The Ray of Creation

Our modern scientific culture is unique in history because it possesses a description of the universe that is based on observation, described by theories with numbers in them, and makes predictions of what we will find if we make new experiments that no-one has tried before. Sometimes, the predictions even come quite close to what the experiments reveal! This is a significant improvement on stories about the world being a flat disk sitting on the top of elephants riding on a giant space turtle and so on, which we now know are blatantly untrue.

Even better, this description is part of a consistent body of knowledge which also describes how to build cars, CD players and so on. It isn't correct yet, because there are some numbers which don't accord with experiment, and there are some things which we observe which the description doesn't explain at all. It's a strange situation, because such an integrated picture isn't the sort of thing we can just pick and choose bits from to believe or not. It can't be wrong, because after all, cars and CD players work. Yet there are no obvious ragged edges to the picture, and there are some things that it just does not address at all.

One such omission is the strange property of self organisation that we see operating in the universe. The planet we live on is teeming with life, complexity and richness, but we know that millions of years ago it was just a ball of lifeless rock, spinning through space. At larger scales we know that very, very long ago the universe was a much simpler place than it is now. Once it was just filled with vast clouds of gas but today it contains untold numbers of galaxies of stars, which are clumped into clusters. The clusters are clumped into superclusters, which are themselves arranged into vast sheets with Great Voids between them. We have a pretty good understanding of the processes that cause structures to degrade from complex to simple like metal objects rusting or mountains eroding away, but we don't have the faintest idea how to start explaining how at the same time other structures get more complex. It's as if half the story is completely missing from our understanding! There are all sorts of fancy words that some people use to refer to this strange effect, such as "emergence", or "autopoesis" (which just means "self organisation" in ancient Greek - it sounds much grander than it really is), but when it comes down to it these words are rather like the Spencer's Warbler - they tell us nothing about what is happening. As we saw in the last chapter, most people in most cultures tend to concentrate on the things they do understand, and ignore the things they don't understand. This leads to a false perception of the universe as a place where things decay and fall apart, when in fact the dominant process in the universe is one of Humpty Dumpty's suddenly falling together, all over the place!

Although we don't understand self organisation, there is one fascinating aspect of it that people have noticed. It always happens at the "edge of chaos". We met the edge of chaos in Chapter 1, where it forms the interesting part of the Mandelbrot Set, but you can observe it in your kitchen too. All you have to do is turn on the tap on your kitchen sink. When the tap is only a little bit open, water flows out of it in a gentle and regular way. You can look at the water flowing out of the tap, and see that the water always forms the same shape as it flows from the tap. When the tap is fully open, it flows in an irregular and crazy way, spurting all over the place. The flow is turbulent. If you open the tap just the right amount, you can get the water flowing in a way that is regular for a few moments, then it does a little crazy dance, then it becomes regular again, and so on. That is the edge of chaos. A great deal of study has been done to try to understand exactly when and how those little crazy dances happen, and the studies have made some progress, leading to more efficient shapes for turbine blades, aeroplane shapes and any other kind of equipment that involves flowing fluids or gases, and as you might have guessed by now, the mathematics that can start to describe the edge of chaos is full of fractals. This is not to say that wherever there is an edge of chaos there will be self organisation, but we do know that to get self organisation happening we have to start with an edge of chaos. So we can bundle up the mystery of self organisation with the mystery of why the universe is full of fractals, and as we saw in Chapter 1, a universe full of fractals also offers new ways to understand our own subjective sense of our own consciousness, which is another thing our current picture of the universe says absolutely nothing about. We can bundle up the mystery of our own consciousness with all the other examples of something seeming to appear out of nowhere in a universe that is filled with fractal patterns.

So why is the universe full of fractal patterns, and why do the fractal patterns have the astonishing property of being able to produce increasing richness by just interacting with each other? We have now learned enough about how the magicians see things to be able to borrow a couple of ideas from them and understand this in a way that science has not been able to suggest until this point in our history. We'll begin by taking a clear and simple statement by the magician Rudolph Steiner, taken from his own Autobiographical Sketch, and then use the idea of inside out thinking from Chapter 3 to fit Steiner's statement into our modern scientific picture of the universe in a way that doesn't need us to rip our wonderfully self-consistent modern picture apart, but does extend its power so that it can explain a lot more than it presently does. The result is a unified scientific and magical picture which for the first time places the phenomenon of miracles (as the real magicians understand real miracles) into a scientific framework. If it can do that, perhaps it's hardly surprising that this new picture has a place for human life, aspirations and destiny which the old picture merely treats as an accident - where it discusses them at all. We'll spend the rest of this chapter understanding the new picture, before placing human experience into it in the next chapter.

To begin understanding the new picture, what Steiner said was this:

Into this period fell - and this belongs already to the external occult influences - full clarity about the conception of time. This knowledge was in no way connected with my studies and was directed entirely from occult life. It was the knowledge that there is an evolution going in a backwards direction, interfering with that which goes forwards; the first is the occult, astral evolution. This knowledge is the condition for spiritual perception.

Steiner claims that although we only see time passing in one direction, from what we call past to what we call future, from the universe's point of view it also passes in the other direction as well! It is the goings on that are influenced by this unseen, backwards chain of cause and effect that the magicians are interested in. In Chapter 3 we looked very carefully at the idea that what we know is quite different to what the universe knows, because our knowledge is limited. So the idea that there might be things going on in the universe that we don't see from our point of view should not be too surprising. We always have to bear in mind that we have a point of view, and that what we see is not absolute, or objective, no matter how objective it seems from our point of view. Think of the centuries of head scratching that it took before we realised that no matter what we think we see, the Earth really does go round the sun instead of the other way round, and what's more the Earth spins as it does it, so that Lennon and McCartney could write their song, The Fool on the Hill:

This idea provides a way to understand why the universe keeps getting richer. In what we call our future, the universe will be a very rich and lively place indeed. This rich place degraded into a very simple state in what we call our past, and we are seeing the film played backwards. Bits of Humpty Dumpty suddenly jump off the floor and click together in a way that we call self organisation, because we're just seeing him fall - backwards! Even better, as soon as we have this idea available, we can immediately understand why we can only see things going the other way. In common with everything else in the universe including galactic super clusters and planetary ecologies, we are getting richer and more complex as time passes, and we grow and form memories. Just follow a series of events as you normally experience them. Perhaps on Monday you notice that some new neighbours have moved in next door. This information adds to your memory, like putting a shirt on in the morning. Then on Tuesday you have a conversation with your new neighbours and discover that you like them. This information also adds to your memory, like putting a coat on top of your shirt. The discovery that you like the neighbours is made in the context of your prior knowledge that they exist. You now have two layers of memory - an inner one that the neighbours exist, and an outer one that you like them. Now run the film backwards. First you un-have the conversation, and forget that you like the neighbours. That's like taking the coat off. Then you un-notice the neighbours moving in, and forget that they exist. That's like taking the shirt off. The difference is that when you put the shirt and coat on, you put the coat on top of the shirt, but when you're taking things off, the coat has absolutely nothing to do with what happens when you take the shirt off. It's already gone! If the universe wanted to, it could run you forwards and backwards through Monday and Tuesday as many times as it likes, and all you'd ever be aware of is one pass through Monday and Tuesday, and you'd only be aware of that on Tuesday evening! In his novel Slaughterhouse Five, the science fiction author Kurt Vonnegut played with this idea, but he got it completely wrong. The central character, Billy Pilgrim, is indeed running backwards and forwards through time in exactly this way, and it makes for some very pretty imagery as (for example) terrible destruction caused by the Allied bombing of Dresden is sucked up into bombs which leap up into aeroplanes and are carefully borne away to be safely dismantled in factories far away. The problem is that Vonnegut has separated Pilgrim from the universe as described in Chapter 3. Pilgrim just keeps on experiencing a personal forwards time when everything in the universe (including his own brain) is experiencing backwards time. Pilgrim somehow forms memories of seeing time flow backwards, even while the brain that forms the memories runs backwards. It's silly.

A more serious objection to the idea of two arrows of time with a much richer state in our future comes from our modern picture of the universe. After all, we know that the universe is expanding, and recent studies have shown that the rate of expansion is actually increasing. Our modern picture says that in the distant future there won't be anything interesting happening at all. Everything is doomed to get further and further away from everything else, eventually the stars will have burned all their hydrogen and gone out, and the universe will become a vast, cold, dark, empty, lifeless place. That's not very rich and complex, but perhaps we can keep all the elements of what we have discovered, and even keep them connected together in the same way (remember - cars and CD players work, so we have to respect the relationships between aspects of the universe that we have managed to understand) by turning the whole picture inside out.

The idea that the universe is expanding came from very careful observations of the light from many distant galaxies. Starlight can be split into its constituent colours by using a prism, in the same way that sunlight is sometimes split into many different colours by water vapour in the atmosphere to form a rainbow. In exactly the same way that copper burns with a specific green colour, there are specific colours that we expect to see in starlight because stars shine by burning hydrogen. When the great astronomer Edwin Hubble looked carefully at starlight from distant galaxies, he found that instead of the colours being exactly the ones he expected they were all off by a small amount, shifted towards the red end of the spectrum. The exact amount of red shift in each galaxy's light depends on just one thing - how far away from us the galaxy happens to be. To explain this astonishing finding, Hubble came up with the idea that the entire universe that we know is like a soap bubble, being blown up in a space that we cannot know directly, and which has an extra physical dimension. Little creatures (perhaps bacteria) running round on the surface of a soap bubble are free to move in any direction they like on the two dimensional surface of the bubble, but they can't leave the surface so they are only aware of a two dimensional space. In the same way, we are completely free to move in the three dimensions we know, but we (and everything else in the universe) cannot move through the extra dimension that we cannot directly perceive. As the surface of our bubble expands, everything on it moves away from everything else, and the further away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away from us. Here's a simplified diagram of what Hubble thought is happening, with all of space reduced to a single one dimensional line, drawn in the two dimensional space of the page that the little astronomer (marked by the letter A) cannot be aware of:

As the bubble expands, the galaxy far from the astronomer (marked by the letter F) moves away from him more quickly than the galaxy nearer to him (marked by the letter N). Red light has a longer wavelength than blue light, just as low pitched sounds have a longer wavelength than high pitched sounds. Hubble's idea was that stars moving away from him would be shining with light of exactly the right colour, but the light waves would be effectively stretched from his point of view in the same way as a police car's siren seems to be a lower pitch if it is moving quickly away from us. This stretching would make the light seem redder than it should be.

The idea of all of space being like an expanding bubble contained a remarkable consequence. It meant that in the past the universe was smaller. There is no edge, but by travelling far enough, just like a little creature on the surface of a soap bubble, eventually a traveller would come right back to where she started. When the universe was smaller, the length of the journey needed to come back to the starting point was shorter. At some point in the past, absolutely everything in the universe was contained in a tiny space filled with an unimaginable fury of energy. Before that, everything was in a point of zero size which exploded in the now famous Big Bang. Understanding becomes impossible at the point of zero size, and there is no way of knowing what happened just before that point, to find out where everything came from. A universe which always makes sense to our imaginative and reasoning study seems to put on a Groucho mask and blow a raspberry at us right at the start of all things. Whatever nature does is always right of course, but it seems like a bit of a disappointment that we live in a universe that gives rise to questioning and intelligent minds, and then plays silly tricks on them by doing things the minds can't ever understand right at the start!

Over the years since Hubble made his great discovery and proposed his radical suggestion to explain it, a huge amount of work by many scientists has fleshed out the details. We have mathematical descriptions of the processes that occurred just after the impossible madness, and which gave rise to the kinds of particles we see in the universe today. Because light travels at a finite speed, we can see what parts of the universe looked like very long ago by studying light that has travelled a very long way, and we see that long ago the universe was indeed much smoother and contained much less structure than it does today, and the further back we look the smoother it gets - exactly as we would expect if it had started as a tiny ball of pure energy.

On the other hand, there are some things that haven't worked out so well. Careful studies of the shapes of galaxies showed that there isn't nearly enough mass in them to explain their shapes. So the idea of "dark matter" was born, to draw the galaxies into their present shapes. The only problem is, to make the sums work out right the scientists had to assume that 97% of all the matter in the galaxies is stuff that doesn't shine like stars, and doesn't get in the way of light from things that do shine either. We have no idea what this dark matter might be - there's certainly nothing like it around planet Earth. Then further studies of the red shift indicated that the rate of expansion of the universe is actually increasing, so an equally vast amount of "dark energy" got plugged in to push the galaxies apart. So the latest version of the theory needs 99.5% of the stuff in the universe to be mysterious substances that we can't see, we know nothing about, and we only assume exist because otherwise the sums just don't work out right. In situations like this, it is only reasonable to wonder if the theory is wrong. Even that ancient smoothness causes problems. If things were so perfectly smooth at first, where did all the rich structure we see today come from?

To turn this picture inside out, we explore a different explanation for the red shift. As before, we imagine the universe as the surface of a bubble, which this time is getting smaller, not bigger. We also imagine that as the bubble shrinks, absolutely every material particle in the universe from the smallest atom to the largest galaxy shrinks with it. This is an important difference compared to the old picture, where space gets bigger but the particles in it do not. In the new picture, the only thing that does not get smaller as time passes is the wavelength of light travelling through space. Every atom emits light of the "correct" wavelength, compared to its size at the time it emits the light. That wavelength is then "frozen" as the light travels, and when it arrives at an atom in the astronomer's eye it seems to be too big, because the receiving atom (as well as the emitting atom and everything else) has shrunk while the light has been travelling. Because the wavelength seems to be too big, it seems to be too red. The longer the light has been travelling the more pronounced this effect will be, so light from very far away will seem to be redder than light from nearby.

Why should everything in the universe be shrinking except for the wavelength of light travelling through space? In the new picture, the story of the universe starts with a Big Bang in our far future. Unlike the old picture, which gives us no reason to imagine it starting as anything other than a zero sized point, we can allow the new Big Bang to start with a size greater than nothing. This means it can start with structured contents instead of completely smooth contents. Einstein's equation E = mc² says that all material particles are made out of light somehow tied in knots so that it can sit still instead of being obliged to zoom around at the speed of light (and the fact that H bombs work proves he was right). As soon as the Big Bang happened, we can imagine its very dense but highly structured contents of tangled light starting to become unravelled, rather like spray cream expands as soon as the pressure in its container is released. This unravelling then continues forever. In the new picture, there is no crazy logic defying moment in our past. Everything in our past is completely sensible and reasonable in the new picture, although almost all of it is very, very boring. Something odd will happen in our future, but from our distant descendants' point of view it will probably be as a result of their own activities! In this new picture, the universe keeps faith with the reasoning minds that arise within it at all times. The further back we look, the smoother and less interesting the universe becomes, until the point where there is no more discernable change at all. So the new picture doesn't need to explain how structure appeared out of nowhere - instead we are seeing structure smoothing out, but we are seeing the smoothing process backwards. Light is travelling through the four dimensional space that Hubble always said the universe is evolving through, but things made of collections of tangled light (including astronomers and the stars they study) can't tell that they are unravelling on one arrow of time and re-ravelling on our arrow. From the point of view of any material object no change is happening at all, since everything is unravelling (or re-ravelling) at the same time, so the measuring sticks change size at the same rate as the things we measure with them. We can't tell that our house is actually getting smaller if the only rulers we have to measure it with are getting smaller at exactly the same rate. Even modern machines for making very precise measurements using light are no help, because the wavelength of the light they emit actually changes as the emitting atoms become smaller. It is only light that has been frozen in wavelength by freely travelling through space since the moment of its emission that remains constant. So the only clue we have that something odd is happening is the unchanging wavelength of free light as it travels through four dimensional space, which we perceive as getting redder because we are getting smaller with respect to it.

It's interesting to compare the difference between the original Hubble picture and the inside out version with the problem of perspective that artists had to sort out before they were able to represent depth in their paintings. Despite the magnificence of their architecture and workmanship, artists in Egypt at the time of the Pharohs weren't able to represent depth at all. The oddly flat looking pictures they left us are celebrated in the comic Egyptian Sand Dance (or if you prefer, the Bangles song Walk Like an Egyptian). We shouldn't pretend that the ancient Egyptians were alone in having this problem. European paintings right up to the 15th Century were just the same, except those people all have pointy shoes on! Then a unique artist who saw something that no-one else had ever seen - even though it was right in front of their noses - called Filippo Brunelleschi discovered vanishing points, learned to handle perspective, and everything changed.

These days we don't think twice when we see depth represented in pictures, but the fact that it took so long to get it right shows that perspective effects are much trickier to understand than they seem. In this diagram we see an imaginary ancient Egyptian philosopher called Hu-bul and a student. Hu-bul is explaining that as they look further back down the road, the reed beds on either side can be seen to be nearer together, and this "reed shift" proves that the road is getting wider as they walk down it! Of course, Hu-bul wouldn't really make this mistake, because he can easily run down the road and check its width. He'd only make the error if he had to make all his observations from very far away...

The new picture provides an explanation of where the fractal patterns - and everything else that we can bundle up with the existence of fractal patterns - within the universe came from. It always take two things to make a measurement. These are the thing that we are measuring and the thing that we are comparing it to. In the new picture we have two different length scales in the universe, which are the wavelength of free light, and the size of the atoms that emit or receive light. Until now we've been describing the new picture as one where the atoms are all shrinking with respect to the free light, to clearly show how similar the new Hubble picture is to the old one. We could look at it another way though, and say that the atoms are staying the same size, but the speed of light that atoms emit and expect to receive is getting faster as (to us) the universe gets older. The astronomer Fred Hoyle (who coined the term "Big Bang", and discovered how elderly stars manufacture all the elements except hydrogen and helium when they die and explode) was intruiged by ideas like this until his death, and talked about "tired light" theories. In tired light theories, old light looks "tired" to us, or to put it another way, new light looks "frisky" to us. Since we can only compare the atoms with the light, both ways of expressing the idea are actually the same. Looked at this way, we have the idea that in our far future, where the new picture puts the Big Bang, the speed of light will be very frisky indeed. As the universe unravelled, backwards in time from our point of view, the speed of light became slower and slower like a trolley that is started with a firm push and then steadily slows down as it travels. So a moment after the Big Bang, light was moving very, very quickly indeed. If it was moving quickly enough, it could have made the circular journey around the whole universe very quickly indeed. The effect of this on any structures in the universe would be to mix them up, like putting a stick into a pot of paint and stirring it. Even on our planet, at this time, we know that a good way of getting chaotic, fractal patterns is to start with a well defined structure and stir it in exactly this way. So the reason why the universe is full of fractals is that it started in our far future, with well defined structures in it, and during a period of frenzied mixing, that structure was distributed all over the universe in a way that made it impossible to see it for what it is, but seeded the whole universe with self-similar patterns that today are available to interact with themselves.

During the period of mixing, parts of each section of the structure of the Big Bang universe would have been distributed into every part of space. The effect of this is to make each part of space representative of what is going on in all of space. The universe before and after mixing is like the difference between a photograph and a hologram. Each part of a photograph holds a different part of the image, so if you tear a corner off a photograph, you've only got one part of the image. A hologram isn't like this. Each part of a hologram contains bits of all of the image, although it does so with less clarity than the whole hologram contains the whole image. Tear a corner off a hologram, and you can make out the whole of the image in it, from one angle. This property of the universe, that a part can be used to understand the whole, is the basis of the statement, "That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above" in the Emerald Tablet. With this deeper understanding we can now add to the interpretation of the phrase, "It rises from Earth to Heaven, and then it descends again to the Earth, and receives Power from Above and from Below" from the Emerald Tablet that was offered in Chapter 1. We have two arrows of time, and two chains of cause and effect. If we wish we can trace the history of the universe the way we usually do it, from a smooth state to a very structured one. Alternatively we can trace it the other way, in the unravelling direction. Both these perceptions don't do the universe full justice. To really understand what is happening, we have to understand that each moment contributes to both chains of cause and effect, round and round, in an eternity contained within a single story.

It's all a very attractive idea, but does it really work? In the rest of this chapter we'll look at some very deep mysteries that this picture can resolve, including suggesting what consciousness is (and no other physical picture has been able to do that), and explaining how miracles occur (and all prior pictures have been obliged to deny that they happen at all), but how can we test it? One very good test would be to look at the mathematical descriptions we have of how the early universe evolved in the old picture, leading to the mix and types of particles we see in the universe today. The description has taken many years of work by many people to construct, and it assumes that most of the interesting stuff happened in a short time, at very high densities and energies. The question is, can we modify the description to start with the simple, light filled universe we have good evidence used to exist, and produce the same mix of particles at very low densities and energies, but with infinite time for the events to happen? There are some situations where we can substitute time for energy (anyone who has prepared a roast dinner knows this), but it isn't always so. If it is possible to turn the description of particle evolution inside out in this way, then it would be a good indication that the new picture really does hang together. Today no-one knows if this will be possible or not - but that's what science is like! The good news is that if the new picture is right, we'll know that total understanding is never possible until we have all the data. There will always be new discoveries to be made, new surprises, until our distant descendants learn how to close down the universe and go... elsewhere.

The science of very small things has collected some unfortunate myths over the last hundred years. We looked at some of the origins of these myths, in the errors made by the deductive mind acting alone, in Chapter 3. One such myth is that just because no-one understands the quantum mechanical world today, we can be sure that quantum mechanics is beyond human understanding. If artists had believed that sort of thing, they'd never have tried to solve the problem of perspective - and the same thing is true of every other human accomplishment! Another myth is that just because we don't have the answers to some questions, normal people can't even understand the questions - which is equally untrue.

The core puzzle of quantum mechanics is very easy to understand. The starting point is an experiment that fires tiny particles like electrons at a phosphor screen, which glows when the electrons hit it. This is exactly what every TV does, with lots of electrons, to make a picture. If we fire electrons one by one, we notice that each momentary glow is exactly the same size, and appears in front of the gun that fired it. This shows that electrons are little lumps, and each little lump is the same as every other one. The diagram shows a gun spraying electrons and a phosphor screen, with some circles indicating glows where they would be seen. There's a barrier with a slit in it for the electrons to pass through, and all the glows happen just in front of the slit as we'd expect:

Things get peculiar when we replace the single slit with a double one. We'd expect to see two clumps of electrons where there was just one with a single slit, but that isn't what happens. Instead we see several clumps of electrons. Each glow is exactly the same size as all the others as before, so the electrons still arrive as lumps, but there is no way to tell where the next glow will happen. All we can do is place bets! This is quite different to the situation with a roulette wheel, where if only we had perfect information about the state of the wheel and how the ball was thrown, we could predict exactly where the ball would end up. With the electrons, there is no other extra information that could pick one position over another:

Where things get really weird is how we place the bets. People quickly noticed that the likelihood of the electron arriving at one place rather than another is determined by imagining the electron is not a lump at all, but a wave, just like waves on a seashore passing through holes in a breakwater. A single outward spreading wave turns into a pair of outward spreading waves where the slits are, and these then interfere with each other. In some places the interfering waves add up, and there we see lots of electrons (although there's a twist to the tale which we'll come back to). In other places the interfering waves cancel out, and there we see no electrons.

It's as if each electron is emitted as a lump, turns itself into a wave, passes through the slits, interferes with itself, has a little discussion between its spread out parts, tosses a coin and then decides to turn itself back into a lump, at one of the points where it's double wave version added up! No-one actually believes that electrons do that, but no-one knows what they really do, either. In this way we have some very accurate mathematics that tell us exactly where to expect to find electrons, but we don't have any idea what the mathematics mean. We might as well be shaking chicken bones over the sums and chanting mumbo-jumbo incantations!

The more we look at the problem, the more bizarre things get. It doesn't matter how far apart the possible places where the electron might end up are. The conversation between the wave version's spread out bits doesn't take any time at all, and speed of light limits that Einstein showed us apply to all communications don't apply to particles playing this crazy game. If we announce that we're not having this nonsense and try to spot which slit the electron "really" goes through using a detector, we can find out - but then the crazy behaviour disappears, and we just get two single slit experiments sitting next to each other, both behaving sensibly. It was the weird business of the electron changing back into a lump and choosing where to appear that got people talking about nothing being real until it had been observed. What caused the wave to make the choice? The idea (wacky though it seems) was that it is the experimenter looking at the experiment that somehow forces the wave to make a choice. Until then, everything is all just fuzzy, interacting waves sitting on top of each other in some strange, unknowable space. Gosh! Aren't we important! (Or can kittens and cockroaches "collapse the wave function" in this way too? No-one could answer that question!) This stuff seemed to get a huge boost when people had the bright idea of detecting which slit the particle went through, but then waiting until the wave/particle was about to hit the phosphor before choosing to look at the detector's result or not. This would test the idea that the detector was interfering with the experiment (because the detector would always be used) and also test the idea that observation is what matters (because sometimes the observation would be made and sometimes it wouldn't). Sure enough, when experimenters looked at the detector's result - after the particle had gone through and travelled nearly all the way to the phosphor - they got sensible, boring single clumps of electrons. When they didn't look at the detector's result, the complicated interference pattern appeared.

The result of all this weirdness was that several different "interpretations" of what the mathematics mean got cooked up. The one about observation being what matters is called the Copenhagen Interpretation, and is the one usually taken as "true". That's why the idea that quantum mechanics is very weird is common. Another popular one is called the Many Worlds Interpretation, and says that the electron doesn't choose a place to hit the phosphor at all. Instead, the universe somehow duplicates itself into as many copies as there are possible positions for the electron to hit the phosphor, so every possible outcome actually happens. That one sounds cute if we are watching an episode of Sliders, where the characters have adventures moving between different parallel universes, but a single electric lightbulb generates untold millions of quantum mechanical events every second. How many lightbulbs are there, sprouting millions of copy universes each second, all over the universe? It seems a bit excessive.

Now that we've summarised the things that make quantum mechanics so weird, we can use the picture suggested in the last section to make sense of it all. It's actually easier to do this than with the red shift, fractal structure and so on, because the key idea is already in place. When the great physicist Richard Feynman sorted out the mathematics of quantum mechanics to make it useful, he introduced a notation called Feynman diagrams. In Feynman diagrams, particles in flight can also be thought of as their anti-particles travelling backwards in time (an anti-particle is just like the corresponding particle, but has an opposite electric charge - uncharged particles are their own anti-particles). To be fair, Feynman always insisted that his diagrams are abstracted aids to keeping the sums straight and should not be taken literally, but the idea is right there. He himself liked to speak of "retarded waves" travelling forwards in time and "advanced waves" travelling backwards in time, so perhaps he didn't take his own warning all that seriously either. Beyond this, there are two partial interpretations of the mathematics which don't answer all the mysteries but do explicitly include information travelling backwards in time, called the Pilot Wave Interpretation and the Transactional Interpretation.

What happens if we fully embrace this backwards in time idea? For one thing, the bizarre way that we can only speak of probabilities in quantum mechanics suddenly makes sense. If there are two chains of cause and effect interfering with each other, just as Steiner said, then we can't ever know the full set of causes of anything happening, because some causes are in our future and haven't happened yet. We can't know all the causal factors, so we can only make bets on what will happen, based on the causes that we do know - the ones in our past. The universe always knows the full story, always knows exactly what will happen, but we can't. There is indeed extra information in play (hidden variables as Einstein called them), but they are located in our future, not in some weird alternate spook reality. There are no weird transitions to waves and back to particles again, no bizarre faster than light communication, no mysterious events correlated in unseen ways. There are just pathways that are either available or not, going forwards in time as well as backwards, and events that are correlated by having common causes in our future. From here we can find a remarkable confirmation of the validity of the idea. There is a strange twist in the tale when we use the interfering waves idea to place our bets on where the electrons will end up. Instead of adding up the amount of reinforcement that we'd get if the electrons had turned into waves and using that number to place our bets, we have to first square the amount of reinforcement. We have to multiply the amount of reinforcement by itself. The squared number is called the probability amplitude in the jargon, and it is that which accurately predicts the likelihood of finding an electron or not at any particular place. No-one has ever been able to suggest any reason why we have to do this - we just have to if we want the sums to work out right. When we fully embrace the idea of two chains of cause and effect, we can immediately see why the squaring is necessary. The true probability of an event happening has to describe the probability of it happening in forwards time, and the reverse event happening (an electron leaving the phosphor at a given point and being absorbed by the gun) in backwards time. Because at such small scales all events are completely efficient and reversible (the jargon word is elastic), the numerical value of both probabilities is the same, so to get the total probability we have to multiply the forwards probability by the same number for the backwards probability. The probability amplitudes confirm the reality of the backwards arrow of time in every quantum mechanical calculation we ever make! This idea then works through to a remarkable result discovered by the physicist John S. Bell, which is called Bell's Theorem. Bell used the square term in quantum mechanical calculations to prove that there really does seem to be some strange faster than light communication taking place at a quantum mechanical level, underlining the idea that the whole universe is somehow "entangled". Although we don't seem to notice it so much at our scales, somehow everything in the universe is connected to everything else. Although this is a strange and astonishing idea if we only recognise the forwards arrow of time, in this picture Bell's Theorem is not surprising at all. The interconnectedness happens in a "local" way, but it happens in our future, and by the time we see the interconnected events they can be very far apart with nothing obvious to us to connect them. So we seem to see what Einstein called "spooky actions at a distance".

In recent years there have been some spectacular developments in quantum computing. Although so far only very small calculations have been performed using quantum computers, they have proven the validity of the idea. Quantum computers work by representing the elements of the problem as a "superposition" or overlaying of multiple possible "wave versions" of several particles. When the transition back to being a particle in a specific position occurs, this produces the solution to the problem. The small computers that have so far been built have shown that for some kinds of problems, quantum computers will be able to solve problems that would take conventional supercomputers many hours - and do it in a single step. The developers of these remarkable devices and their theoretician friends tend to be fans of the Many Worlds Interpretation. They believe that interaction between versions of the devices in many parallel universes is what does the calculation so quickly. Instead of one computer running for a long time, many computers run for a short time. The difference between conventional parallel computers and the quantum ones is that the developers don't have to build many computer circuits to run in parallel. Instead they build one, and then use it's counterparts in many parallel universes to do the job. The physicist David Deutsch is firmly convinced of the existence of parallel universes, and on page 217 of his book The Fabric of Reality he says, "To those who still cling to a single-universe world-view, I issue this challenge: explain how Shor's algorithm works." (Shor's algorithm is this way of doing calculations.) Just like the other strange quantum mechanical effects that can be moved into the realm of the comprehensible by fully embracing both arrows of time, quantum mechanical computers can be explained without needing untold numbers of parallel universes. The computers don't start with a problem and move towards the answer by doing work, in the way that our day to day experience suggests it always has to be done. Instead, the correct answer (which is different to all the other possible answers because it is correct, and part of the future state where researchers are opening champagne bottles) decomposes into the inputs to the problem on the backwards arrow, in the same short period of time that we see the inputs turning into the answer on our arrow. It is the small size of the quantum computers which makes this process so obviously symmetrical, unlike similar effects at larger scales (which we call self organisation) and are not so symmetrical because at larger scales small structures decay as large structures self organise. This is a theme that we will return to.

To complete this section, we can briefly mention the principle of least action, which we met in Chapter 1 as a very elegant way to determine the path of a falling football, and which is completely consistent with the way we do calculations in quantum mechanics. The principle of least action worries people because it seems that in order to know the route it must take, the football must start out knowing where it will end up. Since that seems to put effect before cause, it can't make sense in any picture with only one arrow of time. As soon as we accept that there are two arrows of time, the philosophical problem with the principle of least action ceases to be a problem at all!

The idea that there are two chains of cause and effect, interpenetrating each other forwards and backwards in time, carries with it the idea that each moment has its own predetermined existence whether or not it has happened yet from our point of view. Later we'll be able to resolve what this means for our subjective sense of free will, and whether or not our own efforts mean anything in such a universe (and they most certainly do). We've already seen that such a predetermined universe makes sense of the weirdness of quantum mechanical effects once we explicitly embrace it, and the same thing is true of the physics of large things, too. In fact at larger scales predeterminism is so obvious that it's taken quite a bit of effort for people to manage to ignore it, which they've only done because of the erroneous assumption that our view of time passing is objective and absolute, and a mistaken belief that the universe can't be predetermined because they have free will (or if you prefer, they're scared to think about it).

Predeterminism is sitting there, waiting to be appreciated, in a consequence of Einstein's discoveries called the "block universe". Einstein showed us that the order that things happen in is not absolute. It all depends on where we see them from. To understand this, we can imagine two bombs sitting in space and waiting to be detonated. We ask Einstein to stand near one of them (Bomb E), and his colleague Lorentz to stand near the other (Bomb L). We also ask Sir Isaac Newton to stand halfway between the two bombs, ready to light the fuses and set them off:

Newton lights both fuses at the same time, both bombs explode, and he sees both flashes at the same time. From his point of view, the bombs explode simultaneously. Einstein does not see the same thing. Because light travels at a finite speed, the flash from Bomb E reaches him before the flash from Bomb L. From Einstein's point of view, Bomb E explodes first, and then Bomb L explodes. Lorentz sees something else again. From his point of view, Bomb L explodes first and then Bomb E explodes. This is not a trivial effect. Because nothing can go faster than the speed of light, there is no way Einstein or Lorentz can obtain any other information about the universe than what they see. Each of them lives in a "light cone" which is unique to himself. The idea that there is no such thing as simultaneous events in an absolute sense is central to Einstein's Relativity, which also predicts surprising effects including time seeming to run more slowly for very quickly moving objects, or in strong gravitational fields. These effects have been confirmed by many experiments, which now include the Global Positioning System receivers that can be bought at sports shops. GPS receivers use very slight differences between the arrival time of signals from several satellites to calculate where the unit is located, and they have to include Relativistic corrections to allow for the satellites being higher in the Earth's gravitational field than the receivers are. Without the Relativistic corrections, they report the wrong position. So although it may seem strange, we have plenty of reasons to believe that Einstein's Relativity really is correct.

Where things get interesting from our point of view is what happens when Einstein and Lorentz meet up after having done their experiment. Einstein explains that he saw Bomb E explode, and then Bomb L. From his point of view, by the time Bomb L exploded, the explosion of Bomb E was absolutely certain because it had already happened. This puts Lorentz in an interesting position. Obviously he shares a universe with Einstein (Einstein has just bought him a drink so he must be in the same universe), so in this shared universe it was certain that after he had seen Bomb L explode, he was doomed to see Bomb E explode, even though he did not know it until it happened. Although he could not know that it was his predetermined fate to see Bomb E explode, the universe did know something that was in his future. Of course, exactly the same thing applies to Einstein, because what Lorentz saw makes his future equally predetermined. This is what the term "block universe" means. Relativity says that the whole story of the universe, through all of time, is a single block like a book sitting on a desk. Within the block are many moments, each like a page in the book. The creatures living in the universe see the moments passing in the same order as the pages are numbered, but the last page of the book is always there, even though they don't know what is written on it. The two arrows of time idea doesn't challenge Relativity in any way. Instead, it simply tells us to take it seriously in all its implications. When we fly to a meeting, the GPS receiver used by the pilot to navigate to the airport forces us to accept that the totality of the universe already knows the outcome of the meeting even though we don't.

When we understand a thing, we always find that there are several different ways of telling the story of what we understand. The great Richard Feynman thought this was so important that he didn't feel he had understood anything unless he had found several different ways to explain it. For another example of how predeterminism lurks in the mathematics of Relativity, we can turn to Kip Thorne's fascinating account of the development of Relativity during - and after - Einstein's work, Black Holes and Time Warps:

[Penrose and Israel] especially could not conceive of jettisoning [the apparent horizon] in favor of the absolute horizon. Why? Because the absolute horizon - paradoxically it might seem - violates our cherished notion that an effect should not precede its cause. When matter falls into a black hole, the absolute horizon starts to grow ("effect") before the matter reaches it ("cause"). The horizon grows in anticipation that the matter will soon be swallowed and will increase the hole's gravitational pull.

Penrose and Israel knew the origin of this seeming paradox. The very definition of the absolute horizon depends on what will happen in the future: on whether or not signals will ultimately escape to the distant Universe. In the terminology of philosophers, it is a teleological definition (a definition that relies on "final causes"), and it forces the horizon's evolution to be teleological. Since teleological viewpoints have rarely if ever been useful in modern physics, Penrose and Israel were dubious about the merits of the absolute horizon.

Hawking is a bold thinker. He is far more willing that most physicists to take off in radical new directions, if those directions "smell" right. The absolute horizon smelled right to him, so despite its radical nature, he embraced it, and his embrace paid off. Within a few months, Hawking and James Hartle were able to derive, from Einstein's General Relativity laws, a set of elegant equations that describe how the absolute horizon continuously and smoothly expands and changes its shape, in anticipation of swallowing infalling debris or gravitational waves, or in anticipation of being pulled on by the gravity of other bodies.

We've seen that in the realm of very small particles, the backwards arrow of time helps us to understand otherwise mysterious situations where widely separated events seem to be connected, even though we can find nothing to connect them. At the largest scales we find similar situations, where the backwards arrow of time can be equally helpful. One such is called Mach's Principle. This is named after Ernst Mach who first proposed it (and whose work in other areas is celebrated in the Mach numbers used to describe the speed of supersonic aeroplanes). Mach's Principle is helpful because it neatly summarises something that we don't understand, rather than something that we do. The problem is simple: How do rotating objects "know" that they are rotating? There is no doubt that they do - one sharp tug on a car seatbelt will convince you of that. The seatbelt reel spins quickly, and as a result of the spinning spring loaded teeth are forced outwards and lock the reel. The mystery is that in itself, the spinning reel is no different to the stationary one. Yet somehow, the reel "knows" that it is spinning. The effect is so reliable that we use gyroscopes to control guidance systems in aeroplanes and spacecraft. A gyroscope can always provide us with an absolute frame of reference to tell us how our orientation is changing. If a pilot goes to sleep and is not aware of her plane's orientation changing, one glance at the onboard gyroscope when she wakes up will tell her what the situation is. Every gyroscope somehow has access to an absolute frame of reference, yet if Einstein taught us anything, it is that there is no such thing! Mach pointed out that gyroscopes always know what has happened to them with respect to the background of fixed stars, which don't move as the Earth spins in its orbit around the sun. So we know what they do, we just can't see how they do it. How does every car seatbelt maintain a constant, instantaneous, secret conversation with the most distant stars? As with the conversations that seem to be going on "behind the scenes" in quantum mechanics, two equally valid arrows of time can explain this craziness. Again, the "behind the scenes" communication channel is both forever hidden and completely visible, by always being in our future. The events of Tuesday are not derived solely by stepping forwards from the situation on Monday, with secret conversations needed to sort them out. Instead they exist forever in eternity, locked into only one possible state between Monday and Wednesday.

Another kind of secret, instantaneous conversation between large objects can be seen happening every time the sun and the moon rise and set. Since Isaac Newton made the mathematics possible, we have been able to predict how bodies orbiting in space are attracted to each other by gravity. The curious thing is, Newton did this 300 years before Einstein discovered that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. In Newton's mathematics, gravity acts instantly. The effect of this is not trivial. It takes nine minutes for light to travel from the sun to the Earth. If we change the sums to make the Earth attracted to where the sun always was nine minutes ago, we find that the situation is not stable. The two quickly part company, and the Earth wanders off into interstellar space - which is not what really happens. To be fair, the more modern, Einstein understanding of gravity includes some complex corrections based in the idea that gravity (as Einstein described it) stretches the space that it itself travels through. When these corrections are allowed for, the end result is that gravity seems to move objects around as if it acted instantaneously. This is another example of describing things in more than one way, but it is strange that however we describe it, objects attracted to each other by gravity always end up behaving as if they are all dancing to the beat of a shared unseen drummer.

In this chapter we have seen that an explicitly magical idea that there are two arrows of time, together with an inside out view of the Big Bang which places a rich and highly structured state in our distant future, enables us to understand the tendency to self organise that we see in the universe as well as its fractally organised contents. We have seen that once we embrace these ideas, a clutch of seemingly profound mysteries in science cease to be mysterious and the development of complex structures in the universe becomes inevitable. Even so, we still seem to be living in a universe where a great deal of decay is happening - in fact everything that science has been able to understand to date is concerned with the tendency of things to fall apart.

We can now move forward to understanding the relationship between decay and self organisation in the universe, and as we do so we will find a way to understand the idea common to all magicians that information is conserved in the universe, and in particular the information that constitutes human minds. As we do so, we will obtain rational descriptions of "souls" and "spirits" which are fully compatible with the way the great magicians use these terms, and exclude all notions of alternate spook realities. We will see that there is a constraint on the type of information that can be conserved, and so reach an understanding of why all the magicians persist in giving the advice that they do. At last we can understand what they are talking about.

An important feature of the two arrows of time that we have been looking at is that from the universe's point of view (although not from ours since we only form memories in one direction) both arrows are equally true. This is why we always square the probabilities in quantum mechanics to obtain probability amplitudes. One way to look at this is to imagine the universe as a gigantic machine whose components are subatomic particles. We know that interactions between such particles are always completely efficient. Indeed, it's always been a puzzle to understand how a clear arrow of time can arise at large scales out of interactions that can always run one way as easily as they can in the other at the smallest scales.

The physicist Charles Bennett studied machines like this. Bennett was interested in finding the minimum amount of energy that was needed to perform any given calculation. It would be useful to know this because it would help us understand how small and fast we could make real, practical computers. As he studied the problem, Bennett made a discovery that surprised him and all his colleagues. Even the great Feynman was astonished, as he described in his book The Feynman Lectures on Computation. Bennett proceeded by imagining a computer made of cogs, like an old fashioned adding machine. He imagined that the cogs' bearings were perfectly frictionless, which he reasoned was fair because in theory he could make real bearings as efficient as he liked by just spending more money on them. He found that such an adding machine could move back and forwards through the calculation, being nudged along by nothing more than random vibrations of heat energy in the machine. The colder the machine the slower it would run, but that didn't worry Bennett. What mattered to him was that he didn't need to spend any energy to make the machine grind through any calculation, no matter how complex, so long as he was willing to wait long enough! The only requirement that he had to fulfil to make this zero energy trick work was that the machine must not care if it was going towards the answer or away from it. It had to just wander backwards and forwards, being driven by random vibrations, until by chance it arrived at the finish point. At that point, the machine had to latch (just like a door latch) so that it would not drift away from the answer again before he had a chance to look at the result. After he had seen the result, then and only then would he have to expend energy to unlatch the machine and prepare it for its next job.

Where Bennett's imaginary machine differed from any previous kind of adding machine was the need to make drifting towards the answer no different to drifting away from it. This matters because we often throw information away as we do sums, and if the machine threw information away, it could not drift backwards as easily as it could drift forwards. For example, we might want the machine to divide 7 by 2. (As is customary in computing, we will accept an answer in whole numbers only.) 7 divided by 2 is 3, with a remainder of 1. Usually we just throw that 1 away, but Bennett could not afford to do that. To make the calculation fully reversible, he had to keep the 1 safe in a special chain of cogs that no other machine would need, so that when it ran backwards, the answer 3 would multiply by the divisor 2, which would give 6, and then the 1 would add in from its own store to reproduce the original 7.

Now the universe that we have described is a machine just like Bennett's. The components are perfectly efficient, it doesn't have any kind of external power source to drive it, and it can move backwards as easily as it can forwards. This means that it has to conserve all information that goes in and out of all interactions. If we accept the two arrows of time in our universe, Bennett's discovery would seem to suggest that no matter how widely distributed they might be right now, there are atoms and photons bouncing around the universe like the extra gear trains in Bennett's machines, that would enable the reconstruction of the "intermediate result" that you might otherwise think of as your great great great great grandmother! She isn't gone as such, just very, very hidden.

This gives us a picture of the universe as starting in our far future in a very complex and rich state, which then "rings the changes", mixing itself up in a way that in the first few moments creates a universe filled with fractal structure as we saw earlier in this chapter. The trouble with mixing up something very organised in a space that it completely fills is that it is quite difficult to get the mixing process to work. You may have had the experience of trying to use a computer which has been incorrectly set up for the monitor that is connected to it. Instead of a clear picture you get one that is mixed up, but instead of complete noise you see several copies of the picture, positioned in different places all over the screen. As the universe continues to ring the changes, backwards in time, those first echos of the original structure break apart and echos of the echos form. Those break apart and echos of echos of echos form, and so on. After enough goes at ringing the changes, what is left may look indistinguishable from random noise - a perfectly smooth gas - but it would still contain within it all of the information that was present in the original highly structured state.

In our era the kind of frenzied mixing that comes from a very energetic universe with a speed of light that is large compared to the size of the universe isn't happening any more. The universe is big and cold enough now for structures to unravel more gently. Going backwards in time the universe is doing its best to smooth itself out, but there's still too much structure around. As the structures gradually simplify and mix themselves into the "random" background, bits of that background keep suddenly popping back into being structures, which the universe then beavers away simplifying down again. This keeps on happening, although as time passes the annoying structures that keep appearing do become progressively simpler.

From our point of view, we see this process in reverse. Structures like trees and great grandmothers gradually collect and become more complex, on the arrow of time that is aiming towards the end state. After a period of collection the structures disappear quite suddenly back into the mix, only to gradually collect back into structures again. Over time the structures become progressively more complex. This process will continue until a single, very complex and interconnected structure collects, in very energetic conditions, in our far future. Notice that until that time, there is no inherent requirement for the same structures to appear as have previously disappeared. The whole process works in the context of our entire planet, with information also being exchanged with the rest of the universe as well, mainly as infra red radiation, visible light, and radio waves. Unfortunately when magicians with a good understanding of this process attempted to explain it to people who thought of themselves as distinct from the universe as described in Chapter 3, it led to misunderstandings. People picked up the mistaken idea that "reincarnation" takes place in a simplistic way, with one to one relationships between structures that disappear and structures that later appear. This prevented them from appreciating the importance of advice that could improve their chances of any part of them reappearing in this way. The only way to accomplish that is to ensure that they reach a state during their lives that is a clear decay product of a coherent future structure. That means developing a richly interconnected poetic appreciation of all that they have seen. Such an interconnected appreciation is more likely to be part of a single future thing, while a fragmented mishmash of unconsidered notions is more likely to reconstruct as parts of many future things - at least until the single end structure is reached. Building such an appreciation means engaging in data collection and then finding deep patterns through contemplation, and that means using their inductive thinking ability as described in Chapter 1. If their inductive thinking ability is dormant as described in Chapter 2, this is not possible. As well as ensuring their own future coherence, people who do this work also assist the universe in the process of - quite literally - pulling itself together. Engaging in mind numbing, ritualised, robotic behaviours is very damaging, and any attempt to make life fun and meaningful through the announcing and policing of rule systems of any kind is counterproductive.

It's the treasury of what people still have when they are all alone with their eyes closed that matters. That is the shape of mind that will be bundled up with equivalent shapes amongst their contemporaries exactly as in Chapter 1 fractal data compression and reappear later. People who define themselves as collections of social security numbers, car registration numbers, bank account details, property deeds and other arbitrary and trivial details are not made of stuff that will be robust through the mixing and reconstruction process. In this the mixing and reconstruction process is remarkably similar to the condition of total retrograde amnesia which afflicts some people who suffer head injuries. Amnesia wipes out everything that the person has rote memorised. That is, it removes anything that could be forgotten like facts memorised during pre-exam cramming can be forgotten. It does not remove deep structural understanding of the kind that is never forgotten in normal life either. When able musicians or cooks suffer amnesia they might forget that they are musicians or cooks, but if Jane Doe picks up a guitar or a frying pan her fluency will be immediately obvious to all who see what happens next. When we see this kind of fluency displayed out of the blue by people who have not suffered amnesia, we call it "talent".

In this picture it is the shape of mind which reconstructs, grows a little, mixes, reconstructs again and so on which constitutes the "soul" described by magicians. It does not have a one to one relationship with a single person, because it slowly grows in richness and depth over entire history of the universe, because your innate wisdom and talents today may (and probably have) been previously developed in parallel by several people at the same time in the past, and further compositing will certainly have to happen in the future, as the universe works towards its unified end state. Alternatively, if your understanding is insufficiently integrated it might even fragment for a while. The soul does not "beam in" to infants at birth fully formed. Instead it accretes gradually from an individual's entire life experience. For this reason, people who accrete more complex shapes must have more intense life experiences to get it all in place in time for further growth to occur. An interesting consequence of this is that no matter how intense the life experiences a human can survive, and no matter how efficiently we are able to assist young minds' development, there will come a time where the present human lifespan will be too short to achieve the necessary reconstruction and still leave time for growth. Eventually human (or our further evolved descendants') lifespans are going to have to get longer.

For the reasons we have looked at, we see a universe where small and simple structures decay, while large and more complex structures form. As soon as the universe develops far enough to contain living beings of any kind, this process gets an enormous speedup as the creatures eat food (degrading small structures) to support their own growth (forming larger structures). On the backwards arrow living beings are like bonfires, smoothing out structure that originated in the single, integrated object in our far future. On the arrow that we are aware of, we see these bonfires running backwards. Seeing every part of an unravelling system run backwards is different in a subtle but important way to seeing an isolated part of something run backwards. To illustrate this point we can look at a story from Richard Feynman's student days. Feynman and his friends were discussing a garden sprinkler, which was formed out of a steel tube bent into an S shape:

Water enters the tube at the centre, through a hose at right angles to the tube (sticking up out of the page), and the tube is free to rotate where it meets the hose. As the water squirts out of the tube it forms a jet which drives the tube around, so the water is spread all around the sprinkler. The question was, what would happen if water was sucked out of the hose instead of being forced through it? Feynman's friends thought the sprinkler would go round in reverse, but he disagreed. Talk and opinions don't really settle anything though, so he decided to do an experiment and ask nature. He found a tank, filled it with water and put the sprinkler in it, and connected the sprinkler's hose to a vacuum pump. He switched the pump on, and before it exploded (because it hadn't been designed to pump water in this way) he had time to determine that the sprinkler didn't go round at all. The difference is that when water is being pumped out of the S tube it forms a jet, but when water is being sucked into the tube it just creates a low pressure region at both ends, which water flows into from all around:

There's no special direction to this flow, so there's nothing to pull the tube in one direction rather than any other. This is quite different to a film of the sprinkler being used the normal way, seen backwards:

When we see the whole system running backwards like this, we seem to see some strange, ineffable force which we can't account for, organising random motions of water molecules. At first the organisation is quite gentle, but it quickly mounts until such huge amounts of water are ramming themselves into the S tube with such force that the steel tube has no choice but to move around just to get out of their way. Although we can see no specific, isolated cause for living things leaping about in the highly energetic, literally vital way that is a bonfire in reverse, we can notice that some kind of improbable organising principle is in play. The organising principle is a backwards chain of cause and effect that stretches all the way to the end of the universe and constitutes the "spirit" of living things described by magicians. Spirit powers and directs the processes of growth and movement, and soul is one of the things that can grow through the action of spirit. Soul is a part of all that the universe knows, wants and is, and in this sense has intelligence. Spirit knows where it is going, but does not know that it knows where it is going. Spirit may seem to have an agenda, but since it has no awareness or intelligence, it is a mistake to believe that it does. Spirit cannot be either malicious or benevolent, although its action can be obstructive or supportive of our personal desires. It is simply the universe driving towards wherever it must go. It is the means by which the Sun Absolute, located at the end of time, demands that the universe bring it into being.

When people develop, integrate and use their deductive and inductive thinking abilities, they can guess where the universe around them is going and become actively involved in what the mysterious spirit is doing. Doing this takes effort and patience and in deductively fixated societies where the magical viewpoint is not appreciated it can take plenty of courage, too. One of the great inside out misunderstandings of magical ideas is the way some people think "going with the flow" is a cute excuse for slothful, unthinking, herd animal behaviour, instead of a serious business which can cost everything except the end result - and which they often have to have a magician's viewpoint to even appreciate! That said, when a person's full and integrated awareness is allied with the self organising tendency of the universe, they can enjoy the same kind of random assistance as they move towards their objectives that water molecules seem to enjoy when we watch a backwards film of a water sprinkler. This is not limited to external effects. The magicians claim that sufficiently developed and integrated awareness can lead to a person's body developing an internal component that is material (everything is always done with atoms, whichever arrow of time we use to explain it) but much "finer" than the stuff we can make sense of using forwards arrow understanding. The "fineness" is the same as the way we can't see any obvious currents in the water some distance away from a garden sprinkler when the film is shown backwards, but they are there and build to something much stronger as the flow "enters" the S shaped tube. This fine but material bodily component can keep the person alive and functioning even if their biological state would be too ill to allow them to stay alive in other circumstances, and can maintain its coherence for a period of several days after the person's death (they say that careful studies of the bodies of dead magicians during this period inform their claims). This fine component of the body of a person who is involved in processes on both arrows of time is what the magicians call the "astral body".

If we understand this idea in terms of the two arrows of time, it really isn't so surprising. Every living thing has an astral body, although some are more feeble than others. Having an astral body doesn't benefit a person in itself - it's just another way of understanding their relationship with the self organising tendency of the universe. The relationship between developed and integrated awareness and growth of the astral body is understandable, and always it is the development of awareness that really matters. The astral body does not wander off on its own to have adventures, and it does not exist in any alternate, spook reality. The background of ideas available to modern people enables them to develop and integrate their awareness and understand their universe in a way that makes the astral body idea much less useful than it was to magicians in previous eras.

When Bennett studied reversible computers he discovered that information and energy are interchangeable in a fundamental way. His imaginary adding machines with perfect bearings exposed relationships that had not been previously obvious in more complicated situations, but still hold true in those situations. When the machine has completed a sum and latched, the answer is available, and the state of the machine represents some information. Of all possible settings of the output cogs, only one is locked in place, and that is visible. On the other hand the machine is still, and the stillness is equivalent to very low energy - like a frozen ice cube. When the machine is working, the state of the output cogs is in motion along with all the other cogs. No answer can be seen, but the machine is moving like an ice cube that has melted. The amount of energy associated with a bit of information is very small, unlike the relationship between matter and energy discovered by Einstein. It isn't possible to make a bomb out of a phone book like it's possible to release vast amounts of energy by converting a lump of uranium into smaller atoms. Even so, the relationship is important to the way we've been looking at things in this chapter, because it enables us to think about the way we can use inductive thinking to obtain insights in the same way that we think about the rest of our physical understanding of the universe. We can understand insights and inspiration as an exchange of information and energy with the future.

We've already seen that we can explain the fractal structure of the universe if we think of it as a mixed up version of a highly organised future state moving backwards in time, and we can understand consciousness as the fractal structure of the universe interacting with itself forwards in time to discover and reveal the highly organised state. George Gurdjieff called conscious minds the "anticipated and accelerated results" of the operation of the universe, "on which the hopes of the Sun Absolute depend". Conscious minds have the ability to see what is going on, and choose to actively assist the process of the universe becoming a richer and more interconnected place. We are like the very small drops of water which gather or "nucleate" more water vapour in clouds to create thunderstorms. If we narrow the view of what we are interested in to a single mind, we can see things in a different (but ultimately equivalent) way. We start with a creature which has plenty of data echoing around its total memory but which has not yet obtained an insight. The creature has high energy but low information. Then the data echoing round its nervous system self-detects, and its nervous system falls into a state which represents information. The creature now has increased information and lowered energy, just like Bennett's adding machine reaching an answer. That's great, but now the creature has at least part of its nervous system latched, and like Bennett's machine it can't use that part of its nervous system to have another insight until it's been unlatched. It wouldn't be much help to just unlatch it straight away though, because then the information would be lost for good. So real minds copy the information out to long term chemical memory, and then go to sleep so they doesn't suffer confusing hallucinations when their nervous systems unlatch. This picture explains why all creatures have to spend such a large part of their lives unconscious and vulnerable to attack by predators. Evolution wouldn't have required every kind of animal to do this unless it was unavoidable, and the kind of inductive thinking we are talking about here is the kind that we share with all other animals. It's sometimes said that sharks don't sleep, but that's not quite true. They sleep, but they don't stop moving, and they keep parts of their brains active while they do this so they don't bump into things. They sleepswim like some humans sleepwalk. We can draw the exchange like this, showing energy with a full line, and information with a broken line:

It's interesting that many practiced meditators and "channelers" of impressions report significant temperature drops in their bodies and immediate vicinities during contemplation, and this is the kind of phenomenon that can be studied non-invasively with thermal imaging cameras once a theoretical framework for understanding what is happening is available.

If we combine the two ways of thinking about insights, we can tell the story in a third way, which is equally valid although at first it might seem a rather peculiar way of looking at it. In the third approach, we have an energy filled and insight free nervous system, which suddenly experiences a spontaneous appearance of information and disappearance of energy. The energy has been sent to a business partner in the future, in exchange for some information from the future. The nervous system is then in an information rich state (and can copy the information into long term memory as before) until it reaches the moment in time when it becomes the very partner that its previous self did business with. Then it must send information backwards in time, and receive energy:

The value of thinking about things in this rather peculiar way is that it shows the conscious mind is an active part of a universe which self creates by sending seeds of itself into its own past. This provides two ways to understand that there is no contradiction between a predetermined universe and our subjective sense of our own free will. The magicians would emphasise that we are not distinct from the rest of the universe. Although people in most cultures have a deep-seated belief to the contrary (for the reasons we saw in Chapter 3), there is no system boundary between ourselves and everything else, so it's silly to ask if it's either us that chooses what happens next week or the universe. Unfortunately that point of view doesn't do much for people who haven't really come to see things magically yet. Never mind the theory, they say. Am I free to make my own life choices, or am I being marched around like a wind up tin soldier by something else? This picture shows that there is nothing else in the universe, either now or in your past, that knows what you will do next - so long as you are not trapped in the robotic, boredom addicted state. Only you know this, because you are the bit of the universe that you are! As well as disposing of the ancient distinction between predeterminism and free will, this view of things also obsoletes the more modern idea that we are just robots, responding in an inevitable way to sensory inputs with no room for personal choice. This extreme form of anti-spirituality masquerading as rationality (as described in Chapter 3) was advocated by the psychologist B. F. Skinner in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, and is based on two profound misconceptions. One is that living things have a system boundary around them that makes them distinct from the rest of the universe, so that they process data like computers but don't get modified by it, and the other is that the sensory data arriving at the creatures does not contain hidden order that can only be decoded by other sensory data arriving at the same creatures. In this picture it is the decoded data that actually constitutes the creature, rather than merely being random stuff that is processed by it. Instead of moving beyond freedom and dignity, Skinner's view of living things as robots isolated from their universe turned the whole philosophical picture inside out and made it into one where freedom and dignity have no meaning.

The view of thoughts and inspirations as an exchange of information and energy with the future applies to individual minds, and is the same process that the entire universe is engaged in between the smoothed out cloud in our infinite past, and the richness of the Sun Absolute in our future. As the alchemists say, "That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above". In the next chapter we'll see that we can understand some aspects of human history - particularly the last 6,000 years - as our species doing the same thing at a scale between these two extremes. This leads to the question, what's the point of it all? Why should a perfectly integrated Sun Absolute go through the process of disintegrating itself backwards in time and reintegrating itself forwards in time, with fractally self-similar copies of this process going on within it to make the whole thing work? In this picture it's silly to say that the whole thing has been laid on for the benefit of the minds that have arisen within the universe. After all, everything in those minds existed in a far deeper and more aware sense within the Sun Absolute itself before the process began. A truly remarkable feature of this picture is that it suggests a clear and rational answer to this question, which is comprehensible to the human mind.

Almost everything that happens during the process of (to us backwards) disintegration gets undone during the (to us forwards) process of reintegration. Every single interaction between particles is exactly undone, because it's the same series of events, looked at differently. The only part of the entire process that is not undone is the formation of memory. As we saw earlier in this chapter, we do not form memories backwards in time so we have no consciousness of the universe disintegrating. We form memories forwards in time, so we can have consciousness of the universe integrating - and that's a process in which the creative efforts of intelligent beings will become increasingly important. The universe invests in disintegration to construct the memory of integration. When the universe is about to reach the Sun Absolute state, and the creatures then living in it are about to perform the final tasks of systems integration and build something that can access things which do not exist in this universe, they will be able to review their history standing-waves (the speed of light will be far too great for material objects to exist, so there will be no books or hard drives by then) and know that they and their ancestors (that's us) are entirely responsible for constructing all that they see around them. In their (and our) past, the universe goes on forever, getting smoother and more boring the further back they look, with no crazy moment of discontinuity where any kind of external creation event could lurk. So this awareness of absolute sovereignty, owing nothing to anything else, is the only product of an otherwise completely symmetrical process.

That's all well and good, but the Sun Absolute would have started with that knowledge anyway. We still haven't explained why it bothers. To explain that, we need to remember, "That which is Above corresponds to that which is Below", and look into our own experience. Sometimes we are musing as we are walking the dog or doing the washing up, and understanding comes to us in a flash. Although English has no word for setting out to obtain an insight, it does contain the phrase "the penny dropped", which refers to the sudden arrival of an insight. It's a strange experience. It doesn't take any wall clock time at all, but within the experience, the elements of something that we previously have not understood seem to fly apart, and at the same time the same elements seem to fly together again, in a new way that we appreciate more deeply. After this strange event has occurred we possess no more data than we had before, but our appreciation of the data we have is profoundly altered:

The disintegration of our old perception and reintegration of our new perception seem to pass each other in our minds, and the entire thing seems to happen in the gap between two moments in the external time where we are walking the dog. The elements of the understanding which flys apart and together again are the whole of what is involved in this strange, timeless process. For example, if we are musing on the relationship between the price of houses, interest rates, commercial activity and consumer confidence, the dog walking along by our side will not be involved. After the timeless moment, our jaw drops in astonishment and we are once more aware of the dog. At that point we might cry, "They'll be a new kennel for you next year, Rex!"

The parallels are striking. All that can possibly be, all relationships that can possibly occur in this universe, are the elements of some set of relationships that an external context creature is contemplating. We are in the private time of a moment of insight, and at the end of our time, the Sun Absolute will be something like a proposition in economics, a computer program design or some choreography for dancers with forms we cannot guess at. In that moment, the Sun Absolute will find that it is an unconstrained part of some vaster mind, which is aware of the dog - a thing that was never conceivable in the private space of the insight because it wasn't involved. The possibilities and surprises available between now and the end of time are nothing compared to the possibilities that will become available when our time ends, and we remember that we've always been living in the gap between two moments of external, dog containing time. Does it end there, or does it stack up like this forever? Who cares! There is no mind in the universe today that is capable of functioning in external time. The best we can ever do in this universe is an understanding of some small part of the external reality. Until we're ready to break out, there's always going to be an awful lot to do - and solving that puzzle is what we're equipped to do, like birds are equipped to fly but not to tunnel through the ground.

When Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin and James Watson revealed the structure of DNA in 1953, it seemed to many people that the mystery of life itself had yielded to scientific investigation, and the discovery has famously led to dramatic progress in understanding living things. Less famously, and in contradiction to lurid science fiction tales of genetic engineering, what is has not yet done is to penetrate the central mystery of how information held as chemical sequences strung along DNA molecules gets turned into bacteria, sheep and people. Instead it has uncovered an even greater mystery, which we can't explore using known techniques such as Crick, Franklin and Watson used - because we don't even know what the question is!

As most people now know, DNA contains information needed to make living things, which gets expressed in a two stage process - like developing a photograph is a two stage process. First a part of the DNA in a cell's nucleus unravels, and other chemicals (which are fortunately available, floating around in the nucleus) stick to it, to create a strand of messenger RNA. The messenger RNA is an intermediate stage like a photographic negative. Then more chemicals (called amino acids) stick to the strand of messenger RNA, and in this way a chain of amino acids called a protein gets constructed. This is like producing the final photograph from the negative. The new protein then detaches from the messenger RNA, and goes off to party with vast numbers of other proteins (which have all been made the same way), and it's the interaction between all the proteins that makes the complex structures and behaviours which we only see in living matter.

The deep, remaining mystery comes from the fact that it is the actual shape as well as the chemical constituents of the protein that determines how it interacts with everything else, and the shape does not seem to be encoded in the DNA, like the chemical makeup is. Instead it develops as the new protein detaches from the messenger RNA, in a process called protein folding. At first, we might think that the shape just comes from the chemical makeup. After all, the atoms that make up each amino acid are arranged in a certain shape, so won't the protein's shape just come from joining up all those simple shapes? To understand why this is not so, take a look at this diagram of a protein which itself is involved in controlling the expression of other bits of DNA, taken from the online Protein Data Bank and rendered by the rasmol program:

It's pretty hard to make any sense of that, because there are 1856 atoms in the diagram, and they are all connected in very complex ways. In fact this is quite a simple protein, so we're already starting to see just how complex these chemical structures can be. To make more sense of proteins, biochemists tend to draw them as ribbons, which show groups of strongly connected atoms, rather than showing each atom. The same picture as ribbons looks like this:

Now we can see the characteristic double helix of a length of DNA on the right, with the controller protein on the left using it's specific shape to fit into two of the twists of DNA. Look how complicated the controller protein's shape is. To present the necessary shape to the DNA, it has to contain all sorts of curls, bridges and angles - and they all have to be exactly right in three dimensional space. Here's exactly the same picture, looked at from a different angle:

Of course, when something is folding up like that, it's very important that the folding happens in just the right order. For example, it might be impossible for some of the curls to fold correctly if some of the bends happen first. If the thing is going to end up the right shape, first it has to curl, and then it has to bend - and each protein has its own essential ordering in its folding, peculiar to itself. Chemical bond angles can't control that kind of folding sequence. What's even more amazing is that this process is going on all the time, in every one of your own billions of body cells, and it happens correctly every single time! It's like throwing a billion of those spring toys marketed as Slinkys from the top of a flight of stairs, and having every single one of them end up in exactly the same crazy tangle, a billion times! Biochemists have never found anything else operating in cells that might contain extra information to help the folding work out right every time, and there's no evidence of any extra energy being used, that such a missing component would need to expend. Neither is there any evidence that the process fails a lot of the time, with the malformed proteins being thrown away. Apart from the fact that there's no sign of the rubbish being excreted from cells (or recycled within cells), we know that when the process does go wrong, it leads to terrible and debilitating conditions such as Altzheimer's Disease. So how protein folding works is now the central mystery of how life works, and it's so strange that it has led the physicist Paul Davies to comment in his book The Cosmic Blueprint that:

It has been suggested that the required form is the most stable state (energy minimum), and hence the most probable state in some statistical sense. However, there are a great many other configurations with energies very nearly the same. If the protein had to explore all the likely possibilities before finding the right one it would take a very long time indeed. Somehow the protein seems to sense the needed final form and go for it. To achieve this action, widely separated portions of the protein have to move in unison according to an appropriate global schedule, otherwise the molecule would get tangled up in the wrong shape. This activity, which is a result of a plethora of quantum interactions, is clearly non-local in nature.

The idea that we are living in a universe with two arrows of time, which seems to be spontaneously organising itself on the arrow of time that we see, provides a possible way to explain how protein folding works, without invoking an alternate quantum mechanical spook reality. The key idea is the seemingly random motion of molecules in liquids called Brownian motion. Instead of thinking of the process of protein construction and folding occurring in a soup of molecules that are moving around randomly within the cell, we can think of the Brownian motions as organised by having common causes in our future. Then as proteins detach from messenger RNA, we can imagine them as being buffeted by non-random Brownian motions, which provide little pushes on the newly forming protein, ensuring that it always folds in the right way, and in the right order. Each protein is folded by a series of information bearing "experiences", in exactly the same way that intuitively conscious people are guided by the strange synchronicities that occur in their lives. In such a universe, the difference between living and non-living matter would be a direct, mechanical (billiard ball type) connection to the end state of the universe - the ultimate source of all structure and evolution.

This idea provides us with a basis for understanding a whole class of physical phenomena, which have previously been classed as "miracles", for which there is no physical cause. Anything that requires the backwards arrow of time to make sense is a miracle, and if it can't be explained by the backwards arrow of time then it's probably a tall story (there's one remaining mystery which may be an exception to that general observation). Life is a miracle. Galaxies are miracles. Thoughts are miracles. The strange tendency of living things, all over the world, to converge towards the forms of similar things as described by the biologist Rupert Sheldrake in his book A New Science of Life is a miracle.

The phenomenon of ch'i, described in the Chinese traditions as a mysterious spiritual force that powers living things, can be understood as normal dissipative flows of energy just like we normally see, but seen backwards. Some Tai Ch'i masters are supposed to have been observed pressing six inch nails into wooden beams using their thumbs, without drawing blood let alone breaking their thumbs. In this picture such things are possible, but what is happening is not what seems to be happening. The master does not do work on the fibres of wood in the beam to force them apart and allow the nail to penetrate. Instead tiny vibrations and random heat fluctuations in the floor, ceiling and air around the beam add up to a considerable force, which separates the fibres and allows the nail to enter. The master is only involved by walking over to the beam and placing his thumb on the nail at just the right moment. He knows when to do this because of years spent practicing his inductive sensitivity to the fractal patterns all around him, although he might not know what is about to happen until it does. He certainly can't write "Seem to perform miracle" on a piece of paper in the morning, as a person in deductively fixated society might be expected to do. That kind of forwards time chain of cause and effect does not apply. Magic of this kind is not a repeatable technology of the kind we have developed since we became biased towards the deductive mind. The magician concentrates on being in the right place at the right time, or providing a plausible route for a future event to undo itself. The magician functions more like the exhaust pipe of a car engine carrying away the consequences of combustion in the cylinders than the spark plug which causes the combustion.

In The Sufis, Idries Shah claims that miracles occur for their effect on the people who see them happen. This fits into the two arrows of time picture because in deductively fixated society, there are very few people who are aware of the backwards arrow and able to assist the evolution of the universe towards a richer state. Where the growth of richness requires a person to be diverted out of robotic behaviours, a highly improbable (but still physically possible) event like random vibrations summing to part the fibres of a wooden beam can occur. When more people are intuitively conscious, we can reasonably expect this kind of miracle to become unnecessary. It's worth noticing that if the person isn't very observant, it would be just as useful for the person to think they have seen something odd happen. All events are connected to the Sun Absolute through an unbroken chain of mechanical cause and effect. This means that the universe has bandwidth limitations, just like a domestic Internet connection. For a miracle to occur at a specific place and time, many random vibrations have to focus, and they have to come from somewhere. It's the bandwidth limitations that make it useful for the universe to produce autonomous conscious beings that can use their wits and imagination to help out. A conscious being is high cost, but because of its usefulness it can be very cost effective.

The idea that the magician provides the backwards arrow with a way to deconstruct a rich situation on the backwards arrow rather than constructs the situation on the forwards arrow (similar to the difference between forwards and backwards time in the example of the garden sprinkler) makes sense of the observation, common to many people, that "affirmations" or "visualisation" techniques really do work. This is where the person tells themselves, "I'm the world's most famous yodelling unicyclist" (or whatever), every day, until they really believe it, and then it happens. The usual explanation for this (which is often popular even with people who have experienced success with the technique) is that the person adjusts their awareness of the opportunities available to them. Sometimes though, the bizarre coincidences that enable things to come together really can't be understood this way. If we think of the desired state as needing to unravel on the backwards arrow, operating on our own state of mind on the forwards arrow until it becomes a reasonable component of where we are going provides the backwards arrow with an easy channel for unravelling the situation we want to create. It isn't certain - just like quantum mechanics we have to deal with probabilities because we don't know the future, and if we haven't practiced intuitive awareness enough to ally ourselves with the rest of the universe, where we want to go might not be in accord with the universe's needs. All we can do is bend the odds, but we can sometimes do it in a strikingly effective way.

In her book Telepathy Alice Bailey insists that telepathy is not interesting in itself, but should be understood as a part of the "Science of Impression". In the picture that we've been looking at, this bundles up with every other kind of correlated events that have no obvious channel of communication. Telepathy as described by Bailey does not involve the transmission of information from one person to another. Instead, a person who has been using intuitive awareness to know which way to jump finds that other people doing the same thing are in the right place at the right time. It's the same old story!

An altogether stranger phenomenon is the fourth state of consciousness, which we saw described by George Gurdjieff in Chapter 2. It's particularly hard to describe and understand because it involves a profound shift in point of view. In the fourth state it seems possible to appreciate the relationships between everything in a direct and immediate way. There are no questions, there is only one rich and interconnected form. It's the Sun Absolute's point of view, and it feels like a place that the magician "goes" to. That's the good news. The problem is that in this state it's very hard for the magician to remember the limited awareness that she usually possesses, and that that she went there to get the answer to a question which in her normal state she did not possess! Everything is obvious, she has a very intense awareness of her own existence, but that which exists is the sum total of everything she is aware of. There is a vital, fizzing tension to the place or self or understanding that the magician becomes, and an awareness of a structure that is completely interlocked yet completely free to move with respect to itself. As an example of such a thing, think of a cutaway drawing of a human arm. The limb is completely filled with bone, muscles, tendons, blood vessels, nerves and connective tissue, yet despite the space of the arm being completely filled in this way it is completely free to rotate, with all of its contents sliding smoothly around each other, and always the whole space remains completely filled.

With practice it's possible to move between normal healthy consciousness (that is, with the deductive and inductive minds operating together) and the fourth state. During the shift it's possible for the magician to remember what she wanted to know, and still have time to catch a glimpse of the answer, sitting there waiting to be picked up. The job still isn't finished though, because the next problem is that as the magician returns to normal healthy consciousness, the answer obtained seems so obvious that it's quite unremarkable. It's essential to keep repeating the answer as normal consciousness reasserts itself - no matter how stupid and obvious it seems - until the moment when the relevance of the answer becomes apparent. Even then the job isn't done, because it's only possible to keep hold of ideas that the magician can understand in normal consciousness. The fourth state can provide huge jumps in comprehension but it can't effectively yield ideas that are outside the magician's range of comprehension. Something is certainly happening, and the remarkable availability of novel ideas is real. The integrated picture presented in this book, ranging across topics usually segmented into information theory, neurochemistry, psychology, logic, mysticism and more, was obtained in exactly this way. No component of the integrated picture is by itself novel (except perhaps the interpretation of the need to square probability amplitudes), but the whole taken together is entirely new.

So what is going on? The limitation that the magician must be able to understand anything obtained would seem unavoidable whatever the source of information, but is also suggestive. Perhaps the technique leverages a very deep internal self-consistency of the fractal patterns found within nature - a kind of fundamental design pattern, without which all the other patterns could not fit together in the way that they do. In the Chinese traditions, the idea of Tao describes such a fundamental pattern which can only be appreciated as itself, leading to observations of the type, "the Tao of fishcakes is the eternal Tao", "the Tao of bicycles is the eternal Tao", "the Tao of kittens is the eternal Tao" and so on, plus the observation that, "the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao". An interesting feature of fractal image compression is that depending on the amount of processing we choose to do, it's possible to find rules that will reproduce the original picture with more or less accuracy. If we just do a small amount of processing it's possible to find rules that will reproduce the image in a lossy way which does not show the fine detail of the image but is still recognisable in its broad features. Perhaps it's possible to extract a low resolution version of the Tao - the deepest universal design pattern - out of the data that a single mind can collect from the world around it, so long as all of the data can interact and so self-detect. If anything else gets in the way and prevents total self interaction, it is not possible to find the Tao. That would explain why it's so hard to catch sight of something in one's own mind! However it's done, the effect is real, and if it hasn't been used to obtain new and testable scientific ideas that can build on the developments of the deductive mind before, perhaps this is just because no-one has tried!

In this chapter we've reviewed a variety of effects that are described in magical traditions around the world, and seen that by making slight adjustments to the current conventional scientific understanding of the universe, we can understand how such effects could occur. The extension to what is possible is clear enough that it enables us to tell if a claim within a magical tradition would be possible given the adjustments, or is a tall story. There is a remaining mystery which is not explained by the suggested adjustments, and which is the only outstanding claim that is described in traditions which otherwise are demonstrated to be credible if the adjustments are correct. This mystery is claims of translocation and illusion. Where we find tales of translocation, we also find tales of illusion - the two always appear together. Translocation involves magicians being seen in two places, far apart from each other, at approximately the same time, and in eras prior to flight. It also involves magicians moving objects from one place to another in a similar way. It implies that the magician can travel, very quickly indeed, in a way that is quite different to the way we normally travel. It's suggestive of a known quantum mechanical phenomenon called the Josephson Effect, where an electron can be made to travel, without passing through the intervening space in any normal way and in constant time irrespective of the distance travelled, by adjusting the electric fields around it and so changing the probabilities of where it is located. In principle, the mathematics of quantum mechanics say that this can be done with any kind of particle - including magicians. The only problem is that the energy required to do this with a 70 kilogram magician instead of a miniscule electron is vast. That said, we know that translocation is not completely outside the realms of what science says it's possible. Instead of being able to do something unheard of, translocating magicians have to know something about the probabilities and energetic requirements of the Josephson Effect that no-one else knows.

Illusion does not mean sleight of hand. It means magicians producing objects which have mass, texture, (in the case of food) taste, and are otherwise indistinguishable from normal objects of the same type. The difference is that illusory objects disappear after a short time, and illusory food does not provide nutrition.

According to the stories, translocated magicians or objects are not illusions. The two effects always crop up together, but they are not the same thing. When a magician translocates there is no report of a pop so presumably there is no vacuum left when she disappears, and she is able to function in both places so presumably there is no mixing of atmospheric gases where she appears making her vulnerable to the bends or embolisms caused by gases trapped in her body tissues. There is no suggestion that translocated magicians tend to appear and then hurtle upwards or sideways at high speed with respect to their destination, as would occur if they appeared with the same velocity that they had at their starting point on our spherical, rotating planet. Is there any truth in these claims? If not, why does this specific and limited kind of nonsense persistently turn up in traditions that are otherwise credible? If they are true how is it done, what is the relationship between translocation and illusion, and how are the energetic and atmospheric gas problems tackled? Can translocation of large objects and illusion be demonstrated in controlled conditions? Can an illusory fanbelt get a broken down car to the next town? Can anyone learn translocation and become completely non-coercible and non-imprisonable? Is it possible to translocate vertically and solve the velocity problem well enough to establish a stable orbit, or snatch objects out of orbit that have been jettisoned from spacecraft and remain there to pose a growing threat to people and equipment in intersecting orbits?

Copyright Alan G. Carter 2003.