The Bond

How to Fix Your Falling-Down World

Lynne McTaggart

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781451610529
• Topic: Naturwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Chaotisches Verhalten in Systemen

For centuries, Western science and many Western cultures have taught us to think of ourselves as individuals. But today, a revolutionary new understanding is emerging from the laboratories of the most cutting-edge physicists, biologists, and psychologists: What matters is not the isolated entity, but the space between things, the relationship of things. The Bond. By international bestselling author Lynne McTaggart, The Bond is the culmination of her groundbreaking work. It offers a completely new, scientific story of life and the human experience, one that challenges the very way we conceive of ourselves and our world. The Bond shows that the essential impulse of all life is a will to connect rather than a drive to compete. In fact, we are inescapably connected, hardwired to each other at our most elemental level—from cells to whole societies. The desire to help others is so necessary that we experience it as one of our chief pleasures, as essential as eating and having sex, and we succeed and prosper only when we see ourselves as part of a greater whole. Every conflict that occurs—whether between husband and wife, social or racial groups, or nations—is resolved only when we can fully see and embrace the space—the bond—between us. McTaggart offers detailed recommendations to help foster more holistic thinking, more cooperative relationships, and more unified social groups. Blending interviews and human stories into an absorbing narrative, she shows how: • A simple daily practice conditions the brain to enable you to become more empathetic toward others • A new way of speaking and listening can overcome polarization, helping the staunchest of enemies to become close friends • People who fire together wire together: Whenever a group works together for a common goal, the brains of all parties begin to get on the same wavelength, strengthening the bond within the group • Fairness is more powerful than unfairness: A small group of individuals committed to strong reciprocity can "invade" a population of self-interested individuals and create a fairer society The Bond offers a breathtaking, visionary plan for a new way to live, in harmony with our true nature and with each other, and a new way to heal our relationships, our neighborhoods, and our world.

PART I

THE SUPERORGANISM

The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important.

Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

CHAPTER 1

THE HUNT FOR THE THING

On a bench the size of two SUVs at the University of California at Berkeley, Graham Fleming and his colleagues in the chemistry department have set up the scientific equivalent of a pinball machine. Numerous precision lasers, which pulse out light at millions of a billionth of a second, are placed at various strategic points and trained onto an obstacle course of mirrors and glass lenses, themselves aimed at a tiny solitary black box. Once the machines are switched on, the laser light generated by these ultrafast devices will career off each mirror and lens before shooting inside and alighting on the box’s contents: a tiny sampling of a green sulfur bacteria. The light from the lasers is supposed to mimic the sun, for this type of bacteria, for all intents and purposes, is a plant, with the same extraordinary photosynthetic ability to convert sunlight into energy inside its cells.

By tracking the means by which a rudimentary living thing harnesses the power of the sun and converts it into stored energy, Fleming, a British-born sixty-year-old, hopes to solve the central mystery of plants: their ruthless efficiency. The miracle is not only that the plant can manage this feat at all, but that it does so by using every last photon that comes its way.

The most sophisticated machine on earth cannot begin to mimic the energy production of a plant. Every manmade activity of rough equivalence diminishes the initial store of energy by more than 20 percent in the process of transforming from one type of energy to another. If humans could learn to capture and transform solar energy through even a crude approximation of the manner in which plants do, mankind’s future energy needs would be forever secure.

The other aspect of the mystery is more elementary: how a simple living system like a plant can generate the world’s oxygen and carbohydrates through a reaction powered by the electricity that it essentially creates from light.

The key to studying this extraordinary process lies in tracking the path of electron energy inside the protein scaffolding of the cell, which connects the bacteria’s exterior solar panels, or chlorosomes, the harvesters of sunlight, to reaction centers at the heart of the cells, the tiny crucible where the miracle of conversion takes place.

Fleming’s experiment takes a tiny fraction of the time it takes to flicker an eyelid. As soon as the pulsed light from the lasers hits the protein, it excites the electrons, and the resulting energy then needs to find the most direct route along the tiny protein scaffolding track to the reaction centers. This is a complex and potentially time-consuming task, according to conventional physics, as there are many possible pathways and end points that the electron’s energy must seek out and eliminate, one by one.

What Fleming discovered is nothing less than a giant chink in the entire edifice of accepted biology. Rather than a single pathway, the energy reaches its target by trying out several routes simultaneously. Only when the final connection is made and the end of the road reached does the energy track its most efficient course—retroactively—and the energy follow that single path. It appears as if the optimum route were chosen backward in time, after all possibilities have been exhausted. It is as if a person lost in a labyrinth had tried all possible pathways at the same time, and after finally discovering the correct pathway to the exit, eliminated all trace of his rehearsals.

Fleming’s discovery is a wholly unexpected answer to his line of inquiry: the plant is so efficient because the energy generated by its messenger electrons is able to occupy more than one location at the same time.

Fleming is making some of the first tentative forays into what has been called “quantum biology,” producing the first evidence that life on earth is driven by the laws of quantum physics, and his experiment is necessarily crude. It substitutes laser light for true sunlight and is carried out at temperatures of 70 kelvin (or –333.7˚F), an environment far too cold for most plants to survive.

Nevertheless, with his background in physics as well as chemistry, Fleming realizes the import of what he has just witnessed. As the founders of quantum theory, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his brilliant German protégé, Werner Heisenberg, discovered in the early part of the twentieth century, subatomic particles like electrons and photons by themselves aren’t an actual anything yet. Atoms are not little solar systems of billiard balls but rather a messy little cloud of probability. They exist in many places simultaneously, in a state of pure potential—or, as physicists refer to it, “superposition”—the sum of all probabilities. A subatomic particle like those in Fleming’s bacteria essentially experiments with this pathway and that pathway at the same time before choosing the optimum pathway to the reaction site.

One of the conclusions of their theory, which has become known as the Copenhagen Interpretation, after the city where Bohr and Heisenberg first hammered out the inescapable conclusions of their mathematical discoveries, is the idea of indeterminacy, the fact that you can never fully know everything about a subatomic particle. If you measure where it is, for instance, you cannot also work out where it is going or at what speed. Bohr and Heisenberg recognized that a quantum particle can exist as both a particle, a congealed, bullet-like thing, and a “wave function,” a big smeared-out region of space and time, any corner of which the particle may occupy.

In a quantum state a particle exists as a collection of all possible future selves all at the same time, like an endlessly replicated chain of paper dolls. An electron “probably” exists until scientists pin it down and take a measurement, at which point its multiple selves collapse and the electron settles down into a single state of being.

If the results of Fleming’s experiment are verified—and others have now successfully carried out the experiment on real plants at room temperature—this will mean that the most fundamental process of the universe, the process responsible for life on earth, is driven by a mechanism that isn’t actually anything at all, at least according to our usual definition of things. The electron driving photosynthesis is a will-o’-the-wisp, impossible to pin down or locate with precision.1 Fleming’s experiment also lays bare a much larger possibility: that all of life is created and sustained by something so ephemeral that we may not even be able to identify what it actually is, much less locate where it is with precision.

* * *

Although revolutionary in its implications, Graham Fleming’s discovery is not especially revelatory to quantum physicists. Many within this discipline have been casting about without success to find the thing: the smallest thing that creates all other things in the world. All modern suppositions about our physical universe rest on the belief that life is composed of things, which in turn are made up of littler things, and that we can understand the big things by seeking out and naming the little things.

Ever since a Muslim physicist named Ibn al-Haytham developed the scientific method more than a thousand years ago, scientists have attempted to take apart the universe like one vast radio to examine its component parts. For the past hundred years or so they have been preoccupied with attempting to locate the tiniest of its building blocks. In 1909 the Nobel Prize–winning New Zealand chemist Ernest Rutherford and his colleagues at the University of Manchester created the Rutherford model of the atom, a tiny solar system of orderly electrons, after discovering what at first was believed to be its sun and one of the world’s smallest units: the nucleus. Rutherford’s model took a slight hammering when a colleague from Cambridge, the British physicist James Chadwick, went on to discover an even smaller particle inside the nucleus: the neutron.

Chadwick posited that the constituents of an atom, the protons, electrons, and neutrons, are the most fundamental units of our world—until it was discovered that, like a Russian doll, within these particles lay still smaller particles.

In 1969 science briefly congratulated itself on isolating what it thought was the most essential of the universe’s elements when the quark was discovered—until an alphabet soup of other particles was found or postulated in the following decades: muons and tauons, positrons and gravitons, particles with force and particles without force, upsilon particles, tau neutrino, and the most recent discoveries, skyrmions and goldstinos and dyons and pomerons and luxons, plus strongly interacting “composite particles” like hadrons and even hypothetical particles born of supersymmetry theories.

To make sense of all these entities, physicists produced the Standard Model, the Rosetta Stone of modern particle physics, which lumps all these hundreds of varieties of particles and impossibly complicated interactions into three families and their fundamental interactions and flavors: six types of quarks, six leptons, and a variety of bosons, or “force carrier” particles, which include the tiniest unit of light, the photon; gluons, something called weak-gauge bosons, plus gravitons and the Higgs boson, the latter two classifications assumed to exist but never actually yet seen.

However elegant the Standard Model is as a theory, enabling scientists to reduce all these dozens of particles into mathematical shorthand, the bottom line is that physicists still cannot isolate one single structure and claim with any confidence that this is it, the smallest currency of the universe, the final individual entity out of which our world derives. Most of the dozens of particles discovered after World War II are now thought not to be elementary but rather composites of particles; in fact physicists now allow that it may be impossible ever to prove that these particles can be further separated into their component parts.

Physicists assume that certain particles are more elementary than others—that quarks are more elemental than, say, nucleons or pions. Nevertheless, as the Nobel Prize–winning American particle physicist Steven Weinberg once lamented, “We cannot reach any final conclusion about the elementarity of the quarks and gluons themselves.”2

What scientists have settled for, in the Standard Model theory, is a fuzzy approximation that may have as much to do with the final truth of life as a cyborg has to do with a human being. The Standard Model is likely to prove only a vague approximation for some more fundamental theory that will reveal itself once scientists have invented higher energy particle accelerators, at which point we might discover that the tiniest of these particles isn’t in fact the smallest Russian doll but simply another doll with more dolls inside.

* * *

One reason for this continuing difficulty in locating the smallest piece of the universe may be the simple fact that nothing, finally, exists independently. Although we consider matter discrete and definable, the fact is that it cannot be compartmentalized into anything definitive. Even the smallest structure of matter may prove impossible to separate from its neighbors, place a fence around, and say with any finality that here is where it begins and there is where it ends. For anything smaller than an atom we cannot figure out if a subatomic thing exists on its own or as a composite of elements.

The closer scientists look, the more they discover how dependent on, and finally indivisible from, everything is with everything else. Werner Heisenberg referred to this fact as the “most important experimental discovery of the last 50 years.” He also noted that even the question of what particles “consist [of] no longer has any rational meaning”: “A proton, for example, could be made up of neutron and pion, or Lambda-hyperon and kaon, or out of two nucleons and an anti-nucleon; it would be simplest of all to say that a proton just consists of continuous matter, and all these statements are equally correct or equally false. The difference between elementary and composite particles has thus basically disappeared.”3 In fact the very word “particle,” with its suggestion of a separate and corporeal reality, is a misnomer. When particle physicists get down to the bottom layer of matter there isn’t re...