stated above: He knew her so well that he often was able to anticipate what was going on in her mind.

Still, the lesson of the past century is that the universe is full of invisible fields—so many that Faraday himself would have been surprised. As you walk across the room, the number of invisible items impinging upon your body is staggering. Besides the complete spectrum of electromagnetic waves—the radio waves from nearby broadcasting stations or from distant galaxies, the infrared waves radiated by the heat of the walls or the bodies of other people in the room—we are bombarded by invisible neutrinos from the Big Bang, gravitational waves from collapsing stars in our galaxy, neutrons emitted by radioactive materials decaying in the ceiling and walls, not to mention the invisible Higgs field that many elementary particle physicists believe permeates space giving mass to all matter, or a possible invisible field associated with the mysterious "dark matter" that is thought to make up the greater part of the mass of the universe that I described earlier. As one gets to smaller and smaller scales, the presence of the various fields becomes more and more evident, so that on subatomic scales the elementary particles themselves can be thought of as manifestations of the fields which can create and destroy them. There are a host of other phenomena out there as well, which, while invisible to the eye, can be detected by our other senses. A few molecules of perfume evaporating off the nape of a nearby female induce a flood of sensations and memories in your average male. So who cares if electromagnetic fields don't fit the bill for ESP? The world seems full of senses and sensibilities beyond the five we know. If a bee can detect the invisible (to us) ultraviolet pattern on the petals of a flower, or a dog can hear the high-pitched squeal of a whistle in the distance while we hear nothing but silence, why cannot some of us detect at a distance the otherwise undetectable intense emotions of our loved ones, or even the more prosaic musings of our neighbors?

Extrasensory perception seems so palpable, so tempting, that it's hard to believe it doesn't exist. Psychologists and parapsychologists of varying degrees of eminence have advanced ideas with varying degrees of vagueness over the years.

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