Quantum Non-locality and UFOs

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.



Discussions here indicate a loathing, by some, to accept UFOs (and flying saucers) as tangible objects; some interpretations centering on psychical manifestations, others centering on a mental interaction between percipient and the UFO (image).

There are other hypotheses, and one that should be addressed is the possibility that UFOs are intrusions of a quantum kind from other places in the Universe or psychic ether, if you want) that appear because of quantum non-locality.

To get a grasp of the thought and theorizing about quantum non-locality, click HERE for a 1997 paper about the topic by John G. Cramer of the Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.

One paragraph focuses on what Bruce Duensing and Jose Caravaca call “observer-created reality” (which I eschew). Here’s that paragraph:

The nonlocality of the quantum mechanics formalism is a source of some difficulty for the Copenhagen interpretation. It is accommodated in the CI through Heisenberg's "knowledge interpretation" which views the quantum mechanical state vector (y) as a mathematically-encoded description of the state of observer knowledge rather than as a description of the objective state of the system observed. For example, in 1960 Heisenberg wrote, "The act of recording, on the other hand, which leads to the reduction of the state, is not a physical, but rather, so to say, a mathematical process. With the sudden change of our knowledge also the mathematical presentation of our knowledge undergoes of course a sudden change." The knowledge interpretation's account of state vector collapse and nonlocality as changes in knowledge is internally consistent, but it is rather subjective, intellectually unappealing, and the source of much of the recent misuse of the Copenhagen interpretation (e.g., "observer-created reality").

I’m asserting that UFOs may become present when an object tangentially connected to our area of the Universe is made visible because an observer here is conveniently in situ to see the non-local inspired manifestation.

The UFO may even come about by a quantum intersect across dimensions or parallel universes, ours and theirs.



The quantum possibilities strike me as more reasonable (feasible) than the psychic hypotheses.

Psychical hypotheses are prosaic and mundane for me.

The human mind is given too much credence and power in the psychical response, and we all know, intuitively and intellectually, that psychism leaves a lot to be desired in repetitive and scientific experimentation.

UFO mavens want some control over the UFO phenomenon and applying a mind/UFO interaction allows that control to remain intact, somewhat.

This is akin to the Einstein approach about quantum mechanics, and John Cramer’s paper will take you through Einstein’s caveats and the quantum renunciation.



Einstein couldn’t accept the quantum quirkiness, and those in the UFO community can’t accept the UFO quirkiness, unless they keep control of the phenomenon by saying that it’s the human mind that is needed for a manifestation of UFOs.

That view is unimaginative and errant.

The human mind is hardly able to deal with practical reality, let alone incomprehensible reality (such as that in the quantum world).

(Schizophrenics and paranoiacs display examples of what happens when the human mind accesses realities outside the norm.)

While quantum non-locality is best represented by light photons, there are indications that quantum artifacts can exceed the atomic level and are manifested macrocosmically.

(I’ve provided some of that information online here earlier and at the RRRGroup blog.)

More importantly, perhaps, is the notion that UFOs may derive from intrusions, accidental or purposeful, across dimensions or between parallel universes, as string theory allows.



This would keep intact my preference for UFO tangibility, which is obvious and well-witnessed.

The psychic view of Jacques Vallee and his devotees is old-hat for me. It’s something like the hysteria of the Salem witch trials or the insanity of the Catholic Inquisitional thrusts.

More on this approach to the UFO phenomenon will be ferreted out from other sources and pertinent quantum theorizing, and will be presented here upcoming.

Meanwhile, you “UFOs as psychic phenomena” people can have at it.

RR

Three Universes?

A piece by Dietrick E. Thomsen, in Science News [Volume 105, 2/16/74, Page 109] presents a conjecture about the multi-verse, which has been adopted or adapted by theoretical physicists since.

Thomsen also addresses the "faster-than-light" conundrum currently in the news.

But, hey, you can read all that for yourselves by clicking HERE

RR

UFOs: Why Science Isn't Interested

Scientific methodology is thwarted when it comes to the UFO phenomenon.

What can science study when it comes to UFOs?

There is nothing tangible for scientists to study. There is no evidence that can be tested or any behavior that can be replicated or pinned down in any way.

Photos of aircraft or even of evanescent phenomena (lightning for instance) can be examined, but UFO photos offer nothing specific for science to look at.

The photos of Adamski, Villa, and Billy Meier, to name a few, would offer elements for science or intelligence agencies to scrutinize, if they were authentic photos.







Photos, less detailed, and maybe real, of amorphous UFOs don’t offer worthy elements that can be studied either. Does no one take a telephoto picture of a UFO? Where are the professional snapshots?

As for trace elements in supposed UFO landings (Socorro) or debris elements (Roswell), those are so indefinite or imaginary that science really has nothing to examine. (Anthony Bragalia has discovered that Battelle has studied malleable metal, allegedly from the Roswell incident, but Bragalia’s findings are beclouded by Battelle’s “secrecy” in what they’re doing or have done.)

Scientists need specimens to study, or hypotheses based upon observation(s). Witness testimony, regardless of the support of such by some UFO buffs, is useless, for scientific purposes. Sure, a credible witness might provide a clue that helps a scientist see an avenue for study, but witness testimony, all by itself, is generally useless.

UFO sightings nowadays are even more transitory that flying saucer reports of the past, those that supposedly left indentations (Socorro again) or radiation traces (the Desvergers, Florida tale), so science is even less inclined to get involved with sightings.



Some UFO mavens keep indicating that the O’Hare sighting of a few years back is a prominent UFO sighting, but others (Lance Moody for one) ask for something tangible: where are the photos? After all, almost everyone has a camera-enabled cell phone, and so many persons relate that they saw something strange over the Chicago airport, one wonders (along with Mr. Moody) why none of them had the presence of mind to snap a photo of the alleged O’Hare UFO?

Scientists might have trouble with a photo, as noted, but at least they’d have something to scrutinize. (Of course, some UFO hobbyists insist upon the negatives or original photos for study but today’s photos are captured electronically, so there are no negatives to offer. That argument, from UFO tyros, even when applied to older photos, is just stupid, non-scientific.)

The point here, by me, is that science has nothing with which to grapple when it comes to UFOs. The phenomenon is primarily witness-induced today, or hoaxed, just as it was in the past. However, those past UFO or flying saucer incidents had a few ingredients (radar blips, movie-film captures, trace elements) that today’s sightings do not have.

Moreover, the topic is so tainted by the goofiness and circus-like atmosphere, even by those who once had some credibility and cachet when it came to UFOs, that science won’t touch the phenomenon at all, often acknowledging it as not a legitimate area for scientific scrutiny.

So, science is out. And ufology is a sham. That leaves us with what? A curiosity that is not going to be explained or understood as it stands right now.

To pursue the matter further takes a mind and/or personality that is in a state of denial about reality, and what is purposeful for life.

RR

UFOs are Mega-tachyons

Kevin Randle's blog is riffing on the loss of "robust UFO sightings" that we and others have mentioned recently.

Click HERE for a paper that provides a clue as to where "robust UFOs" have gone.

RR

A 1977 Prediction: Faster than Light

Beyond Reality (Special Issue) UFO UpDate! [October 1977] had this blurb:

"It is possible that Einstein could have been wrong..." [Page 56]



Click HERE to read the "article" for yourself.

RR

Wonders in the Sky (and nonsense in the book)

David J. Hufford, Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Psychiatry, Penn State College of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania provides the forward to Jacques Vallee’s and Chris Aubeck’s book (pictured above).

Professor Hufford is erudite and insightful.

Here are some examples from his Foreward:

I [Hufford] was pursuing the heretical idea that folk belief traditions might actually incorporate accurate observations…

[Vallee in his books, Anatomy of a Phenomenon and Passport to Magonia] recognized the difference between the core phenomenology of [UFO] reports and the local language and interpretations that clothed that core in traditional accounts.

Criticizing conventional UFO investigators for “confusing appearance and reality” [Vallee] said that “The phenomenon has stable, invariant features….But we have also had to note carefully the chameleonlike character of the secondary attributes of the sightings.

The willingness of [Vallee and Aubeck] to cast a very wide net, andn ot to allow the particular cultural interpretations of events to limit their view, offers us a remarkable opportunity to seek patterns that may lead to new understandings.

Those with a view of these matters narrowly focused on a particular interpretation, especially the extraterrestrial idea, may be annoyed by the mixing of the aerial and the religious, the political and the mystical and more.

The problem with “spaceship” is not that it is anomalous; it is that it is an interpetation rather than an observation.

But Vallee and Aubeck undercut these judicious remarks by Professor Hufford by making these comments in their Introduction:

We will show that unidentified flying objects have had a major [sic] impact not only on popular culture but on our history, on our religion…

…the fact would remain that an unexplained phenomenon has played and continues to play a fantastically important role in shaping our belief systems, the way we view our history and the role of science.

…their [UFOs] impact has shaped human civilization in important ways.

Vallee’s and Aubeck’s hubris astounds.

UFOs have never had a “major” impact on humanity or civilization or history or religion.

The phenomenon has always been a remote and peripheral aspect of societal life, of human existence.

UFOs, today, are as inconsequential to humanity and society as a whole as they have always been, despite Vallee’s insistence that UFOs have been and are integral to life on Earth.

Vallee’s view is egocentric, megalomanic almost.

His view typifies that of those, generally, who are absorbed by the pheonomenon.

Irritated by Stephen Hawking’s postion vis a vis UFOs – “I am discounting reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?” – Vallee and Aubeck don’t get it:

The persons seeing UFOs are not cranks and weirdos. Hawking is wrong. The people who study UFOs are the cranks and weirdos – Vallee and Aubeck among them.

RR

The Goldbach Conjecture and literal UFO reports

Witness testimony, whether about UFO sightings, crimes, accidents, et cetera, is an iffy thing. And witness testimony after a period of time has passed even more so.

But that aside, I take accounts of events -- historical, mythological, reportorial, Biblical – as a “true” rendering of what witnesses saw or experienced, expressed with caveats about “inflation,” misinterpretation, subjective extrapolation, and mental bias.

Thus, the Biblical account of Ezekiel, for instance, is not a fanciful metaphor to make moral a moral point not is it a confluence of fictional elements imagined for whatever reason by the Biblical writer whose rubric is Ezekiel. It is a representational rendering of what the witness experienced and set down, as best as he could, considering the limited parameters of existence at the time.



Roswell’s wirnesses, at the time of the alleged incident – 1947 -- can be accounted as veracious. (Witnesses, providing testimony, many years later, suffer the vicissitudes on metal acuity that afflicts people as they age and as time passes, so their accounts can be ignored -- should be ignored.)

But to get at the heart of the UFO enigma, UFO researchers may take a serious perusal of witness accounts and testimony, past and present, providing exquisite details and data that has, so far, been sublimated, replaced by the more sensational aspects of what witnesses experienced.

Every UFO report, including those of “hoaxers” such as Adamski or Fry, should be evaluated, vetted, for elements that abut other testimonies, from reliable, credible sources.



The UFO-like reports, from religious and mythical writings – the Bible, the Hindu texts, the Greek myths, the Norse sagas, and all the rest – should be immersed in scrutiny and examined systematically rather than literarily.

And the Goldbach Conjecture?

Goldbach's Conjecture is that any even number may be expressed as the sum of two primes. If this conjecture is false, then there must be at least one even number that cannot be expressed as two primes.

Just as Goldbach’s theorems and musings about integers remains unresolved, the pursuit of verification provides a methodology for study of UFOs, past, present, and future – if UFO mavens are serious about explaining the UFO phenomenon.

The Ongoing Fusion of Eastern Mysticism and [Quantum] Physics

For those who think that there is a "connection" between Quantum (or even General) Physics and Eastern Philosophical Thought, we suggest a paper for your edification:

Parallels and Paradoxes in Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism: A Critical Reconnaissance by Sal P. Restivo (Social Studies of Science 1978)

Click here for the PDF

N.B. We feel that much in this paper impacts the UFO phenomenon -- a little or a lot.

Are we a simulation?

In John D. Barrows book “One Hundred Essential Things you Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know: Math Explains the World” [W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., N.Y. 2008], Barrow presents a chapter [19] Living in a Simulation, from which I’ve culled these passages:

“Once you take seriously the suggestion that all possible universes cab (and do) exist then you have to deal with another strange consequence. In this infinite array of universes there will exist civilizations far more advanced that ourselves, that have the capability to simulate universes…the would be able to watch the evolution of life and consciousness within their computer simulations.” [Page52/53]

“With in these universes, self-conscious entities can emerge and communicate with one another.” [Page 53]

The physicist Paul Davies suggests that there is a high probability that we are living in a simulated reality, and is there a way to find out the truth? [Page 53]

“Even if the simulators were scrupulous about simulating the laws of Nature [in their created world or universe], there would be limits to what they could do.” [Page 54]

“They may know a lot about the physics and programming need to simulate a universe, but there will be gaps or, worse still, errors.”[Page 54]

“…gradually…little flaws will begin to build up.” [Page 54]

“…logical contradictions will inevitably arise and the laws in the simulations will appear to break down…The inhabitants of the simulation…will occasionally be puzzled by the observations they make.” [Page 54, italics mine]

“Mysterious changes would occur that would appear to contravene the very laws of Nature…” [Page 55]

“…if we live in a simulated reality, we should expect to come across occasional ‘glitches’ or experimental results that we can’t repeat or even very slow drifts in the supposed constants and laws of Nature that we can’t explain.” [Page 55]

Don’t these observations by Dr. Barrow resonate – when it comes to quantum theory and the UFO mystery (or even paranormal events themselves)?

Dr. Barrow’s musings were the province of Mac Tonnies blog and interest, and are the pressure points for persons who visit here, such as Bruce Duensing.

That we may be a simulation doesn’t grab this writer but it's an imaginative hypothesis that can’t be dismissed out-of-hand.

Plato, Descartes (somewhat) thought, and many current physicists accept the possibility, that we do live as a simulation.

The UFO phenomenon seems to provide a substantiation for Dr. Barrow’s method(s) to discern if we live as a simulation or not.

The possibility intrigues, but that is all it does….(for me).

RR

Confining our blogs...

Today, Wednesday, May 25th, 2011, comments to this blog were not automatically sent to us for moderation. I had to go into our e-mail service and retrieve them, which allowed me to scrutinize responses more judiciously than usual, and without them being sampled by other here.

I continue to be distressed by the slovenly thought-processes that are exampled by what purports to be critical thinking about our postings.

In dialogue with other bloggers and friends, I’ve decided that we shall confine comments here to those that reflect intellectual, open-minded rumination, and not knee-jerk response to things written by us and others, which torment an ingrained belief-system or narrow-minded, non-objective cogitation.

There are several (many, actually) commenters we look forward to hearing from but a few that irk us with their bigoted, snotty, unthinking commentary.

From this point on, more so than our usual fascistic deletion of comments that we don’t like, we’ll not be approving comments from some who visit here.

We have a respect for some of you -- your intellectual proclivities, your open-minded objectivity, even-handed skepticism, and your genteel approach to our oblique and beleaguered postings, some of which I agree are over the top.

Your comments will continue to be registered here.

But if you send us a comment that doesn’t appear, and it’s not the fault of our blogging service, you know where you stand with us.

So don’t go away angry…just go away…..



RR

Einstein proven right, again!

Click here for NPR story

Not the "God Particle" but maybe the Jesus Particle?

Fermilab finds intriguing "particle."

Quantum teleportation -- finally!

Click here for an item saying scientists have achieved quantum teleportation

Quantum and String Theories for Dummies?

Wiley Publishing Company has two books, in its Dummies series, about quantum mechanics and/or string theory:

Quantum Physics for Dummies by Steven Holzner [2009, 321 pages, $19.99, Wiley Publishing, NJ]



String Theory for Dummies by Andrew Zimmerman Jones with Daniel Robbins [2010, 366 pages, $19.99, Wiley Publishing, NJ]



Holzner’s book is, as far as we can determine, geared to college students or advanced high schoolers who are adept at mathematics of an advanced kind (Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus particularly).

Jones and Robbins provide an overview of quantum physics and string theory without a total immersion (as Holzner insists) in mathematics.

If you’re looking for a cogent assessment of string theory, which is in a category rightfully called a quantum field theory, get the Jones/Robbins book.

If you are a math genius – and we accent “genius” – Holzner’s book will satisfy. It won’t enlighten you about quantum mechanics in a philosophical way but it can lead you through the abstruse mathematics of quantum theorizing.

Holzner’s book, in our estimation, is not a Dummies book, per se. It’s a tome on rarified mathematics, which science and physicists use to remain arcane and aloof.

Jones with Robbins, on the other hand, empathize with readers who want to know more about quantum and string theory and provide a door to understanding both.

We’ll be presenting material from the Jones book upcoming.

As for the Holzner book, we’ll leave that for those who think science is furthered by use of mathematics rather than clear statements of logic and hypothesizing, in plain English.

The Grand Designer is God! – says (inadvertently) Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow

The 2010 Bantam Book The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow purports to show that physical laws account for life and reality, without the intervention of a prime mover, God.



But after one reads the book, with all the complex interlocking laws of quantum physics and the hypotheses of the so-called M-theory as presented by Mlodinow (mostly), one has to conclude that, indeed, a supreme mind, a thing we can call God, did indeed create the universe and life as we know it.

Physicists try to promote their god – mathematics – with abstruse theories and convoluted mathematical gyrations, but after all is said and written, the conclusion that only make rational sense is that reality is, indeed, a concoction of a sensate entity, no matter how that entity is defined.

Our belief, however, is that God existed – we think He/It died or has gone hidden, as expounded by such writers as Richard Elliott Friedman in The Hidden Face of God [Harper, 1995].



No amount of mathematical machination by physicists destroy the early thinking of philosophers such as Aristotle, or the great theologian Thomas Aquinas – that God is (or was) the designer of the Universe and life itself.

Chapter 7, The Apparent Miracle (Page 165 particularly), provides the unconscious belief in God by Mlodinow (and Hawking also?) exampled by the thoughts of Kepler, Newton, and Einstein, who themselves believed a mind (God) created the laws that govern the Universe and life.



The book can be skimmed in parts, as much of it presents the gyrations of physicists who are as flummoxed by existence as laymen are, but who pretend, like the alchemist of old, to have access to the secrets of life, presented by them as mathematical theories, obfuscated so as to feign hidden knowledge.

M-theory is a reworking of the philosophies of the early Greeks and the scientific investigations of such luminaries as Galileo, Maxwell, Newton (of course), and others. The Grand Design tries to make a case for M-theory, calling it “the unified theory that Einstein was hoping to find” (Page 181) and is, in fact, The Grand Design.

That’s an egregious stretch.

M-theory and string theories are all extrapolations of earlier thinking by Biblical writers and the Greek, Islamic, and Scholastic thinkers of the past.

The inherent quandary (about reality) of physicists is not masked by their obeisance to mathematics, which didn’t really arrive in science until Newton, and have been ballyhooed by physicists and science ever since, but not making any sense, as scientific use of math (or arithmetic) of any kind is merely an elitist ploy to make laypeople believe that science has an inside track to the truth of existence.

But as Richard Bucke shows in his masterwork, Cosmic Consciousness, reality is something so transcendental that human minds can only occasionally observe it but never truly understand it.



For Hawking and Mlodinow (and others, such as Dawkins, Smolin, et al.) to write that that they are near to resolving The Grand Design is beyond preposterous; it’s hubris of a massive kind.