For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of mystics who have been sitting there for centuries.

God and the Astronomers
Robert Jastrow

 

 

In this brief book (only 160 pages), Robert Jastrow, astrophysicist and avowed agnostic, asks us these poignant questions:

• If every effect in science has a cause, what caused the birth of the Universe?
• Have scientists brought themselves face to face with the possibility of God?

---

Robert Jastrow
1925-2008

Robert Jastrow was an American astronomer, physicist and cosmologist.

.
.
Jastrow was a leading NASA scientist:

• joined NASA when it was formed in 1958
• first chairman of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Committee, which established the scientific goals for the exploration of the moon during the Apollo lunar landings
• Chief of the Theoretical Division at NASA
• founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in 1961, and served until his retirement from NASA in 1981
• was concurrently a Professor of Geophysics at Columbia University

After his NASA career, Jastrow became a Professor of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth College (1979–1992), and was a Member of the NASA Alumni Association. Jastrow was also a Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the George C. Marshall Institute, and Director Emeritus of Mount Wilson Observatory and Hale Solar Laboratory.

For a remembrance, refer to the New York Times ‘Space and Cosmos’ column, February 2008: Robert Jastrow, Who Made Space Understandable, Dies at 82.

Books written by Robert Jastrow include:

• Astronomy: Fundamentals and Frontiers
• God and the Astronomers
• Origins of Life in the Universe
• Red Giants and White Dwarfs

 

Space is a Projection from Within Our Minds

Biocentrism shows that space is a projection from inside our minds, where experience begins. Space is not a physical phenomenon per se — and should not be studied in the same way as chemicals and moving particles. Our modern finding is that seeming emptiness seethes with an almost unimaginable energy, which manifests as virtual particles of physical matter, jumping in and out of reality like trained fleas. The seemingly empty matrix upon which the storybook of reality is set is actually a living, animated “field,” a powerful entity that is anything but empty.

We have multiple illusions and processes that routinely impart a false view of space. Shall we count the ways?

1. Empty space is not empty.
2. Distances between objects can and do mutate depending on a multitude of conditions, so that no bedrock distance exists anywhere, between anything and anything else.
3. Quantum theory casts serious doubt about whether even distant individual items are truly separated at all.
4. We “see” separations between objects only because we have been conditioned and trained, through language and convention, to draw boundaries.

By treating space as something physical, existing in itself, science imparts a completely wrong starting point for investigations into the nature of reality, or in the current obsession with trying to create a Grand Unified Theory that truly explains the cosmos.

---

There are 7 Principles of Biocentrism, all of which are built on established science, and all of which demand a rethinking of the physical universe.

Seventh Principle of Biocentrism: Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which events occur independent of life.

Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

Robert Lanza, MD
with Bob Berman

Time Does Not Exist Outside of Perception

People accept that time exists as a physical entity because we have invented those objects called clocks, which are simply more rhythmic and consistent than budding flowers or apples rotting. In reality what’s happening is motion, pure and simple — and this motion is ultimately confined to the here and now. Everything prior to this moment is the past, gone forever. But this subjective feeling of living on the edge of time is a persistent illusion, a trick of our attempts to create an intelligible organizational pattern for nature in which one calendar day follows upon another, that spring precedes summer, and that years pass. Time in a biocentric universe is not sequential — however much our habitual perceptions dictate that it is.

Science has no real explanation why we’re alive now, existing on the edge of time. According to the current physiocentric worldview, it’s just an accident, a one-in-a-gaziollion chance that we are alive.

From a biocentric point of view, time does not exist in the universe independent of life that notices it, and really doesn’t truly exist within the context of life either.

---

There are 7 Principles of Biocentrism, all of which are built on established science, and all of which demand a rethinking of the physical universe.

Sixth Principle of Biocentrism: Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive change in the universe.

Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

Robert Lanza, MD
with Bob Berman

The Universe is Fine-tuned for Life

You either have an astonishingly improbable coincidence revolving around the indisputable fact that the cosmos could have any properties but happens to have exactly the right ones for life or else you have exactly what must be seen if indeed the cosmos is biocentric. Either way, the notion of a random billiard-ball cosmos that could have had any forces that boast any range of values, but instead has the weirdly specific ones needed for life, looks impossible enough to seem downright silly.

And if any of this seems too preposterous, just consider the alternative, which is what contemporary science asks us to believe: that the entire universe, exquisitely tailored for our existence, popped into existence out of nothingness. Who in their right mind would accept such a thing? Has anyone offered any credible suggestion for how, some 14 billion years ago, we suddenly got a hundred trillion times more than a trillion trillion trillion tons of matter from — zilch? Has anyone explained how dumb carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules could have, by combining accidentally, become sentient — aware! — and then utilized this sentience to acquire a taste for hot dogs and the blues? How any possible natural random process could mix those molecules in a blender for a few billion years so that out would pop woodpeckers and George Clooney? Can anyone conceive of the edge of the cosmos? Infinity? Or how particles still spring out of nothingness? Or conceive of any of the many proposed extra dimensions that must exist everywhere in order for the cosmos to consist fundamentally of interlocking strings and loops? Or explain how ordinary elements can ever rearrange themselves so that they continue to acquire self-awareness and loathing for macaroni salad? Or, again, how every one of dozens of forces and constants are precisely fine-tuned for the existence of life?

Is it not obvious that science only pretends to explain the cosmos on its fundamental level?

---

There are 7 Principles of Biocentrism, all of which are built on established science, and all of which demand a rethinking of the physical universe.

Fifth Principle of Biocentrism: The very structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The universe is simply the complete spatio-temporal logic of the self.

Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

Robert Lanza, MD
with Bob Berman

Measurement in Quantum Physics Requires Consciousness

Physicists have analyzed and revised their equations in a vain attempt to arrive at a statement of natural laws that in no way depends on the circumstances of the observer. Indeed, Eugene Wigner (1902-1995), one of the twentieth century’s greatest physicists, and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963, stated that it is not possible to formulate the laws of physics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness of the observer. Wigner made quantum physics even more subjective than had John von Neumann or even Erwin Schrödinger with his famous Cat Paradox. Wigner claimed that a quantum measurement requires the mind of a conscious observer, without which wave functions never collapse and nothing ever happens in the universe.

So when quantum theory implies that consciousness must exist, it tacitly shows that the content of the mind is the ultimate reality, and that only an act of observation can confer shape and form to reality — from a dandelion in a meadow to sun, wind, and rain.

---

There are 7 Principles of Biocentrism, all of which are built on established science, and all of which demand a rethinking of the physical universe.

Fourth Principle of Biocentrism: Without consciousness, “matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

Robert Lanza, MD
with Bob Berman