Beginning in the nineteenth century—and continuing today—physics on the one hand and psychic research on the other have been on convergent paths, both showing that something beyond our three-dimensional world really exists. These two streams have not, as it were, “unified” yet—but it may be early days. Let me give a quick sketch of that.
Light is a wave—even that which reaches us from the sun and distant stars through a vacuum. But how can that be? As the physicist Michio Kaku put it (in Hyperspace, Oxford University Press, 1994) “[I]f light were a wave, then it would require something to be ‘waving.’ Sound waves require air, water waves require water, but since there is nothing to wave in a vacuum, we have a paradox. How can light be a wave if there is nothing to wave?” Hence the science of old posited the existence of aether, a kind of subtle substance, to explain that waving. No proof of aether’s existence could later be established, but the subject keeps cropping up under other names (link on Ghulf Genes).
In 1926 the British physics professor Sir William Barrett, prompted by a case reported by his wife, nee Florence Willey, a surgeon in obstetrics, wrote a book entitled Death-bed Visions. It was the first such collection of cases ever published. One of her patients, Doris, experienced such a vision of her dead father. It was so convincing that Lady Barrett was persuaded of the reality of a beyond; her conviction energized her husband to undertake his own investigations. From such beginnings have come death-bed and near-death experience (NDE) studies. Now I suggest that they have something akin to the “waving” of light in a supposedly non-existing ether. These apparitions are very convincing; they are also sometimes inter-subjective, meaning that not just the person reporting the vision but third parties also see it. But based on current theories of reality, they are impossible. To call them supernatural is a bit of a punt. If something exists, it must be somewhere. So where is it?
In 1921 the German Theodor Kaluza published a paper which suggested a solution to the waving of light. With additions (in 1926) of a theory by the Swede Oskar Klein, this has been known as the Kaluza-Kline theory. It suggests that the vacuum itself was vibrating—and that it has a five-dimensional structure consisting of four dimensions of space and one of time. This outlandish theory simply could not be dismissed. Kaluza-Klein showed that if such a structure was presumed to exist, something theretofore impossible was quite easy to do: Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism and Einstein’s of gravity could be elegantly unified. This motivated scientific belief. Gradually the problems of Kaluza-Klein were worked out. The current field that represents continuation of that venture is superstring theory; the name of that “beyond” has become hyperspace—and it is said to have ten dimensions all told.
But let me take this back to the nineteenth century when the initial insights/observations first arose. In 1854 the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann first laid the foundations for a multi-dimensional geometry in a paper titled “On the hypotheses which underlie geometry.” Until this paper, the possible existence of a fourth spatial dimension was deemed an impossibility, but Riemann proved that it was not only thinkable but, at least mathematically, a fourth dimension—and any number after them—could be shown to behave quite lawfully and predictably. Not that the human mind is capable of imagining a fourth-dimensional structure, but we can know something about it. The Society for Psychical Research was founded a little later, in 1882. Among its initial committees was one on Apparitions and Haunted Houses.
As psychic and physical theories have advanced since, fascinating parallels have continued to emerge. Kaku’s book has quite an extensive listing of the physical consequences—if we imagine beings to exists in a fourth spatial dimension. Those beings could walk through walls in the third dimension, travel at the speed of thought, and see “into” matter. Wormholes exist (since their “discovery” much exploited in science fiction) connecting dimensions. In different dimensions, “time beats at different rates,” as Kaku puts it.
On the psychic side, using the near-death experience literature, we certainly have people, out of their bodies temporarily, walking through walls—and being unable to touch those still in bodies; their subtle hands pass right through bodies too; the often report having 360 degree vision and say that time is somehow “different.” In those reports a subset of people report passing out of their bodies through “tunnels”—emerging from which they see dead relatives and beings of light. In the literature on apparitions, we have speed-of-thought travel—as soldiers who died in battle appear hundreds of miles away to relatives to say good-bye. Clairvoyance presents cases of seeing-at-a distance, telepathy person-to-person communications without electromagnetic transmission of voice.
Michio Kaku’s interest is in the physical phenomena associated with hyperspace, above all the promise of the theory that it will eventually permit the complete unification of the four forces. These are the strong force (holding suns and atomic cores together), the weak force (associated with radiation), electromagnetism, and gravity. Going beyond, he identifies the possibility of time travel—and of the physical proof of hyperspace— but notes that extraordinarily high levels of energy would be necessary to produce either time travel or the proofs—or the formation of wormholes, for that matter.
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