Free Beyond Coincidence by Martin Plimmer

of a pond, the only observable evidence of a general connecting principle of nature, a major force in the universe similar to gravity. But whereas gravity works only on objects with mass, seriality affects both objects and consciousness, bringing things together by affinity. Kammerer thought the peaks that we call coincidences are glimpses of a hyper-connected universe whose weblike workings we are only vaguely aware of and nowhere near understanding. “Seriality is ubiquitous in life, nature, and cosmos,” he said. “It is the umbilical cord that connects thought, feeling, science, and art with the womb of the universe that gave birth to them.”
    He concluded, “We thus arrive at the image of a world mosaic or cosmic kaleidoscope, which, in spite of constant shufflings and rearrangements, also takes care of bringing like and like together.”
    Kammerer lived at a time when the classical laws of physics were starting to groan under the strain of startling new discoveries and ideas. The clockwork universe had been ticking along reliably since the seventeenth century, when René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, and others established its rational basis in human thought. In the nineteenth century, matter was held to be the fundamental and final reality. Scientists saw the universe as a grand machine governed by immutable laws, every part interacting with every other part in a logical and predictable fashion. Time ticked reliably along from past to present—you could set your watch by it. Effect followed cause in reassuringly strict sequence. You could ascertain the cause of something by examining the effect, and the laws affecting one part of the machine applied to all parts of the machine. It was a reductionist approach: you could analyze anything by breaking it down and examining its parts.
    The wrench in the works was human consciousness, which stubbornly refused to be broken down. Where did sentience, self-awareness, and free will fit in to a purely material universe? Just how the mind works and what thinking is are two of the profoundest mysteries. The attempt by classical science to explain the human mind away as a sort of fancy computer, quite apart from being intrinsically unattractive, was unconvincing.
    The twentieth century brought with it new ways of looking outward into space and inward into the atom. Both directions offered astonishing revelations that confounded classical realities. We learned that energy and matter were two different expressions of the same thing (“a somewhat unfamiliar concept for the average mind,” said Einstein with understatement), that light was deflected by gravity, and that time, which previously had waited for no man, was prepared to make an exception if he was traveling at the speed of light. Light itself was revealed as contrary, behaving sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a stream of particles, depending on how it was observed. Out in deep space unthinkably dense black holes gyred and roiled, sucking in stars and light, distorting space and time around their circumferences and emitting the deepest roar in the Universe.
    Inside the atom, formerly thought to be an indivisible ball (hence the name, from the Greek atomos, meaning uncuttable), there was revealed a miniature universe in which things happened that contradicted the classical laws pertaining to the big world. Here gravity held no sway because atoms were held together by their own, vastly stronger special forces, cause and effect didn’t seem to apply, and the exact states of particles could never be predicted. The behavior of a light photon encountering a sunglass lens is impossible to predict. We know the probability of photons bouncing off the surface and also the probability of them going straight through, but it is impossible to predict what any individual photon will do or know why it has chosen that behavior. Science, with its dependency on hard measurable facts,