The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The following excerpts are from Thomas Kuhn’s famous book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” Kuhn’s view of science was that science had nothing to do with truth, and that paradigms and worldviews determine what scientists constitute science over all.

“To the extent that… two scientific schools disagree about what is a problem and what is a solution, they will inevitably talk through each other when debating the relative merits of their respective paradigms. In the partially circular arguments that regularly result, each paradigm will be shown to satisfy more or less the criteria that it dictates for itself and to fall short of a few of those dictated by its opponent… [N]o paradigm ever solves all the problems it defines and since no two paradigms leave all the same problems unsolved, paradigm debates always involve the question: Which problems is it more significant to have solved?

Like the issue of competing standards, that question of values can be answered only in terms of criteria that lie outside the normal science altogether, and it is that recourse to external criteria that most obviously makes paradigm debates revolutionary…

    The history of astronomy provides many other examples of paradigm-induced changes in scientific perception, some of them even less equivocal. Can it be conceivably be of an accident, for example, that Western astronomers first saw change in the previously immutable heavens during the half-century after Copernicus’ new paradigm was first proposed? The Chinese, whose cosmological beliefs did not preclude celestial change, had recorded the appearance of many new stars in the heavens at a much earlier date. Also, even without the aid of a telescope, the Chinese had systematically recorded the appearance of sunspots centuries before these were seen by Galileo and his contemporaries…

What occurs during a scientific revolution is not fully reducible to a reinterpretation of individual and stable data. In the first place, the data are not unequivocally stable. [For example:] A pendulum is not a falling stone, nor is oxygen dephlogisticated air. Consequently, the date that scientists collect from these diverse objects are, as we shall shortly see, themselves different…

Operations and measurements are paradigm determined. Science does not deal in all possible laboratory manipulations. Instead, it selects those relevant to the juxtaposition of a paradigm with the immediate experience that that paradigm has partially determined. As a result, scientists with different paradigms engage in different concrete laboratory manipulations…

Does a field make progress because it is a science, or is it a science because it makes progress?

Doubts about progress [often] rise in the sciences. Through the pre-paradigm period when there is a multiplicity of competing schools, evidence of progress, except within schools, is very hard to find… During periods of revolution when the fundamental tenets of a field are once more at issue, doubts are repeatedly expressed about the very possibility of continued progress if one or another of the opposed paradigm is adopted…

Often a new paradigm emerges, at least in embryo, before a crisis has developed far or been explicitly recognized…A scientific community is an immensely efficient instrument for solving the problems or puzzles that its paradigms define… [but we must ask] What must nature, including man, be like in order that science be possible at all? Why should scientific communities be able to reach a firm consensus unattainable in other fields? Why should consensus endure across one paradigm change after another? And why should paradigm change invariably produce an instrument more perfect in any sense than those known before?…

Any conception of nature compatible with the growth of science by proof is compatible with the evolutionary view of science developed here. Since this view is also compatible with close observation of the scientific life, there are strong arguments for employing  it in attempts to solve the host of problems that still remain.”

Scientists and Their Red Herring’s

From January 2008 item in the UK’s The Daily Mail:

In 1995, the US Congress asked two independent scientists to assess whether the $20 million that the government had spent on psychic research had produced anything of value. And the conclusions proved to be somewhat unexpected.

Professor Jessica Utts, a statistician from the University of California, discovered that remote viewers were correct 34 per cent of the time, a figure way beyond what chance guessing would allow.

She says: “Using the standards applied to any other area of science, you have to conclude that certain psychic phenomena, such as remote viewing, have been well established.

“The results are not due to chance or flaws in the experiments.”

Of course, this doesn’t wash with sceptical scientists.

Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, refuses to believe in remote viewing.

He says: “I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do.

“If I said that there is a red car outside my house, you would probably believe me.

“But if I said that a UFO had just landed, you’d probably want a lot more evidence.

“Because remote viewing is such an outlandish claim that will revolutionise the world, we need overwhelming evidence before we draw any conclusions. Right now we don’t have that evidence.”

[Emphasis added]

What Professor Wiseman has just admitted in his own words is that, “by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven”. It literally passes the rigorous tests all other fields of science go through.

However, I have the suspicion that he doesn’t want to believe in it. So rather than accepting facts as facts, he’s arguing that we should move the goal-post; setting a standard that wouldn’t apply to any other scientific branch. Thereby creating a double-standard. If it sounds unjust, thats because it is.

He does this by throwing out a red-herring. By making a comparison to UFO’s, he can make remote viewing seem ridiculous to the public eye, all the while protecting his own paradigm.

Because we’d need a lot more evidence for a UFO than we would for a red car, right?

Wrong.

Indeed, if I was a skeptic, and someone told me there was a red car in my drive way, I might say: “I don’t know, is there a red car in my drive way? Why should I believe you? Lets go find out!” Then we would go and look and see if its there. That’s a skeptical attitude: not taking peoples word for granted and finding out yourself.

The same process for verifying the existence of a red car is the same you would use to verify the existence of a UFO. A UFO is by definition an ‘Unidentified Flying Object’. If you had analyzed it with the same standards you did a red car, you would have an Identified that flying object. Boom. Its no longer a mystery.

Remote Viewing is not a UFO. We’ve put remote viewing in the lab, and verified that its real with the same methods we verify other phenomena. This psychologist admits this, and by that merit, its a scientifically verifiable reality. No longer “paranormal”- but demonstrably normal and repeatable. Meaning you don’t have to take his or anyone’s word on it.

Sadly, this psychologist is not immune to confirmation bias, logical fallacies, or propaganda (ironic, I know). He has a narrow view of materialism that doesn’t account for Psi, and wants to keep it that way. But at this point, his attitude is no longer scientific, its dogmatic. If you wanted to jest, perhaps you could say he has fundamentalist attitudes about reality that science can’t change his mind about.

Stalin’s Secret Psychic Research Programs

Several Scientists in pre-revolutionary Russia studied parapsychology. In 1922, a commission composed of psychologists, medical hypnotists, physiologists, and physicists worked on parapsychology at the Institute of Brain research in Petrograd. Work flourished in the 1930’s with major publications in the year 1934, 1936, and 1937. After 1937, experiments in parapsychology were publicly forbidden during Stalin’s time, and their the rationale behind this was that studies in parapsychology were an attempt to undermine communist-materialism. Privately, though, Stalin continued the government research of parapsychology- and with much success.

In April of 1960, Dr. L.L. Vasilev spoke on the nature of these experiments while addressing a group of top Soviet scientists:

“We carried out extensive and until now completely unreported investigations under the Stalin regime… Soviet scientists conducted great many successful telepathy tests over a quarter of a century ago. It’s urgent that we throw of our prejudices. We must again plunge into the exploration of this vital field.”

In 1960, L.L. Vasilev, head of the Department of Physiology of Leningrad University and a corresponding member of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR, was given funds to establish well-equipped laboratories at the university for the study of telepathy. In 1963 the Kremlin gave top priority to the study of parapsychology, establishing as many as twenty or more centers for the study of this phenomena, with a budget ranging from 12 million rubles (13 million dollars), and as reportedly has as 21 million dollars.

Visiting Soviet psi labs in 1967, Doctor Ryzl says that he was told by a Soviet, “When Suitable means of propaganda are cleverly used, it is possible to mold any man’s conscience so that in the end he may misuse his abilities while remaining convinced that he is serving an honest purpose.” Ryzl continues, “The USSR has the means to keep the results of such research secret from the rest of the world and, as practical applications of these results become possible, there is no doubt that the Soviet Union will do so.” What will ESP be used for? “To make money, and as a weapon,” Ryzl states flatly.

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More details about Dr. Vasilev, and Russian research into ESP can be found in the unclassified document “Controlled Offensive Behavior” and “Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain“.

The Strange Case of Emanuel Swedenborg

Emanuel Swedenborg was a renowned metallurgist and mystic in the mid eighteenth-century. Among his many scientific accomplishments, Swedenborg displayed an astonishingly modern understanding of brain functioning.

Two hundred years before the neurosciences became a scientific discipline, Swedenborg correctly described sensation, movement, and cognition as functions of the cerebral cortex, the function of the corpus callosum, the motor cortex, the neural pathways of each sense organ to the cortex, the functions of the frontal lobe and the corpus striatum, circulation of the cerebral fluid, and interactions of the pituitary gland between the brain and blood.

On the afternoon of June 19, 1759, he arrived in Goteborg, Sweden. At a dinner party that evening, he suddenly announced to his friends that he was having a vision of Stockholm burning, about 300 miles away. Later that evening he told them that the fire stopped three doors from his home.

The next day, the mayor of Goteborg, who heard about Swedenbog’s surprising pronouncement, discussed it with him. The following day, a message from Stockholm arrived and confirmed that Swedenborg’s vison was correct.

David Bohm on Intelligence

The following quotes are excerpts taken from “Wholeness and the Implicate Order“, written by physicist David Bohm. Emphasis mine.

“It is at least implicitly understood, everyone accepts the notion that intelligence is not conditioned (and indeed one cannot consistently do otherwise). Consider the example of an attempt to assert that all mans actions are conditional and mechanical… Either it is said that man is basically a product of his hereditary constitution, or else that he is determined entirely by environmental factors.

One could ask of the man who believed in hereditary determination whether his own statement asserting his belief was nothing but the product of his heredity… One may ask of the man who believes in environmental determinism whether the assertion of such a belief is nothing but the spouting off of words which he was conditioned by his environment…

Indeed it is necessarily implied, in any statement, that the speaker is capable of talking from intelligent perception, which is in turn capable of a truth that is not merely the result of a mechanism based on meaning or skilled acquired in the past…

The actual operation of intelligence is thus beyond the possibility of being determined or conditioned by factors that can be included in any knowable law. So, we see that the ground of intelligence must be in the undetermined and unknown flux, that is also the ground of all definable forms of matter. Intelligence is thus not deductible or explainable on any branch of knowledge (e.g. physics or biology). Its origin is deeper and more inward than any knowable order of definable forms of matter through which we would hope to comprehend intelligence.

What, then, is the relationship of intelligence to thought? Briefly, one can say that when thought functions on its own, it is mechanical and not intelligent, because it imposes its own generally irrelevant and unsuitable order drawn from memory. Thought is, however, capable of responding, not only from memory but also to the unconditioned perception of intelligence that can see, in each case, whether or not a particular line of thought is relevant and fitting.

One may perhaps usefully consider here the image of a radio receiver. When the output of the receiver ‘feeds back’ into the input, the receiver operates on its own, to produce mainly irrelevant and meaningless noise, but when it is sensitive to the signal on the radio wave, its own order of inner movement of electric currents (transformed into sound waves) is parallel to the order in the signal and thus the receiver serves to bring a meaningful order originating beyond the level of its own structure into movements on the level of its own structure. One might then suggest that in intelligent perception, the brain and nervous system respond directly to an order in the universe…“

Critics and Cholera

The following is an excerpt from the book “The Biology of Belief,” by Bruce H. Lipton, PhD.

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Buried in exceptional cases are the roots of a more powerful understanding of the nature of life – “more powerful” because the principles behind these exceptions trump established “truths.” The fact is that harnessing the power of your mind can be more effective than the drugs you have been programmed to believe you need. The research I discussed in the last chapter found that energy is a more efficient means of affecting matter than chemicals.

Unfortunately, scientists most often deny rather than embrace exceptions. My favorite of example of scientific denial of the reality of mind-body interactions relates to an article that appeared in Science about nineteenth-century German physician, Robert Koch, who along with Pasteur founded the Germ Theory. The Germ Theory holds that bacteria and viruses are the primary cause of disease. A modified version of that theory is widely accepted now, but in Koch’s day it was more controversial. One of Koch’s critics was so convinced that Germ theory was wrong that he brazenly wolfed down a glass of water laced with vibrio cholera, the bacterium Koch believed caused cholera. To everyone’s astonishment, the man was completely unaffected by the virulent pathogen. The Science article published in 2000 describing the incident stated: “For unexplained reasons he remained symptom free, but nevertheless incorrect.”

The man survived and Science, reflecting the unanimity of opinion of Germ Theory, had the audacity to say his criticism was incorrect? If it is claimed that this bacterium is the cause of cholera, and the man demonstrates that he is unaffected by germs… how can he be “incorrect”?  Instead of trying to figure out how the man avoided the dreaded disease, scientists blithely dismiss this and other embarrassing “messy” exceptions that spoil their theories. Remember the “dogma” that genes control biology? Here is another example in which scientists, bent on establishing the validity of their truth, ignore pesky exceptions. The problem is that there cannot be exceptions to a theory; exceptions simply mean that the theory is not fully correct.

The World of Rocket Science and Witchcraft

 

There is more to the practice of Paganism and the development of science and technology than a lot of historians would not go into detail about. The occult means “that which is hidden,” so it doesn’t get talked about much unless you bring up cults or the paranormal.

This changes when you get to important historical figures like Jack Parsons. Parsons was an inventor and engineer who pioneered in rocket engineering and propulsion. He attended several universities, including Stanford, but never attained any degrees. He invented the first rocket jet, and pioneered in both liquid and solid fuel rockets. He was a founder of organizations like JPL and Aerojet Engineering Corporation. At one point in his life, Parsons was also involved with Marxism, and was being investigated by the FBI under the suspicion of espionage. After his death, he was later recognized as one of the most important figure in the US space program, and they have since named a crater on the moon after him.

Parsons was apart of the new Thelemic cult called the ‘OTO’, that Aleister Crowley invented. He converted after reading a few of Crowleys books and had eventually met Crowley and knew him on a personal level. Parson’s involvement in magic took up a huge chunk of his life, one of his biographers noting that

[Parsons] treated magic and rocketry as different sides of the same coin: both had been disparaged, both derided as impossible, but because of this both presented themselves as challenges to be conquered. Rocketry postulated that we should no longer see ourselves as creatures chained to the earth but as beings capable of exploring the universe.

Similarly, magic suggested there were unseen metaphysical worlds that existed and could be explored with the right knowledge. Both rocketry and magic were rebellions against the very limits of human existence; in striving for one challenge he could not help but strive for the other.” – Pendle, George (2005). Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

America’s first rocket-assisted aircraft, developed by Parsons.

In the mid 1940’s, Parsons befriend L Ron Hubbard (before he founded Scientology), and the two performed magical rituals together that they called the “Babalon Working“. Later, after their ‘working’ was done, L. Ron Hubbard would defraud Parsons out of his life savings.

Parsons wrote several books, with such cuddly titles like  “the Book of Babalon” and “The Book of the Antichrist.” The aim of his famous ‘Babalon Working’ was to, in no unclear language, summon the whore of Babalon to the earth mentioned in the Book of Revelations, to aid in bringing the end of all things to come. He believed he succeeded and said;

Its manifestations may be noted in the destruction of old institutions and ideas, the discovery and liberation of new energies, and the trend towards power governments, war, homosexuality, infantilism, and schizophrenia.

This force is completely blind, depending upon the men and women in whom it manifests and who guide it. Obviously, its guidance now tends towards catastrophe.

Parson was seriously involved in dark magical ceremonial rites. The obituary of his local newspaper described him as “handsome 37-year-old rocket scientist,” and was “a man who led a double existence [as] a down-to-earth explosives expert who dabbled in intellectual necromancy.” What he wrote down about what he did may be too dark for the average person to read, because its its gruesome, shocking, and very weird.

At one point at the end of his life, he saw himself as the Anti-Christ. His wife, an artist, created a portrait of him as the angel of death. Later in life, because of accusations of espionage, he no longer got to work in the rocketeering field. He died in an accidental explosion in dealing with certain chemicals at his house, working on a project for a film set. Few have speculated that this may have also been either an attempted suicide or assassination.

Parsons standing over a used Rocket-Assisted Take Off cannister

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As a personal anecdote to go with this story; Back in the day when I had a desktop completely dedicated to a Voluntary/Grid computing program called BOINC, developed by Berkeley -which used mass computation for crunching scientific data- I once spoke to a man over the internet who said that he worked at CERN. He relayed to me that he used to be a reader of Crowley and a Thelemic practitioner (for those who may not know, is a modern practice of paganism). While he was very staunch about his previous involvement with the occult, he relayed to me that he quit everything that had to do with it and focused primarily at CERN, because, and I quote: “physics is the new magic”.

I have not been able to confirm that any of that is true- If he really was a physicist working at CERN and if he did in fact practice occultism. The other options are that he was insane or just a troll- possibly all of the above. I have absolutely no bias either way- But I am sure that would make a great plot in a book somewhere.

David Bohm: The Holographic Universe

David Bohm was one of the most well respected scientists of the 20th century. He attended at the California institute of technology and UC Berkely. His Doctorate advisor was Robert Oppenheimer. Bohm was also a protege of Einstein’s, working as his assistant at Princeton University. He was one of the forerunners and pioneers of quantum theory in the mid-twentieth century.

In the early 1940’s, the US government was using much of UC Berkely’s physics research in the Manhattan Project- which would produce the worlds first atomic bomb. Oppenheimer had invited Bohm to a top secret lab called Los Amos, which helped designed the bomb, but Bohm was denied security clearance on the grounds that he had communist ties. Despite this, much of his own research was used in the development of the first atomic bomb during the Manhattan project. After the government had used Bohm’s research, they barred him from the products of his own work because of his lack of security clearance.

Helping develop the first atomic bomb was not the only major mark in his career. Bohm had made several contributions to the field of physics and the developments of new physical theories about the universe. One of those theories was that the universe itself was a hologram- which he called “the implicate and explicate order”. The implicate order was a deeper form of reality that was outside time and space, or ‘before’ it.

The implicate order to Bohm, in layman’s terms, is all the basic rules of reality that actually exist on a single plain. All events that we know of are tied to this plain of reality, but we cannot perceive how because it is hidden- or implicit. 

Bohm believed that the most basic elements of matter in the implicate order were mental, or at least mind-like. That matter was not inert and unconscious but carried with it meaning, or teleology.

“Every action starts from an intention in the implicate order. The imagination is already the creation of the form, it already has the intention and the germs of all the movements needed to carry it out. And it affects the body and so on, so that as creation takes place in a way from subtler levels of the implicate order, it goes through them until it manifests in the explicate.” – David Bohm

The explicate order was the every day world we experience in time and space. The every day objects we see and interact with, and the events that happened. All the things we know are coming ‘out of’ the implicate order as a projection or a hologram. A hologram is a flat surface with information contained in it, that can project itself as a larger image. Some people have theorized that Bohm’s theory of the Implicate order is related to Jung’s theory of synchronicity.

Bohm theorized that the implicate and explicate order interacted with each other as a greater whole- that things that appeared separate in real life were actually connected at a deeper part of reality- in the implicate order. Bohm believed that things could be manifest in reality through the mind, via the brain, which to him was a holographic machine.

This connection physicists were learning about through quantum physics.  Physicists have recently published papers that seem to confirm parts of Bohm’s theory that the universe is a hologram.

If this is the case, it changes a lot for how we think of the world. Many people think of the world as composed of separate objects that have nothing to do with each other unless they collide with one another. Bohm’s theory of the universe posits that at some level, all things are interconnected and related to one another. Many people have posited that this theory of the universe has also serve as a framework for religion and spirituality.

Extra Reading

A Holographic View of Reality by David S. Walonick, Ph.D.

Interview with Bohm

The Holographic Universe by Technewsworld

Is the Universe a Hologram? by EurekAlert!

The Universe Might Be a Giant Hologram by Huffingtonpost

Dr. Michael Persinger on Psychic Phenomena

Michael Persinger is a researcher in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience with over 200 peer-reviewed publications in circulation. Much of his work has been subject to controversy and scrutiny, as well as praise.

Michael Persinger

During the span of his long career, Michael Persinger, an atheist, developed a controversial field of Neuroscience called ‘neuro-theology’. The main tool used behind this was an invention of his called the ‘God helmet’.Persinger believed that everything about human experience was source ultimately in the brain. That he could cause religious experiences in people using electromagnetic stimulation to the proper areas of the brain.

Needless to say, his work has been mixed with high praise and well as extreme criticism. Professor Richard Dawkins, who used the helmet, did not have any experience at all wearing ‘the God Helmet’. However, British research psychologist Susan Blackmore, said she had one of the most profound experiences in her life. One can find a critical dissection of Persingers “God Helmet” in the book “The Spiritual Brain” written by neuroscientist Mario Beauregaurd.

The greater theory behind his work is that the Earths magnetic fields play a role in peoples psychology and effect paranormal experiences- including everything from spiritual events to UFO sightings. He has claimed that there is some correlation between massive UFO sightings and mass hallucinations with the earth’s plate tectonics- which he called “Tectonic Strain Theory.” The idea behind it is that the earth’s crust near seismic faults creates creates massive electromagnetic fields that could interfere with peoples brainwaves create mass or individual hallucinations on the public at large.

Psychic Ingo Swann

More recently in the 2000’s Dr. Persinger (along with his colleagues) was involved in controlled remote viewing experiments with the famous psychic Ingo Swan -a man who was previously involved in psychic experiments with the US government. Persinger published several different papers claiming that he was able to connect Ingo Swan’s success rate to electro-magnetic activity in his brain, via an EEG.

Persinger developed a technology that he claimed was able to set the brain of even average people on the right frequency to get them to better communicate with others somewhere on earth. That they could see and feel what other individuals were experiencing. Persinger believes that the Earths Magnetic field is the medium that connects peoples minds together. He has studies that showed that success rates correlated tightly with whether or not there was any “noise interference” coming from the Earth’s magnetic field. In other words, test subjects had lower success rates when they during geo-magnetic storms, and test subjects had higher success rates when the earth’s magnetic field was quiet, or normal.

Persinger, who is himself a famous and world renowned skeptic, has suggested that science is due for a paradigm shift, and that until we change our fundamental ideas about what the universe is, there are going to be facts about existence that we are going to ignore because they don’t comply with our narrative. Much like the days of old, and our societies geocentric ideas about the world- we very well may be curtailing our findings to fit our worldview, and ignoring a lot of facts about reality.

“I think the critical thing about science is to be open-minded. It’s really important to realize that the true subject matter of science is the pursuit of the unknown. Sadly scientists have become extraordinarily group-oriented. Our most typical critics are not are mystic believer types.  They are scientists who have a narrow vision of what the world is like.” – Persinger interviewed at Skeptico

Persinger believed that increased technological developments and discoveries regarding this phenomena has large implications for the entire world. “What would it mean for governments or administrations if they had no secrets?” He believes that taking a step in this direction of scientific knowledge would help create an Empathic World Civilization.

Quantum Physics in a Macro World

The following excerpts are from an article in the June 2011 Scientific American magazine, titled “Living In a Quantum World,” written by physicist and Oxford professor of physics, Vlatko Vedral. All emphasis is mine.

According to standard physics textbooks, Quantum mechanics is the theory of the microscopic world. It describes particles, atoms, and molecules but gives way to ordinary classical physics on the macroscopic scales of pears, people, and planets. Somewhere between molecules and pears lies a boundary where the strangeness of quantum behavior ends and the familiarity of classical physics begins…

[T]his convenient partitioning of the world is a myth. Few modern physicists think that classical physics has equal status with quantum mechanics; it is but a useful approximation of a world that is quantum at all scales. Although quantum effects may be harder to see in the macroworld, the reason has nothing to do with size per se but with the way that quantum systems interact with one another. Until the past decade, experimentalists had not confirmed that quantum behavior persists on a macroscopic scale. Today, however, they routinely do. These effects are more pervasive than anyone ever suspected. They may even operate in the cells of our body…

In the modern point of view, the world looks classical because the complex interactions that an object has with its surroundings conspire to conceal quantum effects from our view… Larger things tend to be more susceptible to decoherence than smaller ones, which justifies why physicists can usually get away with regarding quantum mechanics as a theory of the microworld…

[In the world of physics,] Entanglement binds together individual particles into an indivisible whole. A classical system is always divisible, at least in principle; whatever collective properties it has arises from components that themselves have certain properties. But entangled systems cannot be broken down this way. Entanglement has strange properties. Even when the entangled particles are far apart, they still behave as a single entity, leading to what Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance.”

Most demonstrations of entanglement involve at most a handful of particles. Larger batches are harder to isolate from their surroundings. The particles in them are likelier to become entangled with stray particles, obscuring their original interconnections. In accordance with the language of decoherence, too much information leaks out into the environment, causing the system to behave classically….

   A neat experiment in 2003 proved that larger systems, too, can remain entangled when the leakage is reduced or somehow counteracted. Gabriel Aeppli of University College London and his colleagues took a piece of lithium fluoride salt and put it in an external magnetic field. You can think of the atoms in the salt as little spinning magnets that try to align themselves with the external field, a response known as magnetic susceptibility. Forces that the atoms exert on one another act as a kind of peer pressure to bring them into line more quickly . As the researchers varied the strength of the magnetic field, they measured how quickly the atoms became aligned. They found that they atoms responded much faster than the strength of their mutual interactions would suggest. Evidently some additional effect was helping the atoms to act in unison, and the researchers argued that entanglement was the culprit. If so, the 10²⁰ atoms of the salt form a hugely entangled state.

To avoid confounding the effects of the random motions associated with heat energy, Aeppli’s team did its experiments at extremely low temperatures- a few millikelvins. Since then, however, Alexandre Martins de Souza of the Brazilian Center for Physics research in Rio de Janeiro and his colleagues have discovered macroscopic entanglement in materials such as copper carboxylate at room temperature and higher. In these systems, the interaction among particles spins is strong enough to resist thermal chaos… Physicists have seen entanglement in systems of increasing size and temperature, from ions trapped by electromagnetic fields to ultra-cold atoms in lattices to superconducting quantum bits…

Other experiments scale up this basic idea, so that huge numbers of atoms become entangled and enter states that classical physics would deem impossible. And if solids can be entangled when they are large and warm, it takes only a small leap of imagination to ask whether the same might be true of a very special kind of large, warm system: life…

People have long wondered whether birds and other animals might have some built-in compass. In the 1970’s the husband wife team of Wolfgang and Roswitha Wiltschko of the University of Frankfurt in Germany caught robins that had been migrating to Africa and put them in artificial magnetic fields. Oddly, the robins, they found, were oblivious to the reversal of the magnetic field direction, indicating that they could not tell north from south. The birds did, however, respond to the inclination of the earth’s magnetic field- that is, the angle that the field lines make with the surface. That is all they need to navigate. Interestingly, blindfolded robins did not respond to a magnetic field at all, indicating that they somehow sense the field with their eyes.

In 2000 Thorsten Ritz, a physicist then at the University of Southern Florida who has a passion for migratory birds, and his colleagues proposed that entanglement is the key. In their Scenario, which builds on the previous work of Klaus Schulten of the University of Illinois, a bird’s eye has a type of molecule in which two electrons form an entangled pair with zero total spin. Such a situation simply cannot be mimicked with classical physics. When this molecule absorbs visible light, the electrons get enough energy to separate and become susceptible to external influences, including the earths magnetic field. If the magnetic field is inclined, it affects the two electrons differently, creating an imbalance that changes the chemical reaction that the molecule undergoes. Chemical pathways in the eye translate this difference into neurological impulses, ultimately creating an image of the magnetic field in the bird’s brain…

Another biological process where entanglement may operate is photosynthesis, the process whereby plants convert sunlight into chemical energy. Incident light ejects electrons inside plant cells, and these electrons all need to find their way to the same place: the chemical reaction center where they can deposit their energy and set off the reactions that fuel plant cells. Classical physics fails to explain the near-perfect efficiency with which they do so…

The division between the quantum and classical worlds appears not to be fundamental. It is just a question of experimental ingenuity, and few physicists now think that classical physics will ever really make a comeback at any scale. If anything, the general belief is that if a deeper theory ever supersedes quantum physics, it will show the world to be even more counterintuitive that anything we have so far…