The Natural Law Party

There’s an interesting article in the current issue of Fortean Times called “Westminster Weirdos”, all about the nuttier fringes of British politics. The main focus is on the parties contesting next month’s General Election, but there’s a brief mention of a very nutty fringe party that fielded a number of candidates way back in the General Election of 1992: the Natural Law Party.

All the policies of the Natural Law Party centred around the practice of Transcendental Meditation (that’s a special kind of meditation devised by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, best known as the Beatles’ guru in the 1960s). When they first appeared on the British political scene in 1992, I happened to be particularly interested in wacky New Age beliefs, reading lots of books on the subject and attending lectures at the Theosophical Society and Buddhist Society and places like that. So I was fascinated by the Natural Law Party, and I’ve kept their campaign leaflet (pictured above) ever since. According to Wikipedia, William Stevens of the Natural Law Party got 92 votes in the 1992 General Election. I think one of those was mine, although at this distance in time I can’t be certain!

As you can see from the back cover of the manifesto, Transcendental Meditation would be good for the economy (by making people more creative), good for education (by increasing intelligence), good for defence (by creating an “invincible national consciousness”) and good for law & order (by eliminating the cause of crime, i.e. “the inability of the population to think and act spontaneously in accord with natural law”). You may say that’s all a load of unworkable idealistic nonsense, which of course it is – but no more unworkable than the idealistic nonsense purveyed by the mainstream political parties! There’s a difference, too – the mainstream parties have an annoying habit of talking down to the electorate, as if we’re all a bunch of ignorant yokels. That certainly wasn’t the case with the Natural Law party, as you can see from this interior page from the leaflet:

“Time to Bring the Light of Science into Politics”. That sentiment appealed to me, since I was working as a scientist at the time. But for most people it would have had the opposite effect – an instant turn-off! Especially as the science in question was fundamental physics, which is one of the most abstract, mathematically complex disciplines of all. Just zoom in on the left-hand side of the page and look at all those symbols and equations! Admittedly they’ve been annotated with user-friendly words like “FREEDOM”, “SIMPLICITY” and “OMNIPOTENCE”, but they’re still pretty daunting for the non-mathematician.

The thing that is depicted, as it says at the bottom, is “the Lagrangian of the superstring”. Now, how many people know what to do with a Lagrangian? I used to know, but I’ve forgotten – and I expect that most people who studied physics at degree level will say the same thing. To everyone else, it’s just so much mumbo-jumbo... which I guess is why only 92 Battersea residents voted for them!

It’s not mumbo-jumbo, though – it’s real science (the equation, I mean – not the bits about omnipotence and freedom). The image below shows, on the left, a zoomed-in view of the bottom line from the Natural Law manifesto. On the right is a closely similar equation from the book Why Does E = mc²? by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. They describe it as “one of the most wonderful equations in physics”, and go on to say: “It really is possible to get a flavour of what is going on just by talking about the symbols without knowing any mathematics at all.” Sadly, however, they don’t say anything about “IMMORTALITY” or “INVINCIBILITY”.

Not Even Wrong

Following my deconstruction of Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d have a go at another hackneyed quote from the world of physics. “Not even wrong” was coined by Wolfgang Pauli in the 1950s, and it’s widely used by scientists to describe theories that are fundamentally non-scientific. The phrase may sound like a contradiction in terms, but actually it has a precise and literal meaning. I still get annoyed when people use it, though. That’s not because it’s used incorrectly, but because the people who use it think it means “worse than wrong”, which it doesn’t. Even Pauli himself seems to have used the phrase as a pejorative (the correct equation was photoshopped onto the blackboard by me, as if you hadn’t guessed).

There is no such thing as “worse than wrong”. Right and wrong are extremes, and anything that is not right, and not wrong, must lie somewhere in the indeterminate region between the two extremes. A theory that is “not even wrong” is one that is permanently stuck in a state of indeterminacy. There is simply no way of telling whether it's right or wrong.

When the scientific method was first developed in the 16th and 17th centuries, it was understood that it was applicable only to a subset of human experience – namely to phenomena that take place in the physical world. The kind of aggressive, materialistic atheism associated with science today was virtually unknown in those days. Even the greatest scientists accepted that the physical world—and hence the applicability of the scientific method—was only part of the sum total of human experience. In those days the distinction was between “earth” and “heaven”, although today we are more likely to say “physics” and “metaphysics”.

The physical world is the realm of experiment and objective analysis. The metaphysical world is the realm of belief and subjective experience. Materialistic scientists, from Wolfgang Pauli to Richard Dawkins, are perfectly entitled to hold the belief that the metaphysical world is non-existent. That belief is as valid as any other. What they aren’t entitled to do—and yet they insist on doing—is to attempt to disprove metaphysical theories through the application of the scientific method. You simply can’t do that. You can’t apply a tool that was specifically designed for the physical world to something that is non-physical.

One of the fundamental principles of the scientific method is the idea of the testable hypothesis. This is a brilliant concept when it’s taken in its proper context. The defining characteristic of the physical world is that it’s amenable to repeatable experiments. For a hypothesis to be “scientific” it needs to make predictions that can be tested by experiment. If the results of the experiment agree with the predictions, then the hypothesis may be right. If they disagree, then it must be wrong.

By definition, any meaningful hypothesis about the physical world must be testable.

Equally by definition, hypotheses about metaphysics aren’t going to be testable. Metaphysics is all about belief and subjectivity. It encompasses everything within the scope of human experience that isn’t part of the physical world. So a metaphysical hypothesis can’t be proved right, and it can’t be proved wrong. It may be right, and it may be wrong – it’s a matter of individual belief. That’s what people are referring to when they say “not even wrong”.

What I object to is the fallacious assumption that a non-testable hypothesis, on a metaphysical subject, is wrong by definition. It isn't. It’s indeterminate – it can never be proved one way or the other. If someone chooses to believe in such a hypothesis, then you’re free to disagree with them. But you can’t disprove their theory, and it’s a mistake to think you can.

The error comes about from half-understanding something that everyone is taught in university science classes. You’re taught that a scientific theory, about the physical world, is badly formulated if it isn’t testable. That’s true. But it doesn’t mean that a non-scientific theory, about the metaphysical world, has to be testable. In fact the opposite is true, because if it was testable then it wouldn’t be metaphysics.

The fault doesn't lie entirely with the scientists. There's a growing tendency for metaphysical theories to be presented as if they were scientific, in a misguided attempt to give them more weight. It’s perfectly valid to use the non-testable, “not even wrong” criterion to demonstrate that such theories are non-scientific. But that's as far as you can go. You can't say “also the theory is wrong”... the most you can say is “also I don’t believe your theory”.

Spooky Action at a Distance

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a popular account of quantum entanglement that failed to mention Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” quote. That’s not surprising, because quantum mechanics is a notoriously difficult subject to communicate to the non-specialist. It needs all the memorable sound-bites it can get... especially ones that a layperson can relate to. If you saw an experiment in which an electron in one location seemed to know what another electron somewhere else was doing, then the word “spooky” might well spring to mind.

Part of the appeal of the quote is that “spooky” is a colloquial word, rarely encountered in serious writing. It’s quite a recent coinage, as you can see from the Google Ngram chart below. “Spooky” was virtually unknown before the 20th century, and its usage only really took off in the 1970s and 80s. When Einstein used it in a letter to Max Born in 1947, the word was still quite novel (you can view the original context here – it’s on page 158 of the original, on the left-hand-side of page 90 of the scanned PDF).

There’s a catch, however. Einstein’s letter is translated from German, and what he originally wrote was not “spooky action at a distance” but “spukhafte Fernwirkung”. The Ngram stats for spukhafte (or spukhaft) are different from spooky – the word was at the peak of its popularity around 1947, and its usage has declined since then. This led me to wonder if “spukhaft” might have a slightly different meaning from “spooky”.

Spooky comes from “spook”, which is an informal, rather playful term for ghost. The German word Spuk also means ghost, but as you can see from the chart it’s been around longer. The word occurs in the first scene of Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer (mentioned a few weeks ago in Fortean Opera)... a gloomy Gothic tragedy, which isn’t the sort of place you’d expect to find a childishly jolly term like “spook”. The Norwegian sailors, on hearing eerie voices emanating from the Dutchman’s ship, say: “Welcher Sang! Ist es Spuk? Wie mich’s graust!”... which is rendered in the English version as “What a song! Are they ghosts? I’m filled with fear!”

If “Spuk” simply means ghost, with no cosy Halloween or Scooby-Doo overtones, that makes me wonder if “spukhaft” is better translated as “ghostly” rather than “spooky”. If so, it would place a somewhat different emphasis on the Einstein quote. If you say something is “spooky”, that’s not so much a description of the phenomenon itself, as your reaction to it – something is “spooky” if it makes you uneasy because you can’t explain it. On the other hand, if something is described as “ghostly”, that’s saying something about the phenomenon itself. It’s being labelled as supernatural, non-physical and possibly even irrational. For a scientist to refer to something in these terms is tantamount to saying it’s not real.

The closest idiomatic phrase I can think of would be “mystical action at a distance” rather than “spooky action at a distance”. If Einstein objected to “mystical action at a distance”, he wasn’t the first one. As I’ve mentioned before, this was the reason Galileo heaped ridicule on Kepler for his suggestion that the Moon was responsible for the Earth’s tides (see Galileo wasn’t always right...). Soon after Galileo’s time, Newton explained the tides—and the motion of the Moon and planets—as consequences of the gravitational inverse square law. On the face of it, this was nothing more or less than “action at a distance”, and many people objected to Newton’s theory on the metaphysical grounds that action at a distance was illogical and therefore impossible. Numerous mechanical explanations of gravitation were put forward to try to get around the need for action at a distance.

My understanding of the German language is only marginally better than non-existent, so I really don’t know what Einstein meant by spukhafte Fernwirkung. He might have meant “spooky action at a distance” in the sense that English-speakers would understand the term – i.e. that he found the concept unsettling, if not downright scary, because it was seemingly supernatural. But I’m not convinced the emotive overtone of the word “spooky” was intended at all. He may just have been saying “I don’t believe in it, because I don’t believe in the supernatural”.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what Einstein meant. “Spooky action at a distance”, as the phrase is commonly understood, is a perfect description of quantum entanglement. Wittingly or unwittingly, Einstein gave quantum physics one of its most accessible memes, right up there with Schrodinger’s Cat, the Many-Worlds Interpretation and the God Particle.

Inventing the Fourth Dimension

Ever since the latter part of the 19th century, the fourth dimension has been invoked in esoteric literature as an explanation for otherwise inexplicable phenomena such as ghosts and spirits (the picture on the left is taken from a book published in 1928 called Theosophy and the Fourth Dimension, by Alexander Horne). During the same period, mainstream scientists and mathematicians have embodied the fourth dimension (and other higher spatial dimensions) in various theories of cosmology and fundamental physics. As a general rule (despite what New Agers would like you to believe) there is very little common ground between the esoteric and scientific theories. But I’ve just discovered that the two “traditions” can arguably be traced back to a common origin in the 1870s.

There is a fascinating article in the latest issue of Astronomy and Geophysics (the monthly magazine of the Royal Astronomical Society) about a little-known 19th century astrophysicist named Karl Zöllner. If you look him up on Wikipedia you could be forgiven for thinking he was just a minor player on the fringes of science, who was only interested in things like optical illusions and spiritualism. But in fact he was a prolific mainstream scientist, who did innovative work in the fields of astrophotometry, instrument design, electrodynamics, solar physics and the theory of comets. He was the first person to consider that the three-dimensional space that we live in is not “flat” Euclidean space, but is curved on a cosmological scale. The idea of non-Euclidean geometry had been around as an abstract concept since earlier in the 19th century, but Zöllner—in 1872—was the first person to suggest the Universe itself was non-Euclidean. He was led to this conclusion as the simplest explanation of a well-known but puzzling astronomical observation known as Olbers’ Paradox.

What does “curved space” mean? The easiest way to visualize it is by analogy with a curved two-dimensional surface, such as that of a sphere. A normal two-dimensional surface is a flat sheet, which is Euclidean because the angles of any triangle drawn on it always add up to 180°. On the other hand, the apparently two-dimensional surface of a sphere is non-Euclidean because the angles of a triangle add up to more than 180°. This is because the sphere exists in a higher dimensional space—three dimensions—which is Euclidean. By analogy, Zöllner imagined that the universe was a four-dimensional Euclidean hypersphere that gives the illusion of being a curved, non-Euclidean three dimensional space because we cannot directly perceive the fourth spatial dimension that he believed to exist.

In 1877, a few years after Zöllner proposed his theory of curved space, he met William Crookes—a British chemist who had recently become interested in the scientific study of spiritualism. Zöllner quickly became convinced of the reality of “spirits”, but rather than believing them to be the souls of dead people he theorized that they were visitors from the fourth spatial dimension. He expounded this theory in an 1878 book entitled Transcendental Physics, which aimed to encompass both the physical and spiritual worlds with a single theory of four-dimensional space.

Unfortunately for Zöllner, the psychic medium he chose to carry out his spiritualist experiments with was a man named Henry Slade, who was subsequently exposed as a fraud who was adept at sleight-of-hand tricks. In one of Zöllner’s experiments (pictured on the right), Slade’s “spirits” allegedly tied knots in a string that was sealed at both ends. Zöllner interpreted this as evidence that the spirits could move freely in a fourth spatial dimension.

Although Zöllner’s theories of the fourth dimension are almost forgotten today, they preceded the work of Charles Howard Hinton: Pioneer of the Fourth Dimension (mentioned recently in my post on Esoteric Mathematics) by several years. And as I said at the beginning, they can be seen as the ancestor of all subsequent New Age theories about “extradimensional entities”, as well as mainstream cosmological theories involving higher spatial dimensions.

Anthropic principles

The Anthropic Principle is one of the most controversial conjectures of modern cosmology. And it's not just controversial among philosophers and scientists, but among Forteans as well... as evidenced by the less than warm reception given to the talk by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince at last weekend's Fortean Times Unconvention. I've always been a big admirer of Lynn and Clive's historical researches, but I have to admit that when they strayed onto scientific subjects they rapidly got out of their depth (I'm sure I get equally out of my depth when I stray onto historical subjects... which I will do, further down this post!).

The attraction of the Anthropic Principle for Picknett and Prince is its supposed link to esoteric Hermeticism -- in particular, the idea that the Universe (macrocosm) mirrors the individual (microcosm), as depicted on the left (from Utriusque Cosmi by Robert Fludd, 1617). The very word Anthropic, with its suggestion of "anthropocentric" or "anthropomorphic", seems to support this. But really the Anthropic Principle has a lot more to do with the difference between a priori and a posteriori probabilities than with human beings per se.

Current cosmological models involve a number of parameters that are observed to have certain values, but the theory doesn't explain why they have these values and not other ones. Yet if any of the parameters differed by just a small fraction from their actual value, human beings would never have existed to ask the question. Therefore even if the a priori probability of the universe is very small, the fact that human beings exist makes it an absolute certainty in an a posteriori sense. As Sherlock Holmes famously said: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".

It occurred to me that the Anthropic Principle extends to other "low probability" events besides the small matter of the creation of the Universe. Another example is the emergence of intelligent life on Earth. Many people (including hardened UFO skeptics) believe that intelligent life is an extremely rare phenomenon in the universe, and that the a priori probability of it emerging on any given planet is extremely low. And they may be right. All we know, from the fact that we exist, is that the probability is non-zero!

As I alluded to earlier, you can even extend the Anthropic Principle to historical speculation. Throughout recorded history there have been branch points at which humanity might have been wiped out, or at the very least civilized society might have crumbled... but it didn't. And of course it didn't, or I wouldn't be talking to you now via the World Wide Web. But that doesn't mean that in 999 out of a thousand alternate time-lines human history didn't come to an abrupt end.

A good example is the Third World War. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, there was a widespread belief in the inevitability of a nuclear confrontation between the Soviet Union and the West that would have resulted in the decimation of the world's population and the destruction of civilization as we know it. Countless science fiction novels and short stories of that period either portrayed such a war, or the devastated world that would be all that remained after it. Most of those stories were set in what is now the past -- and yet here we are, still blissfully unobliterated. Maybe there was a 99.99% chance of a world-ending nuclear conflict in the 1960s, but in retrospect 0.01% is as good as 100%. And maybe other low probability events can be explained the same way. What about the physics-defying trajectory of the bullet that killed JFK? Highly improbable, certainly -- but maybe he was the one who started World War Three in those 99.99% of alternative time-lines!

Mach's Principle

Ernst Mach (1838 – 1916) is best known for inventing the Mach Number, which measures the speed of an object relative to the speed of sound. But he invented a few other things, of which the most notorious in scientific circles is Mach's Principle. Most physics professors get red in the face with apoplexy as soon as it's mentioned. Mach's Principle takes the most sacred mantra of classical physics, Newton's Second Law of Motion, and ascribes it to the collective effect of all the matter in the universe. To a scientist, this sounds like mystical mumbo-jumbo, or holistic New Age nonsense.

There was a time, a few years ago, when the Wikipedia entry on Mach's Principle had a box branding it as "Pseudoscientific" (reproduced at left... sadly for the point I'm trying to make, the box is no longer there). But what's so dangerous about "the principle that the inertia of a body arises from its relation to the totality of all other bodies in the universe"? And just what is "inertia" anyway?

The official line on inertia is that it's a fundamental property of matter that tends to oppose the effect of any externally applied force, such as gravity, to a degree that is proportional to the mass of the object (as quantified by Newton's Second Law of Motion). In the presence of rotation, inertia causes an object to experience centrifugal and Coriolis forces... which orthodox scientists insist are merely "fictitious" forces, not real forces at all. One of the commonest descriptions of Mach's Principle takes the form of a thought-experiment involving centrifugal force. If you stand outside on a clear night with your arms hanging loosely by your sides, the stars above will appear motionless. If you start to spin around, the stars will start to rotate above your head, and your arms will start to lift up. You might think the rotating stars are exerting an "anti-gravity" force on your arms. As I'll show in a moment, there's good reason to believe that this is perfectly and literally correct... although most mainstream scientists would jump in front of a freight train before they'd admit it.

Gravity is a force of attraction that exists between any two masses. The equation describing this force is identical to the equation for the electrostatic force between two electric charges (except that, if both charges have the same sign, the electrostatic force is repulsive rather than attractive). But in the electrical case, if one of the charges is moving relative to the other, there is another force as well. This is the electromagnetic force, which (without going into details) is an inevitable consequence of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. But Relativity doesn't just affect electric charges -- exactly the same thing should be true of gravity as well. And it is... except that between everyday objects, the "gravimagnetic" force is much too small to detect.

Ordinary gravity (the "gravistatic" force) obeys an inverse-square law, which means that very massive objects that are a long way away (such as distant galaxies) exert a much smaller force on us than less massive objects that are closer to us (such as the Earth). But the gravimagnetic force obeys an inverse-linear law, which has the opposite tendency... in fact the effect only becomes measurable when you include all the matter out to the edge of the universe. And the effect in question, exactly as predicted by Mach's Principle, is Newton's Second Law of Motion! The supposedly fictitious centrifugal and Coriolis forces are nothing other than the gravitational analogues of well-established electromagnetic forces.

The idea that "inertia is to gravity as magnetism is to electrostatics" was, as far as I know, first put on a quantitative basis by Dennis Sciama in the early 1950s... but it was popularized twenty years later by Eric Laithwaite, Britain's most notorious rebel against the scientific establishment!

The man who invented aliens

Some concepts are so deeply ingrained in modern culture that it's difficult to imagine that someone, at some point in history, must have invented them. Take aliens for example. Aliens, as everyone knows, come from a planet orbiting the star Zeta Reticuli. Or possibly Alpha Draconis. Or Tau Ceti. Or Sirius, or one of the Pleiades. At any rate, they come from another planet, orbiting some star other than the Sun. That's the idea, anyway (aliens being purely hypothetical and/or fictional). But where did the idea come from, and when?

The Bible contains lots of references to the stars, but it doesn't give any indication that they're extremely distant objects of comparable size to the Sun, or that they might be associated with inhabited planets. The Biblical account of creation only really makes sense if the universe is quite a small place, not much larger than the Earth itself. The stars are just tiny points of light fixed to a spherical sky, with heaven on the other side of it (as depicted on the left, in a fresco painted in the 1370s by Giusto de Menabuoi).

Not all cultures have taken quite such a narrow-minded view as this: for example the Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian and Chinese civilizations all seem to have had more realistic views of the size of the universe and the true nature of the stars. But Europe persisted with the "small universe" theory. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543) famously demoted the Earth from its place at the centre of the universe... but he put the Sun there instead, which is just as parochial. Copernicus still imagined that the other stars were smaller and less important than the Sun.

The real revolutionary, as far as European cosmology was concerned, was the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600). He believed in an infinite universe, of which the solar system was just an infinitesimally small part. It was Bruno who introduced the idea that the stars are other suns, and that they might have their own planets orbiting around them... and that these planets might be inhabited. In other words, Giordano Bruno was the man who invented aliens.

Bruno's key work in this context was De l'infinito universo et Mondi ("On the Infinite Universe and Worlds"), published in 1584. The whole book is concerned with "the plurality of worlds", but one quote is enough to give an idea of Bruno's view on the subject: "For it is impossible that a rational being, fairly vigilant, can imagine that these innumerable worlds, manifest as like to our own or yet more magnificent, should be destitute of similar and even superior inhabitants."

Nowadays it goes without saying that Earth is the archetypal planet, and the phrase "other planets" refers to planets other than the Earth. But before Bruno, the word "planet" simply referred to one of the five planets visible in the sky: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter or Saturn... not the Earth at all. As late as 1640 an Englishman named John Wilkins published "A Discourse concerning a New Planet" -- and the new planet in question was the Earth! That sounds ludicrously obvious now, but it's another example of a concept we take for granted today, which was far from obvious in the past.

In the end, Giordano Bruno was tried by the Inquisition for heresy -- and, since he refused to recant, he was burnt at the stake on 17th February 1600. It's cool to think (as many people do) that he was put to death because of his belief in the plurality of worlds -- the first ever martyr to science fiction, as it were. However, this is far from proven. Bruno was a prolific writer throughout his life, and almost everything he wrote was designed to annoy the Church in one way or another. According to A New and General Biographical Dictionary (1798): "Though he denied the being of a God, he believed the effects of magic and sorcery".

Descartes and the Buddha

"The seeker after truth must once in his lifetime doubt everything that he can doubt." This could be a quotation from Charles Fort -- an admonition against mindless acceptance of scientific authority. Actually it was written by the French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650)... although with more or less the same purpose in mind. Descartes (left, as painted by Franz Hals) was the ultimate doubter. He didn't believe anything he'd read or had been taught, and he was even distrustful of his own senses. Instead, he tried to reason from first principles -- from axiomatic statements that he was absolutely certain were true.

The first and foremost of Descartes' axioms was cogito ergo sum: "I think, therefore I exist". To him, that was the single most certain fact in the universe: "we can easily suppose that there’s no God and no heaven, that there are no bodies -- that we don’t have bodies, hands and feet and so on. But we can’t suppose that we, who are having such thoughts, are nothing!"

But is "cogito ergo sum" really that obvious? Long before Descartes, there were those who doubted the truth of "I think, therefore I exist"... the most they would concede was "There is thought, therefore thought exists". These were the authors of an early Buddhist treatise called Dhammasangani, written in the Pali language in the third century BC. The title translates roughly as "Compendium of States", and it's as close as the Buddhists of the time got to writing a scientific textbook (or proto-scientific, to use a phrase that cropped up in a comment to an earlier post).

The first part of the Dhammasangani contains a detailed analysis of mental processes -- enumerating the various different types of thought with their concomitant factors. For each thought-type there is a section called "Emptiness" in which, according to a footnote in the English translation (by Caroline Rhys Davids, 1900): "emphasis is laid on the principle that this same thought-complex is an aggregate or combination of such factors, and nothing more... there is no permanent entity or self which acquires the states". This is explained further in the Atthasalini, a 5th century commentary by Buddhaghosa: "... here there are only states: no permanent being, no soul is known. These are mere states without essence, without a guiding principle... there is nothing else whatever, neither a being, nor an individuality, nor a man, nor a person."

The idea that thoughts could exist in the absence of a guiding "self" was central to the form of Buddhism described in the Dhammasangani and Atthasalini. It was an idea that came out of the Buddhist practice of meditation, and books like these were written to help monks to experience the truth in their own meditation. It's a difficult idea, if not downright bizarre, but the basic message is clear enough: Cogito ergo non sum!

The Double Helix of God (1914)

In 1914, one Socrates Scholfield of Providence, Rhode Island was granted U.S. patent 1,087,186 for an "Illustrative Educational Device" which he claimed demonstrated the relationship between the Supreme Being and His Creation. The device consisted of two interlocking springs (see diagram at left, taken from the patent application). The larger, outer spring represents God, while the smaller, inner spring represents the Universe. The basic idea is that the outer spring dictates exactly what the inner spring does, while remaining outside it. The full patent can be downloaded from freepatentsonline.com.

The springs in question are helix-shaped, so the two of them together make a Double Helix. The double helix structure of the DNA molecule was discovered by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, and no less an authority than Salvador Dali was quoted as saying "And now the announcement of Watson and Crick about DNA. This is for me the real proof of the existence of God". This just goes to show what Socrates Scholfield always said (or I imagine he always said) -- that he was decades ahead of his time.

Experimental Metaphysics

Was the Biblical Ark of the Covenant an early form of electrical capacitor? A theory along these lines was presented in issue 207 of Fortean Times (March 2006) in an article by Michael Blackburn and Mark Bennett ("Re-engineering the Ark"). Specifically, they argued that the Ark was essentially a Leyden jar: a type of capacitor that was popular with electrical experimenters in the eighteenth century. The article contains no references (which is unusual for FT), and the authors present the idea as if they had thought of it themselves. They may well have done, but they weren't the first to do so. I've found exactly the same idea in an obscure journal published sixty years earlier -- the October 1946 issue of the Quarterly Review of the Institute for Experimental Metaphysics (in fact the journal is so obscure it doesn't show up in a Google search, so I've included a photograph below to prove I'm not making it up).

The paper in question is by one Captain Q.C.A. Craufurd (sic), and is entitled Experiments with a Psychic Condenser ("condenser" is the old British word for capacitor). Captain Craufurd was a spiritualist, and was looking for a physical device that could be used in séances to amplify psychic signals. He took his lead from the Biblical description of the Ark of the Covenant, which he believed had been a device of this type. He says: "What we managed to produce was an electrical instrument which fulfilled the main requirements of the Ark described in the Old Testament. It was a 'chest' of hard wood, put together without nails or screws and plated with gold within and without. In the case of my model, this plating consisted of gold leaf. The wooden box, having been carefully dried out, was varnished thickly with a coating of resin and shellac so that it became a kind of Leyden jar, capable of accepting a powerful charge of electricity. The wings of the Cherubim arching over the Mercy seat formed a spark gap at the wing tips, not a single pair of points however, but several points forming a collector." A description really very similar to the one presented in FT sixty years later!