QuantumFog

April 2, 2007

Altering realities

Robert Lanza likes his biotechnology. In fact, he's the vice-president of R&D at a company called Advanced Cell Technology where he specializes in stem cells. And he is a professor at the Wake Forest School of Medicine. If you've ever heard of a Fulbright Scholar, he's one of them, too.

Lanza was a member of the team that first cloned a human embryo, he was the first to clone an endangered species and the first to demonstrate a way to reverse the aging process by transplanting cell nuclei.

The good professor shares his perspective on things in the latest issue of The American Scholar. He joins a growing number of scientists who wonder if a falling tree in the forest actually makes a sound. Let's check one of his statements.

"We open the door to rain, snow, or trees swaying in the breeze. We think the world churns along whether we happen to open the door or not. Quantum mechanics tells us it doesn't."

We'll need to pay close attention now:

"When you turn from one room to the next, when your animal senses no longer perceive the sounds of the dishwasher, the ticking clock, the smell of a chicken roasting - the kitchen and all its seemingly discrete bits dissolve into nothingness - or into waves of probability. The universe bursts into existence from life, not the other way around as we have been taught. For each life there is a universe, its own universe. We generate spheres of reality, individual bubbles of existence. Our planet is comprised of billions of spheres of reality, generated by each individual human and perhaps even by each animal."

Usually, such perceptions come from things like quantum entanglement in physics, rarely from other disciplines. It would be interesting for Professor Lanza to give us a proof of concept from the world of biology.

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