Join us on a thought-provoking journey as we unravel the depths of scientific inquiry with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. With a background in biochemistry and a penchant for challenging established norms, Dr. Sheldrake explores concepts such as the variability of universal constants and the revolutionary idea of morphic resonance. Delve into discussions on the speed of light, the concept of dark matter, and the role of consciousness and belief systems in shaping scientific exploration. This episode promises to spark curiosity and inspire new perspectives.
00:00:00 Scientific Assumptions About the Big Bang
The usual scientific assumption is that all the laws of nature and all the constants of nature were fixed and emerged from nothing at the moment of the Big Bang, along with all the energy and matter in the universe. And as my friend Terence McKenna used to say, modern science is based on the principle, give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest. And the one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe and all the laws of nature from nowhere in a single instant.
SPEAKER 04 :
I see what you did there. One free miracle. I love it.
SPEAKER 02 :
and DNA Scholars can’t explain it all away Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God Tune in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keepin’ it real
SPEAKER 05 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. This is Real Science Radio. I’m Fred Williams.
SPEAKER 03 :
And I’m Doug McBurney, Bible student, science geek, amateur comedian. Fred, it is great to be back with you talking about real science on Friday.
SPEAKER 05 :
Today we have a very special guest joining us, an absolutely brilliant scientist. And it’s none other than the renowned Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. He’s coming to us from the United Kingdom. So welcome to Real Science Radio, Dr. Sheldrake. Good to be with you.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, yes, Dr. Sheldrake, I have been looking forward to this interview literally for years. Ever since I watched your video experiment with dogs and their owners, and it wasn’t just watching the video, it was then doing a little bit of research and discovering the controversy around dogs. The intensive efforts to disprove anything you said. And you have quite a biography. And for time, I’ll have to summarize for our audience. Dr. Sheldrake earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cambridge University. He is… an author or co-author of 15 books and more than 100 research papers. In fact, on ResearchGate, Dr. Sheldrake’s research interest score, which combines the number of reads, recommendations, and citations, is in the top 4% of all scientists. Dr. Sheldrake is best known for his theory of morphic resonance and his ability to cause acute discomfort among those he’s dubbed, quote, a scientific priesthood with an authoritarian mentality. And for time, I’ve left a great deal out, Dr. Sheldrake. Is there anything else in particular that you would like to add?
SPEAKER 01 :
I think that’s enough to start with, Doug.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, Dr. Sheldrake, a couple years ago on one of our shows on the Universal Constance, we played a clip from a TED Talk that you had that apparently got banned. And I think it was on your book, The Science Delusion. And you questioned some dogmas in science, such as the Universal Constance. And at the time, we were particularly interested in your view on the speed of light and how it had, and I emphasize past tense, had changed in the past. Can you elaborate a little bit on that for our audience? Because there’s a topic related to plasma cosmology that you may be familiar with that our audience tends to, we tend to have a view that the speed of light did change in the past.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I didn’t come to this with any particular presuppositions, but I got interested in the so-called constants of nature because I thought this is a kind of dogmatic assumption that they’re constant constants. Are they really? So, you know, I believe in empirical evidence. I took a look at the historical record. I had to go to the Patent Office Library in London because most libraries throw away the handbooks of physical constants when a new edition comes along. But fortunately, they kept them. So I managed to get them to get, you know, from the 1910s, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, etc. They brought them out from their reserve stock room, dusting them off. And I found that if you looked at the actual records, almost all the constants vary quite a lot, including the speed of light, which dropped by 20 kilometers per second between 1928 and 1945 all over the world. And the figures they were showing have tiny error bars. You know, it’s not as if they had errors of 30 kilometers per second. They had errors of, you know, 0.001 kilometer per second. And so there’s a huge change. Well, I went and talked to the head of metrology, the science that measures these things, at the National Physical Laboratory in London. I asked him about it, and he said he was a little bit embarrassed by it. He actually said, you’ve discovered perhaps the most embarrassing incident in the history of our science. So I said, well… How do you explain the fact that all around the world people were getting at 20 kilobytes per second lower than before? And I said, were they just fudging the results to get what they expected? He said, we don’t like to use the word fudge. I thought, what do you prefer? He said, we prefer the more delicate phrase, intellectual phase locking. Anyway, well, I said, it changed in the past, so how do we know it’s not going to change in the future? And he then said, it can’t. And I said, why not? He said, we fixed it by definition. And he said, we’ve then defined the units of time and space, the meter and the second, in terms of light itself. So if the speed of light does change, no one will ever notice. Nobody will ever notice that. Right.
SPEAKER 05 :
So they tied the speed of light to the meter itself, and so you can never, ever detect another change in the speed of light. That’s amazing.
SPEAKER 01 :
They fixed that one, but they haven’t fixed the gravitational constant, which still varies quite a lot. And as I was leaving, he was very friendly. As I was leaving, he reached down to below his desk. There was a cardboard box down by his desk. He said… You might be interested in this. He said, these pamphlets have just come from the printers. He handed one to me and said, the latest values of the physical constants.
SPEAKER 05 :
That’s amazing.
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Now, did he say that without a trace of irony? Yes. Yes.
SPEAKER 05 :
So intellectual phase locking, is that because all these different people from different parts around the globe were coming up with the same numbers, and in order to fudge them, they had to all interlock? Yeah.
SPEAKER 01 :
there is that that’s referring to i think he’s just referring to the fact they had to they got the expected answer and gotcha that is they they correct their answers they discard outlying values that kind of thing and you know when they get the expected answer they just sort of stop the correction process so um you know that’s basically what was going on apparently
SPEAKER 05 :
Gotcha. So are you aware of Barry Satterfield’s idea that speed of light was faster in the past?
SPEAKER 01 :
I’m not sure if you’ve ever… No, I haven’t actually, no.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, because I know I’ve listened to some of your stuff. Your intellect is incredible and you know so much about physics and like zero point energy. And so he believes zero point energy increased in the past so that the speed of light, it’s like swimming through molasses. So… You know, we’re creationists here and we believe, you know, that the universe isn’t that old. It’s, you know, seven, maybe 7,000 years old. But we have a real difficult time explaining distant starlight. And so he had come up with this idea that speed of light was faster in the past. And because of zero point energy increased, the light was traveling slower as that energy increased. And what was super interesting, and I wish I could get any physicist to work on this, is he’s provided scientific data that the quantized red shifts that we see as we look out match the electron jumps, you know, the quantized differences in electrons in the atom. And I, you know, I haven’t, had anyone really look into that to confirm if it’s true. I just wanted to kind of run that by you and see what your thoughts are on that. And I wasn’t sure, again, if you’d even heard of any of this before.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I’m sorry to say I haven’t, so I can’t really comment on it. Well, how do you explain the redshift, or have you thought about the redshift? Well, I have thought about the redshift, yes. The theory, I mean, there’s the standard theory, of course, that it’s the recession of the Doppler effect. But I’m interested in the unconventional cosmologist Halton Arp. I don’t know, is he on the radar?
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, yeah, they’re definitely familiar with his work, yes.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes. Well, as you know, he thinks that in quasars, they’re creating new matter. He thinks that matter’s being created all the time. It wasn’t just in the Big Bang. And he thinks newly minted matter is being spat out of quasars. And newly minted matter has an intrinsic redshift because it takes time for the rest of the universe to register that it’s there. And that sort of… It affects the redshift. So anyway, that’s another theory of redshift, Halton Arp’s newly minted matter theory. I’m sure there are others. Anyway, I quite like Arp and his ideas, so I’ve paid more attention to that than the others.
SPEAKER 05 :
Gotcha. So do you have an issue with dark matter as an explanatory device for why a galaxy’s stars seem to be moving a lot faster than the amount of matter can allow?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I mean, dark matter I see as just a fudge factor invented by physicists to explain their equations. And basically, the stars and the galaxies don’t behave as they’re supposed to, according to standard gravitational theory. So they’re able to make them fit. by adding in arbitrary amounts of dark matter, which is invisible and unobserved, just to make the equations balance. And, you know, it’s like if you were dealing with a spreadsheet of an account and there are huge gaps in the account. It’s like adding virtual money to fill in the holes. Or actually, banks do it all the time with quantitative easing. They just sort of create extra money. Well, dark matter, I see, is a kind of quantitative easing of matter within the universe to fit the facts.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. Well, very well said. I’ve often observed that many of our atheist friends, they accuse us, Christians, creationists, of any time we don’t know the answer, we just add God. and who they call magic, but we would say that there’s an awful lot more evidence for the Creator, God, than there is for dark matter. I mean, you have the Jewish race persisting for 4,000 years through history, and the Christian religion persisting for 2,000 years in the face of not academic banishment, but actual execution, even crucifixion. And so there’s an awful lot more evidence for what they call our fudge factor than what we recognize as their fudge factor. And I’m very encouraged that you recognize that as a fudge factor. That’s encouraging to me.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah. And I wanted to ask you, Dr. Sheldrake, so, you know, you’ve got your hypothesis on morphic resonance, but maybe for our audience, perhaps a backdrop that they may be interested in is I know you view yourself as a Trinitarian, you know, from a science point of view. And maybe if they had a better understanding of what you’re referring to, I’d like to kind of jump into that a little bit before we talk about morphic resonance, which I think ties into this view.
SPEAKER 01 :
You mean my view on the Holy Trinity?
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, no, not necessarily. But just your position as a Trinitarian, you know, that there’s three different ways of explaining things. And, yeah, if you do have a view on the Holy Trinity, that would be awesome, too. But I’m thinking more along the lines of, is everything just matter and energy? Or is there a third element? You know, is there information? Is the mind and the consciousness separate? I know conscience is something that science has tried to deny for centuries. many decades, if not centuries. And I don’t know, I guess I wanted to maybe start with you elaborating on where you come from on this particular topic of matter, energy, and information.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I prefer the word form to information because information is in-form-mation. It’s that which puts form into things. And I think it’s easier to think in terms of form, just form itself, you know, like the shape of flowers or the shape of an animal or a building or a chair. We’re used to forms and information is a theory about how the form gets there. So I’d rather stick to form. But you see, basically, I think that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which I find a very helpful view, is that the ground of all being is consciousness. And the first revelation of God to Moses in the Old Testament, when Moses says, who are you? He says, I am who I am. Well, that’s a definition of conscious being in the present, of conscious being, I am. it couldn’t be simpler and clearer. But the doctrine of the Holy Trinity says that then in the Logos, the second person of the Holy Trinity, in the beginning was the Word. The word Logos, given its background in Greek philosophy and the fact that the New Testament is written in Greek, basically means forms, ideas. Hindus call it nama-rupa, names and forms. It’s the principle of form or order in the universe. And then the Holy Spirit is the principle of movement or change. All the images of the Spirit are of movement and change. you know, wind blowing over the water, breath, flames of fire, flying birds, and so on. And so, basically, I think what it’s saying is there’s a ground of consciousness behind everything, and this is manifested through the Logos which comes before Jesus of Nazareth. I mean, it says in the Creed, through him all things were made. Well, All things weren’t made through Jesus as Nazareth in AD 0. The whole universe, we differ no doubt how long we think it existed before Jesus, but it certainly existed before him in almost everyone’s view. So I think that basically the principle of form, the Logos is the principle of form and order. And if we look in physics at what his view of matter and energy is, basically physics says that Matter itself is made of energy bound within fields. Fields are what in nature represents form, order, structure, and is what gives shape and structure to the universe. The gravitational field gives the spherical shape to the Sun and the Moon and the Earth and the stars. The electromagnetic fields and the quantum fields shape all matter and all things. So I think that there’s a principle of form and there’s a principle of energy. that moves through them. And what physics calls energy, I think, is the physical manifestation of the Holy Spirit. So I see the whole universe as a manifestation of the divine, not just in an initial act of creation, but in the ongoing sustaining of the whole of nature as it is.
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay. Yeah, you know, we’ve got a really good website, a webpage on number three. So it’s called RSR brought to you by the number three. It’s at rsr.org slash three. And it’s really interesting because in the Bible, there’s all kinds of references to number three. We could go through all kinds. Like, you know, the Hebrew scriptures are composed of three sections, the law, prophets, and writings. God created three archangels and, of course, the Trinity. And then you look at nature and you’ve got the number three, all over the place. I mean, you’ve got, you know, the universe exists in space, matter and time. Space itself exists in three dimensions, height, width, and length, as does time and past, present, future. And even matter appears to be a wave, a particle, and information. And it’s interesting you bring up fields, because I know the late John Wheeler, and I’m sure you’re familiar with him, he said his career was kind of broken into three parts. First particles, then fields, and then everything’s information. So you’ve got a theory on, and if you can maybe get a little bit more into this theory of yours, morphic resonance, because it kind of ties into this, right? So your thought process behind developing that kind of ties into this Trinitarian view in a sense?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes. I mean, I didn’t have a Trinitarian view when I first developed Morphic Resonance. That sort of came later. I went through an atheist phase, like many scientists. Many are still in it. You know, I went through an atheist phase and I came back to a more spiritual view, partly through India, living and working in India, and actually through living and working in India, came back to a Christian path. I was actually confirmed in the Church of South India. And so I found my way back to a question via India. It’s an unusual route, I know. But morphic resonance came earlier than that, and it came because I was trying to understand inheritance of form. I was working on the development of plants at Cambridge, doing research in developmental biology, and I was trying to understand how form is inherited. And I came to the conclusion that genes were grossly overrated. You know, people like Richard Dawkins were going around saying everything’s shaped by selfish genes. I thought genes were very grossly overrated because what they do is code for the structure of proteins, the primary structure of proteins. They don’t code for the shape of your face or the pattern on a bird’s wings or the color of a butterfly’s wings, the patterns on the wings. I thought form had to be inherited in some other way, and instincts which are like the habits of a species, its behavior. And I came up with the idea that if there’s a memory in nature, if there’s a direct connection across time, then many of these surprising puzzles could be explained. Now, most people don’t see them as puzzles because they think genes explain it all. But I was a biochemist. I was teaching biochemistry. about DNA and molecular biology to students at Cambridge. And it wasn’t as if I didn’t know about this. I was personally quite friendly with Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA. I was sort of in the middle of that world, and I came to the conclusion it just wasn’t enough. So the idea of morphic resonance is that there’s a kind of collective memory in each species inherited directly through an influence from all the past members of the species. Each individual contributes to that collective memory and draws upon it. And so, in the most general sense, this suggests that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits. They develop through a kind of natural selection, but they’re not like a kind of fixed Napoleonic code, as most scientists assume, that was given at the moment of the Big Bang. The usual scientific assumption is that all the laws of nature and all the constants of nature were fixed and emerged from nothing at the moment of the Big Bang, along with all the energy and matter in the universe. And as my friend Terence McKenna used to say, modern science is based on the principle, give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest. And the one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe and all the laws of nature from nowhere in a single instant.
SPEAKER 04 :
I see what you did there. One free miracle. I love it.
SPEAKER 03 :
And they accuse us. I wanted to explore. this just a little bit you talk about a collective memory that strikes me as inherently materialist are you saying that there is a material that there is a collective memory that is stored in the material of things or are you referring to something spiritual
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, neither really. What I’m saying is that there’s a collective memory which is not material, it’s not stored in things. The idea that memory is stored in things, you see, treats the question of memory as if it’s something in space. The question where is about something in space, where is it stored? So then you’d have an answer like in the brain or in the genes or something like that. But memory is a relationship in time, not in space. And what I’m suggesting is a direct connection across time, a resonance across time. We’re used to the idea of resonance across space, as in radio waves, as in mobile telephones, as in acoustic resonance, and so on. electro-nuclear magnetic resonance as in scanning devices in medicine. All of these are resonance in space. But what I’m suggesting is a resonance in time from the past to the present based on similarity and that there’s a direct connection. Now that’s not the same as the spiritual realm because I think that this is the way in which all memory in nature works. I think everything in nature has a kind of memory underlying it. The so-called laws of nature have a kind of memory aspect. Even crystals and molecules have a kind of memory from previous crystals and molecules. So it’s not spiritual in the sense it’s not conscious and beyond nature or in a realm of spiritual freedom or anything. It’s part of nature. but it’s not part of nature as conceived by materialists who have on the one hand a belief in eternal non-material laws and on the other hand a kind of nature with no memory in it at all, kind of amnesic matter governed by material laws which are beyond nature. Basically their conception of natural laws is based on a kind of Greek Platonic philosophy of rational principles outside the universe. So, you know, it’s not as if materialists don’t believe in anything. They believe in some supernatural laws which are present at all times and in all places, utterly immutable and totally omnipotent. In fact, they have all the properties of God as traditionally conceived, and like God they’re invisible. So it’s not as if they don’t believe in anything. They have their own very, very strong belief. What I’m saying is I think that belief is misconceived. I think it comes from a Greek philosophical assumption that ultimate reality is eternal and there’s nothing changeable within, truly changeable within nature. Whereas I think the key feature of the whole Judeo-Christian tradition is that there’s a developmental process in nature. Even though we disagree in our interpretation of the book of Genesis, it’s clear that the whole universe isn’t created at once. Those six days, whether they’re days, eons, or ages, we don’t need to discuss now, but it’s a series of stages or processes, the creation story. It’s a process, and the whole Old Testament shows a process, and the New Testament shows a process, a developmental process in time. And so the idea of evolution is, I think, a kind of generalization of the Judeo-Christian view of history as being an unfolding process in time, whereas Greek, Hindu, and Buddhist cosmologies see history as entirely cyclical, just repetitive cycles including reincarnation. Everything just goes in cycles with a kind of eternal basis. Whereas I think this key point of the Judeo-Christian tradition is this process view. And evolution, however one interprets it, or process, is a development in time. And I think that morphic resonance is part of that because it’s… History is changed by what happens. I mean, Christians believe, and I believe as a Christian, that history and the destiny of humanity was changed through the death and resurrection of Jesus. And that changed things for everyone else thereafter. And I think there’s a kind of memory process there. You see, it changes things. Yeah, that’s interesting. No, I’m just saying I think morphic resonance is compatible with a view of developmental change in history and where what’s happened in the past influences what happens now. And it differs from the conventional assumption that it all depends on eternal mathematical laws that are not affected by anything that actually happens.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, it’s interesting that in this discussion that you’ve weaved in kind of the Greek philosophy of immutability, because we could go off on a whole other tangent on that, you know, because we’re not Calvinists here at Real Science Radio. But, you know, maybe what would help our audience on your hypothesis is some examples of what supports it, you know, some evidence that supports it. the idea of morphic resonance. And I think you’ve had examples of like how you can train rats to do something and then somehow rats across the globe learn the same thing without it being taught. It was taught locally and yet globally, rats kind of learn this technique or this new thing.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, there was an actual experiment started at Harvard where they trained rats to escape from a water maze. They had to swim to the right exit. And it took them to start with more than 250 trials before they cottoned on and got it. Within about 25 generations, it only took them about 25 trials to learn. This rate of learning speeded up tenfold. They assumed that it was because of the inheritance of acquired characters, or what we now call epigenetic inheritance. But when this was checked out in Australia and in Scotland, they found their rats started off where the Harvard rats had left off, with about 25 arrows, and they got better and better. But not only did the rats descended from trained parents get better, but all the rats of that breed were getting better. Now that’s what I’d expect with morphic resonance. If a lot of animals learn a new trick, all around the world it should be easier for others to learn it. If lots of humans learn something new, like programming computers, playing video games, surfboarding, snowboarding, it should get easier for others to learn it. And one line of evidence comes from the rather amazing fact that average intelligence in intelligence tests improved all over the world by about 30% over the course of the 20th century, not because people were getting 30% smarter, but because the tests were getting easier to do. And I think the tests were getting easier to do because so many people had done them. And right now, I have an experimental project going on to find out whether it gets easier every day for people to do the New York Times five-letter word puzzle, Wordle.
SPEAKER 05 :
Please tune in next week for the conclusion of our interview with the renowned Dr. Rupert Sheldrake.
SPEAKER 02 :
Scholars can’t explain it all away. Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God.
SPEAKER 1 :
Tune into Real Science Radio. Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keepin’ it real.
