Friday, March 21, 2014

IN WHOSE IMAGE?

   Quantum Mechanics and Shroud Science

By John C. Klotz

Some have referred to the Shroud as the “Fifth Gospel.”[i] It may be that, but it also something more, a new Revelation brought to us not by a scribe writing on an isolated island, but by science itself.
Shroud science was born with Secondo Pia’s 1898 Shroud photographs but in1900 a scientific revolution in science erupted with the formulation of Max Planck’s theory of light as “quanta,” tiny entities that were both particle and wave. His theory gave birth to “quantum mechanics,” a study of the nature of existence at the atomic and sub-atomic levels.

Before the advent of quantum mechanics, the world of science was dominated by the view of the universe and all material existence promulgated by Isaac Newton. Newton’s universe was steady, never ending with no beginning and no end. His theories were the end result of the scientific revolution begun by Copernicus and Galileo. Along the way, he invented a new mathematical system of analysis called calculus. Across the Channel in Germany, Gottfried Leibniz was also developing a calculus. Who is the real father of calculus is a debate of interest and importance to mathematicians but not to most of humanity. What was important to humanity is that calculus systems were developed and they worked.

Philosophically, Newton’s universe led to the principle of “determinism.” Ultimately the universe and everything in it was subject to immutable rules. Everything was determined by those rules even the course of human conduct. There was no room for free will.

That changed with the advent of quantum mechanics because at the quantum level, matter did not behave in a determined manner but obeyed only the rules of probability. Indeed, until measured or observed, the most minute particles are ambiguous, behaving as both wave and particle.

To some, the extreme point is solipsism: all of existence depends upon observation and the only universe was the universe that one observed. There was no other reality.

Yet, for all its mystery and apparent illogic, quantum mechanics worked. The atom bomb was built upon principals developed from it and probability calculations unleashed the most horrendous devastation in the history of warfare.

But the benefits of quantum mechanics were manifold. Many of the analytic devices used by medicine functioned by manipulating the quantum attributes of light. In 1978, technology used by the STURP team in its examination of the Shroud was among the fruits of quantum mechanics.

Central to quantum mechanics is the role, and debate about the role, consciousness plays in observing and measuring quantum phenomena. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin held that the human species emerged when it developed of the power of reflective consciousness.[ii] Sir Roger Penrose and Dr. Stuart Hameroff have written:

“Consciousness implies awareness: subjective experience of internal and external phenomenal worlds. Consciousness is central also to understanding, meaning and volitional choice with the experience of free will. Our views of reality, of the universe, of ourselves depend on consciousness. Consciousness defines our existence.”[iii] (Emphasis added)

In quantum mechanics, consciousness determines the form and nature of quantum phenomena. What is God, if not the primordial consciousness which engendered our universe?

 The crowded empty space.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

John Muir
1911[iv]

Sierra Club founder John Muir is often quoted as writing “Every thing is connected.” That’s actually a paraphrase of what he wrote in 1911. His statement, on the quantum level at least, is true. Not only is it true, the interconnectivity of all existence is a fundamental, if not the most fundamental aspect of our existence.
There is no such thing as empty space – not anywhere. While more than 99% of an atom appears to be empty space, a void, devoid of heat or energy, there is field of energy that pervades all of existence including “empty space.” It’s existence means that we can never obtain a true zero temperature. The amount of energy is impossibly minute, but it’s there. Nonetheless, it’s called Zero Point Energy: a field of energy that connects all of existence in this Universe.

To the extent that any phenomenon operates at the quantum level, it is connected by the field to every point in the Universe. It’s as if there was a gigantic telephone system with everything having a telephone number. Of course, to communicate, you must pick-up the telephone and dial a number. There are some who seem better able to make that call than others. Sometimes it’s called extrasensory perception (ESP). Skeptics scoff, rejecting ESP and all similar phenomena as “paranormal” but the lines of communication are always there. In a television documentary “The Real Face of Jesus,” one participant called the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as “the most important paranormal event in history.”

There is no question that charlatans and fraudsters have made constant abuse of gullible individuals throughout the course of history. To skeptics, “paranormal” is a derogatory term. Scientists who study the phenomena avoid the term and some refer to the paranormal as “psi.”

There results of many tests of individuals and groups of individuals are explicable only in terms in the reality of paranormal or psi attributes. The validity of the tests depend on applying the rules of probability. Crucial to the validity of the results are the protocols governing the tests. Ironically, pseudo-skeptics who swallow the results of the protocol-challenged carbon dating of the Shroud whole, base their criticisms of the psi tests by attacking “protocols” of the psi tests.

The issue is whether human beings have the capabilities to tune in to the ZPE. Some scientists dealing with that part of quantum mechanics labeled quantum information believe they can and that all of humanity makes regular, use of the ZPE. That use is how our consciousness operates.
Penrose, Hameroff and others maintain that human consciousness is a quantum phenomenon. It is more than the sum total of discrete processes of the isolated brain. Quantum information is aggregated in the form of quantum qubits. Those qubits exist in the ZPE field.

Other scientists dispute that. They appear wedded to a Newtonian deterministic cause and effect paradigm that defined all existence. Newtonians appear in many different guises and scientific disciplines. One thing that neo-Newtonians dispute is the concept of “free will.”[v] All is determined whether by DNA or the environment. The brain is simply a biological construction of a mechanical computer. Consciousness is the sum total of its calculations.

What quantum mechanics has done, while recognizing the relevance of Newtonian physics at the “macro” or large level of existence, is to largely discard it at the “micro” or atomic and sub-atomic level. There is space for the action of free will. That space is as broad as the Zero Point field is wide.

Who is right about human consciousness: the neo-Newtonians or those who find consciousness to be a quantum phenomenon? Perhaps we should begin with the “incredible,” and ultimately tragic, saga of Hans Berger.

Hans Berger and his magic machine

Hans Berger was born May 21, 1873 in Neuses, a small Bavarian town that was eventually absorbed by the City of Coburg. He was the son of a well to do physician.[vi] His father’s wealth freed Berger from the day to day struggle of the less fortunate to just survive. He had interests, but no extraordinary ambition. Hans was not interested in pursuing a career in medicine and settled, initially, on a career in Astronomy.
He enrolled as a mathematics student at the Fredrich Schiller University of Jena to prepare him for that career, but the pace of life in the city held no allure. He left college and began a year of military training in the cavalry to sort things out. It was while in the cavalry, that an incident occurred, that not only changed the course of his life, but the course of what we call neuroscience, the study of the nervous system, including the brain.

One morning, he was thrown from his horse during a training exercise. He landed on road in the path of a fast approaching team of horses pulling a heavy gun carriage. His thought was quite explicit: “I’m going to die.” Fortunately, the drivers of the gun carriage were able to rein-in their team of horses and it stopped short of Berger. Shaken, but not injured, he returned his exercise and his duties.

That evening, when he returned to his quarters, he found a telegram from his father inquiring about his welfare. That morning, his sister had become quite hysterical because she felt that Hans had been in an accident and died. His father inquired anxiously if he was all right. Berger promptly responded but he was amazed that his sister had an attack of hysteria at the moment of his grave peril when he consciously thought he was about to die.

It was a life changing moment for Hans Berger. His attention turned to neuroscience. He concluded that the brain must in some way think and process electromagnetic waves and that in some way his thought of his impending death had been transmitted to his sister with whom he had a close relationship. Needless to say, as he advanced in his study of neuroscience, contemporary colleagues were quite dubious and treated his ideas with derision.

Undeterred, he developed a machine to measure “brain waves.” More derision, but in 1924, his machine began to achieve acceptance. It was dubbed the Electroencephalograph, the EEG, which was a breakthrough in the analysis and treatment of brain disorders.

Berger’s life continued on a troubled plane. He never received what he regarded as his proper recognition. The next two decades would see the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party. There is some controversy about whether Berger was a Nazi collaborator. In any event, he retired from the University of Jena in 1939. In 1940, plagued by ill health and his failure to achieve what he regarded as his proper place in the scientific pantheon, he committed suicide. Today, there are research organizations in neuroscience that have either adopted his name or sponsor conferences in his name.

The EEG, which was a scientific breakthrough of the first order, has been in some respects replaced by the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) which allows analysis not only of the brain but the entire body or selected parts of it. Bruce Rosenbaum and Fred Kutler writing The Quantum Enigma claim that “One third of our economy” involves products based upon quantum mechanics and go on to describe four of them: the laser; CCDs (charge coupled devices that, among other things record images in digital cameras); the transistor; and the MRI.[vii]

Merely mentioning the four devices that use quantum mechanical methods to manipulate reality indicates to a certain extent the distinction between the reflective consciousness of humanity and the consciousness of all other life on earth. Mastering quantum mechanics is one of the greatest accomplishments of humanity’s reflective consciousness. Most importantly, that reflective consciousness is the reason we, as distinguished from all other forms of life on earth, are constricted in our actions by ethics and morality. All other living creatures answer to unfettered instinct. The natural world is a violent, nasty place.[viii]
Is humanity different? If so, why?

Evolution and Consciousness

Let us create humanity in our own image and likeness.
              Genesis 1:26[ix]


And, let us take seriously the observation of the compilers of Genesis: we are made in God’s image and likeness. That image and likeness is not our material bodies evolved over ages and for which primordial consciousness, existing in a state before the existence of our universe and beyond space and time, does not possess. The image and likeness of God in which we are created can only be our consciousness, but insofar as we possess it, that too evolved.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The great prophet of reflective consciousness and its evolution is Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. This book is not a treatise on Teilhard. The scope of his body of work was quite broad but there is little question but that he defined a path for the convergence of science and religion that we are in fact traveling. Teilhard was born May 1, 1881 and died April 10, 1955. Eventually, during his lifetime, he was forbidden by the Church to publish or teach. Most of his important writings were not published until after his death including his epochal works The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu.

As important as The Divine Milieu and some of his other works are, for our purposes, we will concentrate primarily on his description of the evolution of humanity in The Phenomenon of Man. His work on the book was completed by 1940. However, before it could be published he was barred by the Church from publishing his work and he obeyed. After his death, it was first published in France in 1955. It was translated and published in English in 1959. In his preface to the Phenomenon of Man, he wrote:

" If this book is to be properly understood, it must be read not as a work on metaphysics, still less as a sort of theological essay, but purely and simply as a scientific treatise. The title itself indicates that. The book deals with man solely as a phenomenon; but it also deals with the whole phenomenon of man."

Teilhard wrote before the theory of quantum information was developed. Thus his theories about consciousness and humanity were uninformed by it. However, he divided the human phenomenon into the physical appearance as matter and consciousness as substance. Arguably he presaged the whole question of quantum information which would explain the “substance” of humanity as distinguished from its Newtonian physical existence. What results is a bridge between quantum mechanics and the appearance-substance dichotomy espoused by Thomas Aquinas which in turn was a medieval, Christian transliteration of concepts advanced by Plato.

Teilhard posits everything as having a substance distinguishable from its appearance. For living organisms that substance is consciousness for which even the simplest organism exhibited precursor attributes. 

Consciousness evolution and physical evolution journeyed upward in parallel evolutionary paths. Even the simplest one celled organism showed chemical reactions to various stimuli or irritants that were in Teilhard’s eyes the beginning consciousness. There were precursors to human intelligence that gradually emerged. Empathy was one. However, as others have written, the biological world was a brutal, unforgiving place. Key to the advance of evolution was selfishness.[xi]

Teilhard regarded the emergence of a species with the power of reflective consciousness as the birth of the human race. However, there was an inherent conflict between that reflective consciousness and selfishness. That conflict was the underlying theme of the Book of Genesis. It has yet to be resolved.

Copyright 2014, John C. Klotz, New York City



[i] Giovanni Tamburelli,Reading the Holy Shroud, called the Fifth Gospel, with the Aid of the Computer” Shroud Spectrum, Issue #2,(March 1982)
[ii] Teilhard 
[iii] Roger Penrose, PhD, OM, FRS1, and Stuart Hameroff, MD2, “Consciousness in the Universe: Neuroscience, Quantum Space-Time Geometry and Orch OR Theory,” Cosmology of Consciousness: Quantum Physics & Neuroscience of Mind (Kindle Locations 681-683). Cosmology Science Publishers. Kindle Edition.
[iv] John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911) (p. 110), Sierra Club Books Ed., 1988)
[v] Rosenblum, Bruce; Kuttner, Fred (2011-07-01). Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness (p. 32). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
[vi] The story of Hans Berger is drawn from Dean Radin’s book, Entangled Minds. Radin, Dean. Entangled Minds (p. 21 et seq). (Simon & Schuster, Inc., Kindle Edition, 2009) See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Berger
[vii] Rosenbaum and Kuttner, p. 116.
[ix] The usual translation of this passage is “let us create man…” However, in Hebrew the word used for man is generic and means mankind. In this 21st century, the use the word “humanity” which means mankind.
[x] de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard (2011-06-21). The Phenomenon Of Man (Kindle Locations 423-425). Evergreen Books. Kindle Edition.
[xi] Dawkins, Selfish gene,

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