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Physics Of The Supernatural 101

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Posted by Richard Ruquist on November 21, 2000 05:41:44 UTC

Something like 99% of the mass of the universe is Dark Matter. There is in addition twice as much energy as mass if we use the omega for the cosmological constant and mass as the basis of comparison. But I will only discuss the mass.

Scientists do not yet know the composition of Dark Matter. But high energy theories like QCD and the Standard theory, which have experimental confirmation, as well as the unconfirmed GUT, super gravity and superstring theories offer several candidate particles that could make up that mass.

The leading candidate as far as I can tell, and the most interesting such particle is the axion.

The axion is extremely close to being massless. Something like one billionth the mass of a proton. But it is even more extremely numerous, with some 100 billion axions for every proton in the universe. That's why it's thought to be the main constituent of Dark Matter.

Axions cannot be detected, except via very macroscopic effects on stars, etc., that we refer to as caused by Dark Matter. They couple to the physical world of protons, neutrons and electrons via gravity. In a static magnetic field they also couple to photons. No other coupling mechanisms are known.

If we reverse the perspective for a moment, we can say that axions can detect mass and light.

However, the most interesting property of axions, which comes out of the Grand Unified Theory (GUT), a theory that unifies all forces except gravity, is their property of motionlessness. They have no relative motion to space. They just sit there, provided they are not excited by light or gravity.
But because they are so massless and numerous, excitations in the axion medium are like waves in a pond. Throw a rock in and you make waves that propagate, but the water molecules themselves do not propagate. So the axion medium is a static medium that can support 3-d waves, just like air supports sound waves that propagate at the speed of sound, while the air is relatively motionless.

Moreover, since axion particles do not move, their temperature is at absolute zero. That is the most important characteristic of other super materials like superconductors and superfluids. These materials, when at or near absolute zero, have no friction. In quantum mechanics they are called Bose-Einstein Condensates. They can support macroscopic quantum waves without collapsing them. That is why they are supernatural- because of the macroscopic quantum effects.

It's a curious coincidence that the supernatural which we have come to know from ghost and occult stories may have a basis in a axionic superfluid.

So I cannot prove that the axionic superfluid is the basis of our common understanding of what the supernatural is. But it has all the right properties to be a leading candidate. An unproven collory is thay much of Dark Matter may house a supernatural world.

Religous people should not find this too farfetched. Afterall, heaven has to be a supernatural place- it's certainly not physical. And dark matter permeates our entire galaxy, and even spreads out beyond its physical boundaries. It permeates our solar system and the earth.

But remember that it's suffers from gravitational attraction. Therefore, it tends to cluster around and within dense bodies like planets and stars and even rocks and trees and human beings. But most likely the earth controls the static distribution of axions in our neighborhood, and we just make waves in the axion fluid.

So I hypothesize that this axion superfluid can support such effects as astral projection and afterlife as well as gods and ghosts, and heaven and hell. Axions appear to be quite passive. So reality is probably much more complicated than being merely axions. But the axions may provide for the immediate coupling from the physical world to the more complex parts of the supernatural world.

Hence the focus of a scientific approach must be on how information can pass to and from the physical world to the axion medium, in particular from the physical human brain to what might be called the human soul. Penrose in Shadows of the Mind has proposed several such mechanisms. But that's a whole other story. So perhaps it's time to stop and see if these ideas are of interest to anyone. Suffice it to suggest that your dreams may axionic.

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