Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact - Above Top Secret

nucleus of an atom. This elegant theory, however, raised more questions than it solved and had to beabandoned.In 1957 Hugh Everett and John Wheeler of Princeton University proposed a "Many WorldsInterpretation" (MWI) of quantum mechanics. Under that concept, the universe can be viewed asconstantly branching through alternate realities.In recent years, new lines of speculation proved even more fruitful. They assumed an even greaternumber of dimensions. The most interesting results were produced by the superstring theories,which came into being in the 1970s. The belief today among many theoretical physicists involved insuperstring research is that the universe evolved from a ten-dimensional string that was unstable. Inthe words of Taku and Trainer, "Six dimensions have curled up, leaving our four-dimensionaluniverse intact." Over the decades we can expect this new line of speculation to be challenged,expanded, improved. Paranormal phenomena like UFOs can provide valuable material to thisfundamental debate.Information, Occasions, SpacetimeAnother interesting facet of the UFO phenomenon concerns information theory. According tomodern physics, and in particular to Brillouin, Bagor, and Roghstein, information and entropy areclosely related. The relationship has been expressed clearly by Brillouin:Entropy is generally regarded as expressing the state of disorder of a physical system. Moreprecisely, one can say that entropy measures the lack of information about the true structureof the system.No information can be obtained in the course of a physical measurement, then, without changingthe amount of entropy in the universe, the state of disorder of the cosmos.Now the physicist is faced with a new challenge: how to define disorder. And the task, as R.Schafroth has pointed out, is not easy:Some scientists pile up papers and books on their shelves in apparent disorder, yet theyknow perfectly how to find the document they want. If someone restores the appearance oforder, the unfortunate owner of these documents may be unable to locate anything. In thiscase it is obvious that the apparent disorder was in fact order, and vice versa.Speculating on the relationship between these physical quantities, French physicist Costa deBeauregard wrote, "It must be in the nature of probability to serve as the operational link betweenobjective and subjective, between matter and psychism." He points out that, in precyberneticsphysics, observation was regarded as a process without mystery, requiring no explanation, whereasfree action, on the contrary, was "regarded as a physical impossibility and a psychological illusion."In modern physics these ideas have been revolutionized.Most theories advanced to explain paranormal phenomena borrow the standard concepts of spaceand time dimensions from physics. These concepts seem obsolete to me. They are not appropriatefor understanding telepathy, or the moving of objects at a distance, or ghosts, or UFO abductions. Ihave always been struck also by the fact that energy and information are one and the same thingunder two different aspects. Our physics professors teach us this, yet they never draw theconsequences of that teaching.Perhaps it is proper to shake from our theoretical ankles the chains of spacetime. Space and timecoordinates derive their convenience from graphic considerations. The theory of space and time is acultural artifact. If we had invented the digital computer before inventing graph paper, we mighthave a very different theory of the universe today.The remarkable story of Cardan's dialogue with the two sylphs who disagreed about the nature of