The Field by Lynne McTaggart

Author:Lynne McTaggart
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Extended Eye

DOWN IN THE BASEMENT of a physics building at Stanford University, the tiniest flicker of the tiniest fragments of the world were being captured and measured. The device required to measure the movement of subatomic particles resembled nothing so much as a three-foot hand mixer. The magnetometer was attached to an output device whose frequency is a measure of the rate of change of magnetic field. It oscillated ever so slightly, grinding out its slowly undulating S-curve on an x – y recorder, a paper graph, with annoying regularity. To the untrained eye, quarks were sedentary: nothing ever changed on the graph. A non-physicist might look upon this gadget as something akin to a souped-up pendulum.

A Stanford physics student named Arthur Hebard had seen the superconducting differential magnetometer as a fitting post-doctoral occupation, applying for grant money to devise an instrument impervious to all but the flux in the electromagnetic field caused by any quarks which happened to be passing by. Nevertheless, to anyone who understood about measuring quarks, it was a delicate business. It necessitated blocking out virtually all the endless electromagnetic chatter of the universe in order to hear the infinitesimal language of a subatomic particle. To accomplish this, the magnetometer’s innards needed to be encased in layer upon layer of shielding – copper shielding, aluminium casing, a superconducting niobium shield, even μ-metal shielding, a metal which specifically limits magnetic field. The device was then buried in a concrete well in the floor of the lab. The SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device) was a bit of a mystery at Stanford – seen but not understood. No one had ever published its complex inner construction.

To Hal Puthoff, the magnetometer was a quackbuster. He looked upon it as the perfect test of whether there was such a thing as psychic power. He was open-minded enough to test whether psychokinesis worked, but not really convinced. Hal had grown up in Ohio and Florida, but liked to say he was from Missouri – the Show Me state, the ultimate state of the skeptic. Show me, prove it to me, let me see how it works. Scientific principles were a comforting refuge for him, the best way he could get a handle on reality. The multiple layers of shielding erected around the magnetometer would present the ultimate challenge for Ingo Swann, the psychic, whose plane was arriving from New York that afternoon. He would spring the thing on Swann. Just let him see if he could alter the pattern of a machine impervious to anything short of an atomic explosion.

It was 1972, the year before he’d begun working on his Zero Point Field theories, when Hal was still at SRI. Even at that time, before he’d thought about the implications of quantum zero-point fluctuations, Hal was interested in the possibility of interconnection between living things. But at this stage, he didn’t really have a focus, much less a theory. He’d been dabbling in tachyons, or particles that travel faster than the speed of light.

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