To be a physicist in the early twenty-first century looks like the most frustrating job in the universe. I say this because being even a devoted physics groupie reading popular-science versions of what physicists are up to now feels mind-shriveling. I will give you some quick examples from the recent press:

Apparently the Big Bang, now thoroughly engrained in our minds as the way the universe started, isn’t such a sure thing anymore. Perhaps the universe instead is in a steady state. To quote a summary of a recent paper on phys.org: “In physical terms, the (steady state) model describes the universe as being filled with a quantum fluid. The scientists propose that this fluid might be composed of gravitons—hypothetical massless particles that mediate the force of gravity. If they exist, gravitons are thought to play a key role in a theory of quantum gravity.” (My emphasis.)

Time is one of the few things that everyone on earth experiences, but for physicists it is still a mystery. To quote a recent puzzling article in my beloved Scientific American, “Whether through Newton’s gravitation, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, Einstein’s special and general relativity or quantum mechanics, all the equations that best describe our universe work perfectly if time flows forward or backward… Of course the world we experience is entirely different….” 

Physicists are attempting to study dark matter, which is called “dark” only because it won’t interact with photons of light. They tell us that everything that we think of as real makes up only 4-5% of the universe, while dark matter makes up 23-27%. (Apparently estimates vary.) So in an effort to study a mass which is five times the size of the known universe, physicists are looking for wimps thousands of feet beneath the surface of the earth. This time we’re reading The Wall Street Journal: “A wimp—a weakly interacting massive particle—is thought to be the stuff of dark matter, an invisible substance that makes up about a quarter of the universe but has never been seen by humans.” I have talked previously about the fact that dark matter is a candidate to be the afterlife levels of reality, and there are physicists who speculate that it might be an actual inhabited reality. But rather than investigating either of these theories, physicists are spending billions of dollars investigating the unlikely possibility that five-sixths of the matter in the universe is a fluff of particles constituting nothing.

Meanwhile, Quanta Magazine tells us that “Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.” Oops.

There’s more, but I can see that you are nodding off. My point is that some very big things are all at once going wrong in physics.

• There no longer is any “there” there. Even what were believed for decades to be established aspects of reality are turning out to be on shaky ground. Practicing physicists will tell you that this uncertainty is part of the joy of their profession, but those of us cheering from the bleachers would like to see a few throws hit the basket. We hope for at least a dawning sense of what actually is going on. Yet the response of most working physicists to uncertainty seems to be just to drill down further on theories and methods that make the big picture even harder to grasp.
• Physicists insist on studying only part of what evidence suggests is real. We have understood for at least a century that what we think of as solid matter is not solid, but still universities continue to enforce atheistic materialism as a fundamental dogma. Doing physics now is like trying to understand why there is water on the floor while making it taboo for anyone to study the condition of the roof.
• Modern physicists are entranced with particles. Not phenomena. Not concepts. Not great sweeps of space. Indeed, not much of anything on the macro – or even on the visible – level. Using just a search for one kind of particle to study matter at least five times greater than all the visible matter that exists, and a search for a hypothetical particle to help determine how the universe began, makes little sense to you and me.

I have come to think that holding atheistic materialism as a core dogma has at last brought physics to a true dead-end. There simply is nothing that is both material and bigger than the size of an atom that has not already been well studied, which means that drilling down into atoms is all that physicists have left. So for universities to drop all dogmas and allow physicists to study whatever turns up would shine some much-needed light into physics.

What afterlife researchers have discovered is far more than just the fact that human minds are eternal. We are learning a great many interesting things about each of the very issues that are puzzling and confounding physicists today. And looking at what we have to show them would at least give physicists the welcome chance to go back to sometimes studying things that can be seen with the naked eye.

Let’s take the concept of time as one example of where considering the afterlife evidence might be of use to working physicists. Here is some of what afterlife researchers are learning apparently is true about time:

• Time is a linear constant only in this material universe. And the universe as we perceive it makes up only maybe one-seventh of what we are able to establish exists.
• In the reality that we enter at death, time is subjective. We can choose to experience it either consistently or once in awhile, or we can dwell happily outside it. Imagining how being free of time might feel is difficult from our perspective, but from my point of view the very thought is wonderful!
• When viewed from outside the material universe, all of time within the universe is happening at once. I understand that the very notion of this makes your eyes cross. We are told, too, that while we live multiple lives, all our lifetimes are happening at the same time.

Physicists used to understand time a lot better than they do now. Albert Einstein said, “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” He also said, “The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” He understood that time is a non-fundamental construct that operates as an arrow for convenience. The afterlife evidence helps us understand that Einstein was spectacularly right.

How might it work for universities to throw out the obsoleted dogma of atheistic materialism and allow physicists to include studying the roof in their effort to better understand why there is water on the floor?

Requiring scientists charged with understanding all of reality to study only a portion of it renders it impossible for them to do anything that is ultimately productive. If there were no non-material component to reality, then it would be legitimate for university gatekeepers to forbid physicists from being distracted into researching things that are not real. The fact is, though, that over the past nearly two hundred years we have accumulated abundant and consistent evidence that much of what is real – perhaps most of what is real – is not material. Yet it interacts with and profoundly influences the material reality that physicists are trying without much success to understand. So might it be useful to the advancement of physics for universities to abandon their century-old dogma of adamant atheistic materialism?

As the saying goes, at this point it can’t hurt.

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An amazing debate continues to rage in the scientific community. Do we, or do we not, have free will? Experiments indicate that our brains become active and we start the process of moving our bodies before we make the decision to move, which troubling fact has led many researchers to conclude that our apparent free will is an illusion. To quote a recent article in Scientific American:

“Our decisions are predetermined unconsciously a long time before our consciousness kicks in,” [John-Dylan] Haynes [of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin] commented to New Scientist, while adding that “it seems that the brain is making the decision before the person.” Others share his opinion. Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has written: “So it is with all of our … choices: not one of them results from a free and conscious decision on our part. There is no freedom of choice, no free will.” Neuroscientist Sam Harris has concluded from these findings that we are “biochemical puppets”: “If we were to detect [people’s] conscious choices on a brain scanner seconds before they were aware of them … this would directly challenge their status as conscious agents in control of their inner lives.”

In 2010 I wrote about this problem in The Fun of Dying, where I showed how what afterlife researchers are learning readily explains these results. But mainstream scientific researchers still have little understanding of the nature of our minds, so they continue to do these experiments. And they continue to find their results troubling. The author of the article cited above essentially says what you or I would say: But I really do deliberate! I think things through! I make rational decisions. So of course I have free will:

Every one of us takes actions every day that we have consciously planned for ourselves. It is possible that the neural activity that carries out this planning has no effect on what we do or that it just concocts stories after the fact to explain to ourselves and others what we did. But that would make little evolutionary sense. The brain makes up only 2 percent of the human body’s weight but consumes 20 percent of its energy. There would be strong evolutionary pressure against neural processes that enable intricate conscious thought yet are irrelevant to our behavior. The brain circuits responsible for my imagining that this is the best way to write this essay are likely causing it to turn out this way.

This author is fond of catchy terms, so he refers to those researchers who believe we have no free will as “willusionists,” and he makes the mainstream scientist’s stubborn mistake of dismissing the notion that human consciousness might exist apart from the brain:

Willusionists, however, suggest this internalized brain processing simply cannot count as free will. They often say that people who believe in free will must be “dualists” who are convinced that the mind somehow exists as a nonphysical entity, separate from the brain. “Free will is the idea that we make choices and have thoughts independent of anything remotely resembling a physical process,” wrote neuroscientist Read Montague in 2008.

This problem of experimental results that seem to suggest that we have no free will is one of many conundrums that mainstream scientists face because they continue to insist against compelling evidence that “material” reality must be material, and that the human mind must be generated by the brain. Neither assumption is correct. And the scientific evidence that neither assumption is correct is so abundant now that for scientists to stubbornly hold to these dogmas has gone beyond nonsensical to become ridiculous. Mainstream science has transformed itself from a system of open-minded inquiry into just another belief-system. And the last thing this world needs right now is yet one more closed-minded religion!

Max Planck received the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics. He should have received a second Nobel Prize for his greater insight that human consciousness is primary and pre-existing. In 1931 he said:

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

Planck’s insight was derived from his quantum physics research. Afterlife researchers have come from a different direction and reached precisely the same conclusion. Each human mind is part of the same core Mind that continuously brings forth the universe. I use Planck’s term, “Mind,” because the real creative force is nothing like the Christian God. You will be relieved to know that we have found no evidence that such a petty and judgmental deity exists. Instead, the base creative force which is the only thing that objectively exists is both infinitely powerful and highly emotional. And the only emotion that it expresses is affinity – love – beyond our ability to comprehend it.

So from Planck’s perspective, and from ours, this problem of no apparent free will is readily explained.

As integral parts of eternal Mind, our minds in their nature are vast and powerful. While a human being is attached to a body, though, just a limited part of that eternal mind expresses itself in what we call awareness. In order for us to function here efficiently, our minds make most decisions beyond our awareness in a kind of unlimited “super-consciousness” which scientists dimly perceive as “sub-consciousness.” That super-consciousness is who we really are, so for it to be doing most of our thinking and only afterward informing our consciousness minds simply means that we are exercising our free will at a higher mental level. Our super-consciousness decides to move, it directs our brain and body to begin the process, and then it notifies our body-bound awareness that the decision has been made. At that point we consciously register the decision. But it is our own minds that have made it.

So, can you see how the scientific dogma that the mind must be generated by the brain leads inescapably to a misunderstanding of what are sound scientific findings? Mainstream scientists’ rigidly-enforced dogmas force them into repeated fights over nothing in the pages of science magazines, when what they should instead be doing is objectively studying reality.

Mainstream science in the early twenty-first century has been so deteriorated by its adherence to dogmas that a lot of it now consists in the construction of ever more fanciful dead-end theories and pointless squabbles over nothing.

This notion that the brain must be the source of the human mind is just one of the corollary dogmas that flow from the century-old “fundamental scientific dogma” of atheism (and yes, you can find those words in print). What makes this particular dogma that the brain must generate the mind so troubling is that scientists have amassed abundant evidence that human consciousness is primary and pre-existing. So they really should know better!

If you are still unsure about whether your brain generates your mind, you need look no further than the simple fact that the human genome does not code for the human mind. Our genome consists of roughly 19,000 genes, which is 2,000 fewer than the genome of C. elegans, a tiny semi-transparent worm that can do little more than react to stimuli. And nearly all of the human genome consists of genes that predate the emergence of primates. There is no basis whatsoever for the supposition that the brain generates the human mind! And there is solid evidence that it does not. So why, in contravention of their own data, do so many scientists waste their careers searching for a source of human consciousness in the brain?

Good question.

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