Biocentrism News - Robert Lanza's Theory of the Universe

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Biocentrism Dawn of a New Theory

Robert Lanza – Prelude to Biocentrism
The Secret of Life
A Parable of Matter, Mind, and the Ubiquity of Life
Robert Lanza

It happened on a day when the oaks and maples were budding, soon after the birds had returned. The field was unkempt and full of rusty stems. Thistle seeds and pods had attached to my shoes and socks; a grasshopper, fumbling for freedom in a web, was wrapped alive, where the waiting spider poked its proboscis into him. The meadow was soundless. I had twisted my ankle and was sitting on a rock. That is why I was still there and didn’t miss it. Otherwise I might have left still thinking that everything in the world was exactly as it appears, and never have gone on to write “Biocentrism.”

I was beginning to get very bored of sitting on the rock, there by the spider. So I was considering, in my mind (as well as I could, for the sun had made me feel very drowsy), whether it was worth the trouble of getting up and making my way back home, when suddenly a woodchuck emerged from his hole and ran close by me. That was not so very remarkable. Nor was it so very unusual when he paused a moment in his rushed sweep through the grass, holding up both paws, looking at me with the curious glance of the White Rabbit, as if to say, “Why, Robert, what are you doing out here?”

But, when this creature actually looked into my eyes, and twitched its whiskers, I felt the Élan Vital in him, a certain sense of consciousness that cut across space. Then it ran off, and I too. You see, there was a joining, a projection of desires across the species boundary; and as Thoreau once remarked, I feared my thoughts would not come back to me. “If it would have done any good, I would have whistled for them.” For just a moment, it was as if I put my head into the belly of the woodchuck. I could feel the great-tipped wind hairs standing out on the back of my neck, even as the woodchuck might have felt them himself.

Some people at the universities will smile. They will say that the sun was hot upon me that day, and that, considering the circumstance, I should not burden my readers with this affair. Others will wonder what I had for breakfast, if I did not feel weak, or if it was not a fantasy. They don’t think there is any other explanation left. However, some of you probably heard about Zeno of Elea in school–I saw an article about him in a scientific journal. It turns out he was right, which is why I recall the woodchuck and that small suburban field.

It would seem that scientists have proved a theory named for the Greek philosopher that, in the world of quantum physics, shows that a watched pot doesn’t boil. “It seems,” said Peter Coveney, “that the act of looking at an atom prevents it from changing.” Theoretically, by the tenets of the Zeno effect, if an atomic bomb was watched closely enough, it wouldn’t explode if you checked its atoms every quintillionth of a second. This and other experiments suggest that the physical world, and in particular, particles in the atomic realm, are influenced by human observation, prompting some to reevaluate the basic nature of life, of the universe, and of the interrelationship between them.

Zeno of Elea, who lived from 495 to 430 B.C., is best known for one of four paradoxes involving a flying arrow, a paradox that has been explained only in this century through the application of sophisticated mathematical concepts. Since an object cannot occupy two places simultaneously, he contended the arrow is only at one place during any given instant of its flight. To be in one place, however, is to be at rest. The arrow must therefore be at rest at every instant of its flight, and motion is impossible. But is this really a paradox? Or rather, is it proof that time [motion involves objects changing, in time, their position in space] is not a feature of the outer, spatial world, but is rather a conception of human and animal thought?

In the last few decades, physicists have shown that atoms cannot change their energy state while they are being continuously observed. To test this theory, a team of researchers at NIST held a cluster of beryllium ions (the “water”) in a fixed position using a magnetic field (the “kettle”). They applied “heat” to the kettle using a radio-frequency that would stimulate the atoms to jump from a lower to a higher energy state. This transition usually only takes about 250 milliseconds. However, when the scientists kept checking the atoms every four milliseconds with pulses of light, the atoms never made it to the higher energy state, in spite of the force driving them toward it. It seems the process of measurement forces the atoms back down to the lower energy state–essentially resetting the system to zero. This phenomenon has no analog in the everyday classical world of sense awareness and appears to be a function of observation.

graphical quotesPerhaps it’s wiser to try to understand nature in terms of life rather than to interpret her in terms of Schrödinger’s wave functions. To me, my interaction with the creature that inhabited that field was more complicated, and will in the end penetrate closer to the secret of the universe than any experiment that ever was carried out in a laboratory.”

Arcane? Bizarre? It’s hard to believe the quantum Zeno effect is real. It’s a fantastic result, I have to agree. Indeed, when quantum mechanics was in its early days during the beginning of the last century, even some scientists dismissed the findings as impossible. It’s interesting to recall Albert Einstein’s reaction to the experiments: “I know this business is free of contradictions, yet in my view it contains a certain unreasonableness.” A few years later he stated explicitly his conviction that quantum mechanics does not contain any logical contradictions. “The functions [the Schrödinger wave functions],” he said, “are supposed to determine in a mathematical way only the probabilities of encountering those objects in a particular place or in a particular state of motion, if we make a measurement. This conception is logically unexceptionable and has led to important successes.” Maybe so, but I’ve spent my entire life studying nature, the basis of life in general. I have faith in life, not a set of equations.

No doubt the equations are right, but perhaps it’s wiser to try to understand nature in terms of life rather than to interpret her in terms of Schrödinger’s wave functions. To me, my interaction with the creature that inhabited that field was more complicated, and will in the end penetrate closer to the secret of the universe than any experiment that ever was carried out in a laboratory. As I have grown older, I have found myself puzzling more and more over the woodchuck. Somewhere in that little episode, I was sure, lay the key to the secret.

It was only with the advent of quantum physics and the fall of objectivity, that scientists began to consider again the old question of the possibility of comprehending the world as a form of mind. Einstein, on a walk from The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton to his home, asked Abraham Pais if he really believed that the moon existed only if he looked at it. Since then, scientists have tried to revise their equations in a futile attempt to arrive at a statement of natural laws that in no way depends on the circumstances of the observer. It seems only natural that the daily circuit of, say, moon round earth, though satiable only by a mind, was independent of any perception whatever. Certainly the mind is a physical phenomenon. But all this in the end was to prove an illusion.

In these days of experiment and disconnected theory, one point seems certain: the nature of the universe cannot be divorced from the nature of life itself. Indeed, the quantum theory implies that consciousness must exist, and that the content of the mind is the ultimate reality. If we do not look at it, the moon is gone. In this world, only an act of observation can confer shape and form to reality–to a dandelion in a meadow, or a seed pod, or the sun or wind or rain. Anyway, it’s amazing, and the woodchuck can do it too. And maybe even the spider, there on her web, moored to the tall spears of buffalo grass.

But that is not all. The late Heinz Pagels of Rockefeller University once commented: “If you deny the objectivity of the world unless you observe it and are conscious of it (as most physicists have), then you end up with solipsism–the belief that your consciousness is the only one.” This may not unsettle you, except perhaps, if you were standing in a meadow in the afternoon of a spring day, when everything was bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have roused a groundhog, if it had been slumbering in its hole, as it was, I suppose. But there I was, the creature two or three rods off, so still, its eyes immutably fixed on mine.

I knew then, at that moment, that in an important way Pagel’s conclusion about solipsism was right. Only it wasn’t my consciousness that was the only one, it was our’s. There was no doubt; that consciousness which was behind the youth I once was, was also behind the woodchuck. Aye, behind the mind of every animal and person existing in space and time. “There are,” wrote author and naturalist Loren Eiseley, “very few youths today who will pause, coming from a biology class, to finger a yellow flower or poke in friendly fashion at a sunning turtle on the edge of the campus pond, and who are capable of saying to themselves, ‘We are all one–all melted together.’”

Yes, I thought, we are all one. There was a crackling of some twigs, and I jumped up in alarm. In another moment I popped down the large woodchuck-hole under the rock.

Biocentrism and Beyond Biocentrism (BenBella Books) lay out Lanza’s theory of everything.

The Quantum Zeno Effect

Affirming a theory named after the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea, scientists at NIST have proved a theory named for the Greek philosopher that, in the world of quantum physics, shows that a watched pot doesn’t boil. Together with the conclusions of quantum logic and Schrödinger’s cat in the box experiment, this experiment suggests that the physical world, and in particular, particles in the atomic realm, are influenced by human observation, prompting some to reevaluate the basic nature of life, of the universe, and of the interrelationship between humans (and animals) and their environment.

Zeno of Elea, who lived from 495 to 430 B.C., is best known for one of four paradoxes involving a flying arrow, a paradox that has been adequately explained only in this century through the application of sophisticated concepts of time and space. Since an object cannot occupy two places simultaneously, he contended the arrow is only at one place during any given instant of it flight. To be in one place, however, is to be at rest. But is this really a paradox? Or is it proof that ‘motion’ is not a feature of the outer, spatial world, but rather a feature of animal sense understanding. According to biocentrism, everything we experience is a cloud of information that is assembled in our mind; time is simply the summation of what we observe in space – much like the frames of a film – occurring inside the mind. Motion isn’t out there; it resides within.

In the last few decades, physicists have shown that atoms cannot change their energy state while they are being continuously observed. To test this theory, the team of researchers held a cluster of beryllium ions (the “water”) in a fixed position using a magnetic field (the “kettle”). They applied “heat” to the kettle using a radio-frequency that would stimulate the atoms to jump from a lower to a higher energy state. This transition usually only takes about 250 milliseconds. However, when the scientists kept checking the atoms every four milliseconds with pulses of light, the atoms never made it to the higher energy state, in spite of the force driving them toward it. It seems the process of measurement forces the atoms back down to the lower energy state–essentially resetting the system to zero. This phenomenon has no analog in the everyday classical world of sense awareness and appears to be a function of observation.

Schrödinger’s Cat

In the mid-30’s physicist Erwin Schrödinger, as upset as Einstein about the implications of quantum theory, came up with a clever thought experiment to show the absurdity of applying quantum mechanics to the everyday world. He imaged an experiment set up in a closed box, which contains a live cat and a radioactive source. The experiment is set up so that a detector can register radioactive particles. If it detects a particle, a poison gas is released and the cat dies. If no particle is detected, the cat lives. The detector is turned on just long enough so that the probability that the radioactive source will emit a detectable particle during that interval is one in two. If quantum reality were applied to this experiment, then neither has any reality unless it is observed; that is, the decay of the radioactive atoms has neither happened nor not happened, and the cat is neither dead or alive until we open the box and observe it. One might say that the cat exists in some indeterminate state unless it is observed; and, indeed, that because of the infinite regression of cause and effect, the world itself may only owe its “real” existence to the fact that it is observed by the human (or animal) mind.

Ironically, even though Schrödinger devised this thought experiment to reveal the absurdity of applying quantum theory to the macroscopic world, many physicists who accept the pure version of quantum mechanics believe Schrödinger’s “absurd” conclusion is an accurate interpretation of the cat’s predicament.

– Robert Lanza

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Book trailer for Lanza’s new novel with award-winning author Nancy Kress

Book cover of Robert Lanza's Observer: A Novel
If we can alter the structure of reality, should we?

OBSERVER takes you on a mind-expanding journey to the very edges of science. It will thrill you, inspire you, and lead you to think about life and the power of the imagination in startling new ways.

“Robert Lanza is one of the most exciting thinkers of our time, and his novel, OBSERVER, is a thrilling exploration of his most daring theories, a thought-provoking page-turner that asks the most profound question of our existence—what is our role in the true nature of reality?"—Blake Crouch, New York Times bestselling author.

“Robert Lanza has taken the gigantic step of incorporating his ideas into a science fiction novel with Nancy Kress …brilliant…a riveting and moving story."—Rhonda Byrne, #1 New York Times bestselling author.

“A startling, fascinating novel.”—Kim Stanley Robinson, New York Times bestselling author.

Get 40% off if you pre-order now button link to Observer A Novel website.
New Book - Beyond Biocentrism graphic image

The Grand Biocentric Design

Image of Dr. Robert Lanza's The Grand Biocentric Design Book Cover
How Life Creates Reality
What is consciousness? Why are we here? Where did it all come from? Humans have been asking these questions forever, but science hasn’t succeeded in providing many answers – until now. In The Grand Biocentric Design, Robert Lanza, one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People,” is joined by theoretical physicist Matej Pavsic to shed light on the big picture that has long eluded philosophers and scientists alike.
"quite thrilling ... its notions are exciting ones, and they do a sound job of linking them to observable, replicable experiments. Fans of revolutionary science—or just big, cerebral questions—will enjoy this ambitious work. A thought-provoking dispatch from the frontier of physics."
—Kirkus Reviews
"a masterpiece”—Anthony Atala, W. Boyce Professor, Wake Forest University
“paradigm-shattering”―Lucian Del Priore, Robert R. Young Professor, Yale University
“It’s fabulous—I couldn’t put it down!” —Ralph Levinson, Professor Emeritus, UCLA
“Robert Lanza is one of the most creative and brilliant scientists I have ever known”—Kwang-Soo Kim, Professor, Harvard University

Lanza’s new paper published in leading physics journal

Image of space bubbles.

Observers determine the structure of spacetime itself

The paper—published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (one of the world’s leading journals in cosmology & astrophysics, covering the latest developments and breakthroughs including Stephen Hawking’s groundbreaking work on the evolution of the early universe)—was co-authored with Dmitriy Podolskiy and Andrei Barvinsky, one of the world’s leading theorists in quantum gravity & quantum cosmology. The paper shows that networks of observers define the structure of physical reality/spacetime itself. In particular, it reveals the exasperating incompatibility between Einstein’s general relativity and quantum mechanics vanishes if one takes the properties of observers—us—into account. The study also represents a rare case in physics when the presence of observers drastically changes the behavior of observable quantities themselves not only at microscopic scales but also at very large spatio-temporal scales. Observers determine the value of both the gravitational constant and the effective cosmological constant.
JCAP paper [Read More]
Big Think [Read More]

Robert Lanza's Paper is the Cover Story of Annalen der Physik, which Published Einstein's Theories of Relativity

Magazine cover image of Annalen der Physik

On Decoherence in Quantum Gravity

In his papers on relativity, Einstein showed that time was relative to the observer. This new paper takes this one step further, arguing that the observer creates it. The paper shows that the intrinsic properties of quantum gravity and matter alone cannot explain the tremendous effectiveness of the emergence of time and the lack of quantum entanglement in our everyday world. Instead, it’s necessary to include the properties of the observer, and in particular, the way we process and remember information.
WIRED [Read More]
Discover Magazine [Read More]

Robert Lanza, M.D.

Image of Dr. Robert Lanza's Biocentrism Book Cover
Robert Lanza, MD is one of the most respected scientists in the world—a U.S. News & World Report cover story called him a "genius" and "renegade thinker," even likening him to Einstein. Lanza is a professor at Wake Forest University, and was recognized by Time magazine in 2014 on its list of the "100 Most Influential People in the World." Prospect magazine named him one of the Top 50 "World Thinkers" in 2015.

Google Scholar Citations

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h-index for Lanza = 90

From Wikipedia: The h-index measures both the productivity and impact of a scientist or scholar. A value for h of about 12 might be typical for advancement to tenure (associate professor) at major [US] research universities. A value of about 18 could mean a full professorship, 15–20 could mean a fellowship in the American Physical Society, and 45 or higher could mean membership in the United States National Academy of Sciences. According to Hirsch (who put forward the h-index), an h index of 20 is good, 40 is outstanding, and 60 is truly exceptional.
Image of Dr. Robert Lanza's Beyond Biocentrism Book Cover
Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death
Biocentrism shocked the world with a radical rethinking of the nature of reality. But that was just the beginning.
"Beyond Biocentrism is an enlightening and fascinating journey that will forever alter your understanding of your own existence." —Deepak Chopra "Beyond Biocentrism is a joyride through the history of science and cutting-edge physics, all with a very serious purpose: to find the long-overlooked connection between the conscious self and the universe around us." —Corey S. Powell, former editor-in-chief, Discover magazine
 
Best Seller - Biocentrism graphic image Image of Dr. Robert Lanza's Biocentrism Book Cover
How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe
Don't miss the book that started it all, and shocked the world with its radical rethinking of the nature of reality.
In biocentrism, Robert Lanza and Bob Berman team up to turn the planet upside down with the revolutionary view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around.
 
Biocentrism takes the reader on a seemingly improbable but ultimately inescapable journey through a foreign universe‒our own‒from the viewpoints of an acclaimed biologist and a leading astronomer. It will shatter the reader's ideas of life-time and space, and even death … the reader will never see reality the same again.
 
"Like "A Brief History of Time" it is indeed stimulating and brings biology into the whole. Any short statement does not do justice to such a scholarly work… Most importantly, it makes you think."
—Nobel Prize Winner E. Donnall Thomas

Biocentrism Shocked the World: How Consciousness is the Key to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

Image depicting light waves

More About Biocentrism

Graphic image for Dr. Robert Lanza's What Happens When You Die article
What Happens When You Die?
Life is an adventure that transcends our ordinary linear way of thinking.
Picture of dog prints in sand on beach
Death is Only the Beginning
If death doesn’t exist, then what happened to your dog?
Graphic image for Dr. Robert Lanza's What Happens When You Die article
The Secret of Life
A parable of matter, mind and the ubiquity of life.
Streaks of light in circular pattern
Biocentrism Explored
Rethinking Time, Space, and the Nature of the Universe.
Graphic image for Dr. Robert Lanza's Free Abridgement of Biocentrism article
Free Abridgement of Biocentrism
How life creates the universe. Authors say cosmology misses the big picture unless it includes biology.
Graphic image for Dr. Robert Lanza's Discover Magazone article
The Biocentric Universe Theory: Life Creates Time, Space, and the Cosmos Itself
Stem-cell guru Robert Lanza presents a radical new view of the universe & everything in it.
Graphic image for Dr. Robert Lanza's Biocentrism video
Rethinking Our Insanely Improbable Universe
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Robert Lanza presents the case for abandoning the "dumb universe" paradigm...
Graphic image for Dr. Robert Lanza's Biocentrism video
Lanza on Biocentrism
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Robert Lanza's talk on biocentrism at the Science & Nonduality Conference.
Graphic image for Dr. Robert Lanza's a new Theory of the Universe article
A New Theory of the Universe
Biocentrism builds on quantum physics by adding life to the equation.
Photo of Dr. Robert Lanza being interviewed by Deepak Chopra on radio
Robert Lanza Interview By Deepak Chopra
“My special guest is Dr. Robert Lanza and his extraordinary mind, I just finished reading his book Biocentrism and I said to myself, ‘Finally, aha, somebody that I can totally relate to.’”

“Deepak Chopra”

“TIME Magazine: Top 100 Icons of the Century”

[Read More]

Robert Lanza
Is There An Afterlife?
It’s a question pondered by philosopher’s, scientists, and the devout since the dawn of time.

Lanza Featured in OMNI MAGAZINE’s Collector’s Edition

OMNI Magazine cover image Omni Magazine is back. Featured story:

Building Doctor Who’s Time Machine

What if you could travel through time just like you navigate space? The journey starts here

OMNI Magazine [Read More]

Articles

  • Robert Lanza - A New Theory of the Universe
  • The Secret of Life – Prelude to Biocentrism
  • What Happens When You Die?

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