Caitlin Lynagh - Blog

Ok, so please accept my apologies, this blog has turned into an essay and it has been a long time coming. I’ve wanted to write about the ideas behind the science concepts and suggestions which feature in my book Anomaly (The Soul Prophecies) now for a while, but you know, life gets in the way, and hammering out the thoughts in my head in a way that would make sense to everyone has been tricky. The certified physicists struggle with the physic topics that I’ve attempted to write about and I’m wholly unqualified to explain them. Therefore I am going to try and approach this from a philosophical point of view and hope that someone out there can understand my reasoning, thought processes and amateurish diagrams. I know that a fellow physics enthusiast has questioned me about the science in my book and has written a wonderful blog about it at https://thesaganist.wordpress.com/2016/05/24/could-dark-energy-be-another-dimension-of-time/ for anyone who is interested. With that being said, let’s get on with it.

            For those of you who haven’t read my book, Anomaly is about death and the decisions that you make throughout your life. It is about the possibilities and probabilities associated with the path your life has taken and the many paths your life could have taken. Anomaly is also about the decisions others have made and their varying degrees of impact on everyone else. Anomaly explores time as we know it, past, present and future, and separates time into two timelines, the first being human time and the second being Nowtime, a timeline which holds every single physical and imaginary possibility. Within Nowtime, Anomaly looks into human thought, emotion and the imagination, and lastly, Anomaly covers the idea of an afterlife governed by the laws of physics, as opposed to an almighty god-like deity. A lot to digest in a few short sentences, and I’ve barely scraped the surface of the concepts and ideas hidden behind Anomaly.

            Death is a morbid topic to consider especially for an early twenty year old, but I began to think about death and what, if anything, could be logically left of ‘us’ when our biological bodies die. I consider humans to be more than just their biological bodies, I consider humans to be minds made up of thought, emotions and memories, which are influenced and gathered throughout an individual’s life and experiences. So, if the biological body perishes, what happens to all the thoughts, emotions and memories that we have built up over our lives? We can all agree that they weren’t there when we were initially born, or at least, not in the same way. Do they simply disappear and cease to be? Is the energy just taken back and spread out across the universe? Or if our thoughts, emotions and memories remain and exist after the body dies, how and in what form?

            For Anomaly I drew upon the idea of the soul, not a new idea or concept, but my idea of a soul is more like a bubble of energy which contains everything that makes up a person that is not physical, so thoughts, emotions and memories. If everything is made up of the fundamental particles, essentially vibrating bits of energy according to the string theory, then by that logic, thoughts, emotions and memories must also be made up of fundamental particles. This led me to think about how the soul would exist and where exactly? It’s not like people claim they can see the dead on a regular basis, so souls in this sense would have to exist in a way that is invisible to living humans. This wasn’t a particularly hard thing to decide, the human eye can only see a limited range of wavelengths, so a deceased soul could be invisible if it existed outside of those wavelengths. The next thing to consider was what and how the laws of physics would govern this form of energy, considering souls would not have a visible physical body and next to no mass.

            The imagination has no bounds, and time works differently within the mind. Each one of us can imagine ourselves on the other side of the world instantly, whereas in reality it would be impossible to do this with our physical bodies without the aid of some sort of teleportation device. Emotions, thoughts and memories can all be called upon instantly within the mind, despite the resulting chemical and biological reactions that also take place. You can imagine anything you want, meaning that these imaginary possibilities are limitless. Since in Anomaly, the soul is a person’s thoughts, emotions and memories, it would mean that the soul too works as the imagination does. Just like the physical world and it’s dimensions is the ‘field’ the living body walks upon, the imagination and soul would have their own ‘field’ too, unbound by the physical dimensions and laws that we all know and take for granted, in Anomaly I call this field the creative field or the imaginary field.

            If you consider your life for a moment and all the decisions and experiences which have led you to this moment right now, then you can see that certain decisions that you did and didn’t make influenced where you are today. If you can’t think of anything in particular then think about the subjects that you chose and could have chosen when you were taking your GCSE’s or equivalent examinations. Every decision you make, no matter how small, has an impact on the rest of your future. Some decisions are referred to as sliding door moments, where a decision or series of decisions can lead your life in a completely different direction, like coming to an intersection, or walking down a path that suddenly divides into two. Most of the decisions we make on a daily basis don’t affect us very much, or at least, don’t lead to negative consequences. Now think about the decisions your parents made, grandparents and great-grandparents. Every decision your ancestors made and those closest to you, have had and still have an impact on the you that exists now. I think of it as great webs of interlocking decisions where your decisions have good, bad and neutral effects on those closest to you, your descendants, and the rest of the world.

            Even our smallest decisions have an impact on the rest of the world, it is called the butterfly effect, and some decisions carry more weight than others. Whilst the majority of us never have a big impact on humanity as individuals, there are certain people who have had great impacts on the world, usually rulers, scientists, artists, celebrities, etc. There are also people who have had great impacts on the world who have never been recognised or remembered for them. Think how different the world would be today had Hitler never been conceived or born? Or if Franz Ferdinand hadn’t been assassinated? Or if Al Gore had won the 2000 presidential election? Different decisions could have been made; different futures and possibilities may have been our reality today.

            For every individual living person, there are both physical and imaginary possibilities open to them in any given moment. If you opened the contact list on your phone you could (hopefully) choose from a number of friends and family to call in any moment, that is a physical possibility that is open to you. Other physical possibilities could include how you decide to travel to work one day, will you cycle? Walk? Go by train? Take the bus? Or will you drive? How about when you go to the shop to get lunch, will you pick up the healthy salad or go for the bacon sandwich? These are all physical possibilities that could be open to you in one particular moment of time throughout your day. These physical possibilities are less and more likely, so some have a higher probability of occurring than others. For example, if your office place happens to be 50 miles away, it’s unlikely that you will wake up early enough or be willing to walk or cycle all the way to work. You are more likely, as long as it’s available, to go by train, take the bus or drive in this scenario.

            In any moment throughout our lives there are possibilities like this, where some have a higher probability of actually happening than others, regardless of how big or small these possibilities may be. However, it is the rare and remote possibilities that usually have the greatest impacts on our lives. This is effectively quantum tunnelling in action. For example, if an ordinary person purchases a lottery ticket, they have a remote chance of winning the jackpot. If they do happen to pick the winning numbers then the impact a jackpot win will have on their lives and potentially their descendants would be enormous. Extreme positive and negative events like this are events that happen away from the norm, the events which don’t happen on a day to day basis. They are also the reason that we tend to forget the mundane ordinary but the extremes often stick out to us and are easy to remember. The media in particular, love to emphasise the negative events happening throughout the world.

            The creative or imaginary field in Anomaly is, in a nutshell, information – it’s entropy. The field itself is a lattice, linked and woven within what scientists recognise as the quantum field. It behaves like a network of particles, very much how neurons connect in the brain. These particles are tiny particles with varying frequencies and exist in various states simultaneously. You can picture the creative/imaginary field like this; it is a snapshot of a single moment within the entire universe, taking into account all the events that ever happened and could happen. The information held within each snapshot increases with each passing fraction of a moment. This is why the characters Kyle Hunter and Sophia Leto in Anomaly describe Nowtime as time which spirals around human time, in a vortex shape.

            Nowtime shown in red in the diagram to the left is separate but linked to human time through the creative/imaginary field. Everything inside Nowtime is the creative/imaginary field shown by the blue grid pattern in the diagram below. The vertical space/distance between each loop of Nowtime is a single planck’s length graphically speaking, this is actually planck time – the time it takes for light to travel a single planck’s length (which is really, really, really small). Nowtime contains information – all events past and present plus all possibilities that can happen in a single moment Planck-time after. Each loop of Nowtime gets bigger because there is more information/entropy in the universe as human time moves forwards into the future. I also believe that Nowtime would run with the cosmological constant in General Relativity.

            If we were to take a cross-section, a slice through Nowtime, and take a snapshot of that moment, then the middle would be human time, the outside coil would be a circle which is Nowtime, then everything inside would be the fields of science – the Higgs field, the quantum field and within that, the creative/imaginary field. You could think of Nowtime as an extra time dimension that has always been there, even before the Big Bang, everything is held and exists within Nowtime.

            Before the Big Bang, I imagine Nowtime as being a single loop of time with no human time. The Big Bang is mankind’s reference point after all, and at the Big Bang or just before, the single loop of Nowtime split and began to spiral, and human time was effectively born. Why did this happen? Well because of quantum tunnelling, something that has a one in a billion chance of occurring actually happens many times when there are quadrillions of possibilities, those ‘anomalies’ then happen more often than we would have initially thought. As I mentioned before, the rare, long odds have the greatest impacts on us and the universe, like creating the universe for instance. In this sense Nowtime is effectively ‘God’ it is omniscient and omnipresent, it holds all the information in the universe, past, present and future.

            In Anomaly, deceased souls exist within the creative/imaginary field and can create their own afterlife by imagining whatever they want into existence. In this sense the creative/imaginary field is like a giant, unlimited sandbox for the dead. Whatever you can imagine within your mind, can become your reality. So where is this field exactly? Technically it would be all around us, however in Anomaly the deceased exist in space, invisible and undetected by the living, orbiting the planet and very much like a blanket around the Earth’s atmosphere. They are held there with what I describe in Anomaly as Positive energy and the Positive force; however this is not the same as positive/negative energy described by physicists. To try and avoid further confusion I shall simply refer to Anomaly’s version of Positive energy and force as ‘Good’ and Anomaly’s version of Negative energy and force as ‘Bad’.

            The deceased soul would need to be some form of energy, and to be able to create their existence using some form of energy and by manipulating some form of particles. The soul’s energy would need to be either self-sustaining, or the soul would need to get its energy from somewhere else in order to continue existing. In Anomaly, a Good/Positive soul is one that is self-sustaining due to ‘Good’ energy. A Negative/Bad soul is one that is not self-sustaining due to ‘Bad’ energy. This ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ energy is directly linked with human emotions, and is what pulls the afterlife towards Earth. Sounds too airy fairy doesn’t it? One of the best examples of what I am referring to in this blog/essay as the ‘Good’ force and energy is the ‘home advantage’. If you were to look at the statistical data for a number of sports teams you would find that teams that play at their home ground appear to perform better and win more often than the away teams. They seem to have an advantage over the away teams. This can be explained in part due to a number of physical and psychological factors, pressure from the crowd may affect the referee’s judgement, weather differences, and the fact that the away team may have travelled further just to participate. However, because this works both ways, a team that’s out of form, will feel increased pressure from the crowd and therefore will be prone to mistakes and bad decisions. We have all been there before, where we have felt under pressure to perform well and have made silly mistakes as a result. It happens all the time in sport, where a person seems to have the ‘Midas touch’ and can’t lose, so they win every consecutive event they participate in. It also happens in reverse where a person just can’t seem to win, and consistently loses for a period of time and seems to have a ‘bad run’ so to speak.

            In Anomaly, the concept can be described as follows, because there are more home fans ‘hoping’ and cheering on the home team, there is more ‘Good’ energy which gives the home team a slight advantage. As the game/event progresses, if the home team scores this ‘Good’ energy is amplified, the home fans don’t simply believe their team will win, they start to think it is certain. The away fans as a result, still ‘hope’ that their team can pull it back, but they are starting to feel doubtful about their chances. However when the home team scores again, then there is a sudden shift in energy. Confidence soars with the home team and pretty much vanishes with the away team. This energy spirals very quickly in a ‘Good’ way for the home team and a ‘Bad’ way for the away team. The home team scores again and then again and is way ahead by the time the game/event finishes.

            So what emotions are the home fans and away fans feeling? Both have equal passion, love and confidence in their teams at the start of the game, but these emotions quickly change depending on who scores and when. With the first goal for the home team, the passion, love and confidence increases with the home fans. The away fans however, start to feel anxious and doubtful. The second goal and the home fans feel certain that they will win, and the away fans reluctantly feel they are doomed to lose; they start to feel demoralised and saddened. With the next goals scored by the home team, the atmosphere shifts completely, the away fans may even start to leave rather than see their team defeated by the final whistle. People notice this ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ energy intuitively all the time, we can pick up on tensions when we walk into a room, and we recognise when we feel comfortable or uncomfortable around certain people, even if we don’t know them very well.

            Confidence is a big part of ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ as a whole. The more you believe you can do something, the more likely it is to happen, within your own abilities of course. In reverse, if you have a bad run and believe or expect things to go wrong, they often will go wrong. Again, most of us have had days where everything just seems to go right and others when everything just seems to go wrong. You’re subconsciously aiding your own chances of success and failure. Just like the home fans who cheer on their team and believe in their success, prayer works in the same way, or when people collectively send their ‘best wishes’ to someone who is unwell and recovering in hospital. It is a combined energy of ‘Good’ emotions and thoughts which acts as a force to influence events. It cannot yet, be fully understood by science, but it can be measured scientifically and the results are seen constantly in the world around us, the placebo effect is another good example. This same ‘Good’ energy is what pulls you towards your friends and loved ones; you want to be close to the people who you care about and who make you feel good. Similarly, you try to stay away from those who you don’t like. These ‘Good’ feelings and thoughts is what bonds people together, and is the same energy which bonds the afterlife and the deceased to the living, like micro webs of energy/attraction.

            There are then, ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ emotions, but it is not black and white. In Anomaly, ‘Good’ emotions are love, compassion, kindness, selflessness, etc. ‘Bad’ emotions are anger, frustration, hatred, envy, selfishness, etc. However it often depends on the context as to whether or not an emotion could be described as ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’, and often emotions don’t appear on their own either, they're coupled together or several can be interlinked. We recognise that when we’re feeling ‘Good’ we are able to achieve more and feel great about ourselves and our lives. When we are feeling ‘Bad’ however, we do not feel great about ourselves and our lives, we sometimes become depressed. When someone is extremely depressed sometimes they don’t want to eat, they don’t want to get up, and they don’t want to face the world. Their emotions are literally telling them to destroy themselves and their bodies. In this sense ‘Bad’ emotions are destructive; hence why in Anomaly these ‘Bad’ emotions which feed the Negative/Bad energy and force mean that this energy and force are not self-sustaining, they are destructive in their very nature. The same is true in reverse for ‘Good’ emotions which feed the Positive/Good energy and force. This ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ energy and force, although linked with the human conscience and emotions now, haven’t always been, and these forces existed before the Earth was created. These forces and energies have evolved just like humans and the human conscience has evolved.

            So in Anomaly’s version of the afterlife, ‘Good’ souls are self-sustaining and can use the creative field as a means to create their own personal afterlives. I may do a blog at a later stage that will go into the ideas behind souls and emotions in more detail for anyone who is interested. ‘Bad’ souls are not self-sustaining and are limited in what they can do and achieve. In loose terms this is effectively Heaven and Hell, but from a different perspective. Throughout life we are able to ignore our conscience or convince ourselves that we are doing something good when in fact it’s not as good as we hoped or sometimes just outright bad. In the afterlife your conscience is you, you don’t have a biological body or the strains of the living world. You ultimately have to face up to what you’ve done within your conscience over your life, and the resulting energies from those decisions, determines what sort of afterlife you can lead. There is no God-like figure who judges you, you ultimately judge yourself.

            Back to Nowtime, there is an important idea that is really at the heart of Nowtime, it is the idea that there is energy in time and energy is absorbed by time. If you could stop human time, press the pause button on human time and yet could carry on, then time itself would absorb that energy. The easiest way to describe this is to say, if we have an apple and cut it into a hundred pieces which were then scattered all over the country. If you stopped time and then went all around the country to collect the apple pieces and put the apple back together again. That journey could take you a full year of human time and you would use a lot of energy in your quest to find the apple pieces. If you used 2000 calories per day, you would have used 730,000 calories in that quest. When you start the ‘play’ button on time again (and eat your apple) then those 730,000 calories would be absorbed instantly by time. This is effectively how Nowtime works.

            There is a colossal amount of energy in time. Energy that is abundant in the ever expanding universe. It happens in the human time frame too but is indirect – exo-energy. For example, a natural disaster such as an earthquake or tornado. Firstly you have the measurable energy (the energy involved in the event itself) but after that there is the combined energy that is absorbed over time in two stages. One, the clean-up operation, search and rescue, clearing away debris, rebuilding the broken homes, fixing infrastructure, etc. Masses of man-power, fuel and construction energy. Two, the psychological energy; trauma, grief, frustration, displacement, worry, etc (this can last decades after the event). This energy, which indirectly still obeys the laws of thermal dynamics, is absorbed and expelled through time – the energy to do the ‘work’ and the ‘work done’.

            For a deceased ‘Good’ soul to ‘imagine’ and effectively ‘will’ a world into existence around them, it is possible with the energy absorbed in Nowtime. When we use our imagination now and picture ourselves on the other side of the world, there are no limits on our imagination, we are only limited by our physical bodies and our own individual creativity, and we can imagine instantly. In the afterlife, time does not relate to distance, so particles can be ‘willed’ together, so wherever they are in the universe, they can be elsewhere. The idea that energy can be absorbed in time sounds absurd because we think of human time, because human time is always in motion, but with Nowtime this does not happen. We know that the observable universe expands over human time entropically. With Nowtime there’s nowhere for all that information to go, so that energy is stored within time itself and metaphorically speaking, why the vortex shape is also seen to expand. This is effectively dark energy, and the energy that enables the universe to expand.

            As an example, if you were to eat a 200kcal chocolate bar, the energy involved is human time related. In a theoretical situation, the nearer the time gets to 0 the more energy is required to burn off the consumed calories. Eventually there’s equilibrium where you burn off calories as fast as you eat them. Obviously in reality this is physically impossible for a person, but if we get near to and stupidly close to 0, you’d be approaching the speed of light. Therefore, all your particles would be ripped apart by that energy, so much so, they would start behaving like waves. Eventually you would reach planck time because nothing can go faster than the speed of light. However, there is all this energy, Nowtime is always now – it’s instant, this energy is dark energy.

          

            The laws of thermal dynamics still apply and every moment of plank time has to be this absolute moment plus all the possibilities of information that is about to happen in the next moment of planck time. That’s why there is energy in time, it is an extension of special relativity in many ways. Time at this infinitesimally small moment behaves like light.

            Nowtime moves in pulses, like frames of a video, in Planck-time along the arrow of human time. Nowtime holds all cosmological information, and by default conscious thought. All events contained in the Nowtime are connected through the creative field. Current mathematical models build on the space time reference in special relativity, citing causal zones at any event where the points of the cones meet (the middle of the hourglass shape). The idea works with the two timelines in Anomaly, but the visualisation is wrong thus the maths is also wrong. I think it is much easier to visualise a new time dimension with a vortex.

            If Nowtime did exist, the reality would be much more like this. The shaded areas would be the causal zone, which is effectively the creative field for any reference point in human time, if you were to slide the two cones up the human timeline.

            The two cones or hourglass shape is just a mathematical visualisation; the vortex/spiral is the actual visualisation of what is happening. In other words, the cones/hourglass explains what is happening at any point, all the events lead to that moment in time, but it is not as simple as that, the cones/hourglasses happen to every particle, not just one (every individual and every speck of dust). Therefore, for one major event, you would have an infinite number of cones/hourglasses all overlapping one another at that one point; every event has its own cause an effect. Also, the cones/hourglass shape is only relevant after the Big Bang, you can’t go before the Big Bang with these shapes.

            The concept of adding a second dimension of time would mathematically require an extra dimension of space. Events on the Nowtime collapse as human time passes as there are no possibilities beyond that point (from the past) to the present. Time is always now, but all events of the past are held together like a gravitational consequence of each event. This includes consciousness too of all such species, potentially including aliens – any creature that can use a memory or an idea in the future to effectively change the future. For example, an idea you have today you might revisit in 10 years’ time, which could create a chain of events to change the future. It might lead to a new discovery or an ability to travel the universe and colonise other planets. Theoretically, in order for the maths to work the standard model would need changing.

            There is no easy way of measuring any of this, as much as we see the effects around us everyday: Home advantage, placebos – even our own intuition. Ideally we would need to capture a moment in time to measure it, which is not possible – neither is the other indisputable proof, death. So we need to consider scientific ways of measuring the effects of time.

            One way would be to use mental energy to summon matter. This would need a tremendous amount of energy – and also faith. So there would need to be a bit of trickery. Imagine 10,000 eyes in an arena staring at a box. Inside this box is a vacuum and atomic scales. If everybody could focus into that box and imagine seeing something that does not exist such as a blue banana, though it would perhaps need something heavier. Over time the atomic scale would start detecting mass (it would be ever so slight but would be permanent). The problem with this experiment is that it sounds absurd and it’s hard to repeat enough to get enough data to recognise it scientifically.

            Potentially data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could also be used if energy is gained or lost within the process of collisions. This would go towards upholding some of the expected processes of existing string theories. There would need to be some modification of these existing theories though. The nature of the creative/imaginary field and quantum mechanics means you can’t allow for the effects of quantum tunnelling on time. There will always be some random event that completely changes the course of predictability and when you apply that to infinite time the slightest fluctuation – even a 1 in 10⁴⁰ chance event will change the course of everything.

            I guess there is always the possibility that the ideas within Anomaly could be more fact than fiction at some point in the future. If that were to be the case, then I would imagine a number of circumstances and events would have to happen first. A level of particles that as of yet remain undiscovered would be discovered and would have quantum properties. At first scientists might think that this discovery will be something that might prove the existence of multiverses. They may reach this conclusion because the laws of thermal dynamics may appear to have been breached, so they will conclude that the energy must have gone to a multiverse. However, if the Nowtime theory, mathematically speaking could be completed (if Nowtime is considered as a variable and included into the equations), then over time I believe this loss of energy would lend more to the Nowtime theory. That is not to say that the multiverse theory is wrong, there would be no way of proving that, but it is possible that more particles are yet to be discovered which will behave differently because they are effectively used by Nowtime. They would have properties in the same way as mesons and gluons to help these forces and connections in the creative/imaginary field.

            If you’ve stuck this out to the end, then thank you for taking the time to read this lengthy blog. I have gone into more detail here about my ideas and thought process than I have within my book Anomaly, but I do plan to expand on these ideas in my next couple of books which will be part of The Soul Prophecies series. If you have any questions or wish to discuss these ideas further, then please feel free to leave a comment at my wordpress blog https://thebookigloo.wordpress.com/2017/05/05/my-thoughts-ideas-behind-anomaly/