2. J. Fonda, My Life So Far, London: Ebury Press, 2005: 571.
THE INTENTION EXPERIMENT is no ordinary book, and you are no ordinary reader. This is a book without an ending, for I intend for you to help me finish it. You are not only the audience of this book, but also one of its protagonists – the primary participants in cutting-edge scientific research. You, quite simply, are about to embark on the largest mind-over-matter experiment in history.
The Intention Experiment is the first ‘living’ book in three-dimensions. The book, in a sense, is a prelude, and the ‘contents’ carry on well beyond the time you finish the final page. In the book itself, you will discover scientific evidence about the power of your own thoughts, and you will then be able to extend beyond this information and test further possibilities through a massive, ongoing international group experiment, under the direction of some of the most well-respected international scientists in consciousness research. Through The Intention Experiment’s website (www.theintention experiment.com), you and the rest of the readers of this book will be able to participate in remote experiments, the results of which will be posted on the site. Each of you will become a scientist at the hub of some of the most daring consciousness experiments ever conducted.
The Intention Experiment rests on an outlandish premise: thought affects physical reality. A sizeable body of research exploring the nature of consciousness, carried on for more than 30 years in prestigious scientific institutions around the world, shows that thoughts are capable of affecting everything from the simplest machines to the most complex living beings.1 This evidence suggests that human thoughts and intentions are an actual physical ‘something’ with the astonishing power to change our world. Every thought we have is a tangible energy with the power to transform. A thought is not only a thing; a thought is a thing that influences other things.
This central idea, that consciousness affects matter, lies at the very heart of an irreconcilable difference between the world view offered by classical physics – the science of the big, visible world – and that of quantum physics – the science of the world’s most diminutive components. That difference concerns the very nature of matter and the ways it can be influenced to change.
All of classical physics, and indeed the rest of science, is derived from the laws of motion and gravity developed by Isaac Newton in his Principia, published in 1687.2 Newton’s laws described a universe in which all objects moved within the three-dimensional space of geometry and time according to certain fixed laws of motion. Matter was considered inviolate and self-contained, with its own fixed boundaries. Influence of any sort required something physical to be done to something else – a force or collision. Making something change basically entailed heating it, burning it, freezing it, dropping it or giving it a good swift kick.
Newtonian laws, science’s grand ‘rules of the game’, as the celebrated physicist Richard Feynman once referred to them,3 and their central premise, that things exist independently of each other, underpin our own philosophical view of the world. We believe that all of life and its tumultuous activity carries on around us, regardless of what we do or think. We sleep easy in our beds at night, in the certainty that when we close our eyes, the universe doesn’t disappear.
Nevertheless, that tidy view of the universe as a collection of isolated, well-behaved objects got dashed in the early part of the twentieth century, once the pioneers of quantum physics began peering closer into the heart of matter. The tiniest bits of the universe, those very things that make up the big, objective world, did not in any way behave themselves according to any rules that these scientists had ever known.
This outlaw behaviour was encapsulated in a collection of ideas that became known as the Copenhagen Interpretation, after ?the place where the forceful Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his brilliant protégé, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, formulated the likely meaning of their extraordinary mathematical discoveries. Bohr and Heisenberg realized that atoms are not little solar systems of billiard balls but something far more messy: a tiny cloud of probability. Every subatomic particle is not a solid and stable thing, but exists simply as a potential of any one of its future selves – or what is known by physicists as a ‘superposition’, or sum, of all probabilities, like a person staring at himself in a hall of mirrors.
One of their conclusions concerned the notion of ‘indeterminacy’; that you can never know all there is to know about a subatomic particle all at the same time. If you discover information about where it is, for instance, you cannot work out at the same time exactly where it is going or at what speed. They spoke about a quantum particle as both a particle – a congealed, set thing – and a ‘wave function’ – a big smeared-out region of space and time, any corner of which the particle may occupy. It was akin to describing a person as comprising the entire street where he lives.
Their conclusions suggested that, at its most elemental, physical matter isn’t solid and stable – indeed, isn’t an anything yet. Subatomic reality did not resemble the solid and reliable state of being described to us by classical science, but an ephemeral prospect of seemingly infinite options. So capricious seemed the smallest bits of nature that the first quantum physicists had to make do with a crude symbolic approximation of the truth – a mathematical range of all possibility.
At the quantum level, reality resembled unset jelly.
The quantum theories developed by Bohr, Heisenberg and a host of others rocked the very foundation of the Newtonian view of matter as something discrete and self-contained. They suggested that matter, at its most fundamental, could not be divided into independently existing units and indeed could not even be fully described. Things had no meaning in isolation, but only in a web of dynamic interrelationship.
The quantum pioneers also discovered the astonishing ability of quantum particles to influence each other, despite the absence of all those usual things that physicists understand are responsible for influence, such as an exchange of force occurring at a finite velocity. Once in contact, particles retained an eerie remote hold over each other. The actions – for instance, the magnetic orientation – of one subatomic particle instantaneously influenced the other, no matter how far they were separated.
At the subatomic level, change also resulted through dynamic shifts of energy; these little packets of vibrating energy constantly traded energy back and forth to each other like ongoing passes in a game of basketball, a ceaseless to-ing and fro-ing that gave rise to an unfathomably large basic layer of energy in the universe.4
Subatomic matter appeared to be involved in a continual exchange of information, causing constant refinement and subtle alteration. The universe was not a storehouse of static, separate objects, but a single organism of interconnected energy fields in a constant state of becoming. At its infinitesimal level, our world resembled a vast network of quantum information, with all its component parts constantly on the phone.
The only thing dissolving this little cloud of probability into something solid and measurable was the involvement of an observer. Once these scientists decided to have a closer look at a subatomic particle by taking a measurement, the subatomic entity that existed as pure potential would ‘collapse’ into one particular state.
The implications of these early experimental findings were profound: living consciousness somehow was the influence that turned the possibility of something into something real. The moment we looked at an electron or took a measurement, it appeared that we helped to determine its final state. This suggested that the