Free Beyond Coincidence by Martin Plimmer Page A

found itself treading water in a probabilistic universe that confounded the old certainties.
    Electrons, those tiny particles that exist in orbits around an atom’s nucleus, exhibited the same wave/particle duality as light, suggesting that in a microscopic sense, all matter is wavelike. Electrons were very mysterious; Einstein called them “spooky.” They appeared able to exist in twenty places at once (quantum superposition), they would suddenly change their behavior for no causal reason, and if a pair of linked particles were separated they exactly mirrored each other thereafter (quantum entanglement), whether they were two feet or a billion miles apart. An experiment that changed the state of one would be instantly reflected by a corresponding change in the state of the other, the information having passed between them across any distance instantaneously. Each particle seemed to “know” what the other was doing. The phenomenon is very difficult to explain as it violates Einstein’s law that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Scientists have used the word “telepathy” to describe it and have even speculated that the particles’ separation may be an illusion.
    More alarming for traditional scientists was how personal the study of the atoms’ interior parts was becoming. As soon as a subatomic particle such as an electron was measured (i.e., observed) it changed its behavior. If you tried to measure a particle you found something that looked like a particle, otherwise it behaved as a wave. Things changed when you looked at them so you could never know what they looked like before you looked. Interpretation was necessary. Scientists were forced to be subjective—that intimate adjective that also defines the essence of consciousness and coincidence. Quantum physics seemed to be teaching us that at the microscopic level there may be no objective reality; that what we observe is always affected by the presence of the observer. Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who first postulated the existence of the neutrino in 1931, said: “On the atomic level the objective world ceases to exist.”
    With science getting weirder and weirder all the time, the claims of ESP (extrasensory perception) and psychokinesis, collectively known as psi, are starting to sound rather tame. It’s almost as though science has decided to take on psi at its own game of fantastic unbelievability and is beating it hands down.
    Look at the Narnia-like world of the atom; it’s a place so small you can’t even see it, a world that from our remote distance seems utterly condensed and claustrophobic, yet the closer you get to its paradoxical and common-sense-defying reality, the wider its wide open spaces are revealed to be. The atom is about .000004 of an inch across, but 99.99 percent of its volume is empty space. If we drew an atom to scale, making its nucleus .3937 of an inch then its electrons would measure less than the diameter of a hair, and the entire atom’s diameter would be greater than thirty-three football fields laid end to end. In between—nothing. Scientists believe that in a human body the relationship between so-called mass and space is 200 trillion to 1. Einstein calculated that if the space between all the atoms in all the human beings on Earth were removed, leaving only concentrated matter, you would be left with something about the size of a baseball (though a lot heavier).
    If a neutrino, one of Pauli’s tiny, chargeless, and virtually massless particles that are created by nuclear explosions on distant stars and blow through space in their billions, were able to see as it hurtled toward Earth at the speed of light, it would register our planet only as a patch of barely differentiated haze, through which it would pass like a bullet, not interacting with it at all.
    So if this bedrock we believe we stand upon is little more than an