The Field Read Online Free PDF

reductive. Despite what he’d learned in quantum physics about the nature of the universe, during his years at MIT, it seemed that biology remained mired in a 400-year-old view of the world. The current biological model still seemed to be based on a classical Newtonian view of matter and energy, of solid, separate bodies moving predictably in empty space, and a Cartesian view of the body as separate from the soul, or mind. Nothing in this model could accurately reflect the true complexity of a human being, its relation to its world or, most particularly, its consciousness; human beings and their parts were still treated, for all intents and purposes, as machinery.
    Most biological explanations of the great mysteries of living things attempt to understand the whole by breaking it down into ever more microscopic parts. Bodies supposedly take the shape they do because of genetic imprinting, protein synthesis and blind mutation. Consciousness resided, according to the neuroscientists of the day, in the cerebral cortex – the result of a simple mix between chemicals and brain cells. Chemicals were responsible for the television set playing out in our brain, and chemicals were responsible for the ‘it’ that is doing the viewing. 3 We know the world because of the intricacies of our own machinery. Modern biology does not believe in a world that is ultimately indivisible.
    In his own work on quantum physics at MIT, Ed Mitchell had learned that at the subatomic level, the Newtonian, or classical, view – that everything works in a comfortably predictable manner – had long been replaced by messier and indeterminate quantum theories, which suggest that the universe and the way it works are not quite as tidy as scientists used to think.
    Matter at its most fundamental level could not be divided into independently existing units or even be fully described. Subatomic particles weren’t solid little objects like billiard balls, but vibrating and indeterminate packets of energy that could not be precisely quantified or understood in themselves. Instead, they were schizophrenic, sometimes behaving as particles – a set thing confined to a small space – and sometimes like a wave – a vibrating and more diffuse thing spread out over a large region of space and time – and sometimes like both a wave and a particle at the same time. Quantum particles were also omnipresent. For instance, when transiting from one energy state to another, electrons seemed to be testing out all possible new orbits at once, like a property buyer attempting to live in every house on the block at the same instant before choosing which one to finally settle in. And nothing was certain. There were no definite locations, but only a likelihood that an electron, say, might be at a certain place, no set occurrence but only a probability that it might happen. At this level of reality, nothing was guaranteed; scientists had to be content with only being able to bet on the odds. The best that ever could be calculated was probability – the likelihood, when you take a certain measurement, that you will get a certain result a certain percentage of the time. Cause-and-effect relationships no longer held at the subatomic level. Stable-looking atoms might suddenly, without apparent cause, experience some internal disruption; electrons, for no reason, elect to transit from one energy state to another. Once you peered closer and closer at matter, it wasn’t even matter, not a single solid thing you could touch or describe, but a host of tentative selves, all being paraded around at the same time. Rather than a universe of static certainty, at the most fundamental level of matter, the world and its relationships were uncertain and unpredictable, a state of pure potential, of infinite possibility.
    Scientists did allow for a universal connectedness in the universe, but only in the quantum world: which was to say, the realm of the inanimate and not the living. Quantum