BACKGROUND TO THE WAY IN WHICH THEORY WAS DEVELOPED

Rupert Sheldrake published his ‘New Science of Life’ in 1981, presumably having developed his ideas during the late seventies. I developed Duplication Theory during a bout of unemployment over two years commencing January 1977 following the mid seventies property crash. The theory (more correctly a hypothesis) is very similar in many of its conclusions to those of Sheldrake’s morphic resonance, and proposes a mechanism to explain the operation of the latter. Some of the following inevitably repeats parts of the full explanation in B. above. In reading the work of others I have often found that the best way to properly understand a theory is to read a first person singular account by its originator of what they were doing at the time to cause them to reach certain conclusions. This is often via an apparently haphazard route, which I find makes such accounts all the more intriguing.

Having studied physics, maths, chemistry and English literature to University entrance level at school, with some degree of success in class work, I made a fool of myself in the college entrance exam and then failed to win an expected place at Cambridge. I found it hard to work well under pressure and tended not to excel in exams. There was not time to apply to other Oxbridge colleges but Trinity College Dublin were prepared to take me at short notice on the strength of a photograph and my A level results. When I mentioned to my house master at school that I was considering TCD he said it was no more than a cheerful backwater, which at once appealed to me, despite his appeal to my better nature to attend a more serious institution such as Keele. I decided to study law at Trinity as a suitable training for entrance into the world of commerce. My background was based on a then substantial family furniture manufacturing business, which was beginning to founder when I left school.

I found the study of law tedious and a large part of it intellectually dishonest compared to the laws of chemistry and physics whose order and pattern I had enjoyed discovering as a schoolboy. I did not take it seriously and did just enough work to gain a degree: about two essays per term, and a few lectures per week, and concentrated more on a social life of sorts that was easily available in those days in Dublin. I knew I did not want to be a lawyer, but I had no idea what I would find worthwhile. I therefore decided to work in a business that might bring the greatest financial rewards in the shortest possible time. Once I had then made enough money to keep me in the style to which my upbringing had made me accustomed (but which capital base has since disappeared), I would then be able to pursue in comfort whatever vocation might open up to me in the fullness of time. I decided on a career in property.

There was a miscalculation in the above apparently logical thought process which I did not come to appreciate until I had worked about ten years for the largest British development company and a couple of the largest firms of London commercial estate surveyors. In order to succeed in a career, one has to become very involved in it, to live and breathe in the detail of its operation. In order to do that, it helps if one believes it is worthwhile activity. I have to say that many people in the property business are driven by avarice and are not necessarily those one would choose as good company. Indeed, I would go so far as to say many of my colleagues were dull, and except in their own field of property, not that well informed. I rarely socialised with them after office hours.

In late 1976, in the middle of a major property recession, after seven years of sweat and frustration, working on hugely profitable development schemes (half a mile of office and shop development in Victoria Street Westminster for example) and not being that well rewarded, I decided to resign my job, live on very little and write a black comic novel about office life in London for a young and bored member of the middle classes, hopefully in the style of a latter day Evelyn Waugh. I had been far sighted enough to buy a basement flat in Elgin Crescent, Notting Hill, then a slum but now rather different, and I let this out and moved in to live in my wife’s flat in Sussex Gardens, having married in 1975.

The partner under whom I toiled was so surprised when I told him I was leaving to go abroad and write a novel, that he asked the partnership to pay me for another three months after my departure on the condition that I remained available and in the country so that they could refer any questions to me, presumably if they could not find a file or some vital copy document. I was never sure that this was a compliment on my ability or a reflection of their lack of faith in my filing system. Three months later on 31st March 1977, the first day of unpaid unemployment was singular in that it coincided with the birth of my oldest son and the final exam for the professional surveyors qualification which I had put off taking for years, and which was beginning to damage my career chances.

The period of unemployment was almost two years. During that time, I concluded that I knew enough about the subject to realise what I was producing was not great literature. So rather than persevere, I spent many months reading in libraries, instead of writing, on any subject that I thought I ought to know more about: philosophy, psychology, mechanisms of the mind, comparative religious beliefs, the point of existence etc. Among the latter, I attempted a little further science in the way of what Everyman should know about quantum physics, and also I read whatever I could find on ESP or the paranormal as it was called in those days. I was particularly enthused by the books that Arthur Koestler wrote on the workings of the mind. I dabbled in philosophy and was intrigued by the idea of Spinoza, Leibniz, Schopenhauer and I read everything I could find translated into English by Ernst Mach and Erwin Schrödinger. There were also a number of books written by physicists for the benefit of the reading public which were diverting, and the numbers of which have much increased today, thirty years later.

By early 1978, I started another semi historical novel with a time transference theme, so that the narrator is transferred from today back two centuries to become his own forbear. I wanted to give some sort of semi plausible scientific sounding explanation for how someone could be projected back through time. To do this I used the familiar theory that hauntings of ghosts might be caused by an action of consequence being impressed on a particular space so that it resonated down through time. But the more I considered it the more it seemed to me that reportings of such hauntings seemed to have the common theme of boredom more than that of great consequence: forlorn ladies staring out of windows, or walking through rooms wringing their hands etc.

It occurred to me the perhaps if an obsessive or depressed individual sat in the same place and thought the same thought patterns over and over again, as obsessives will, then perhaps that caused the resonance. The more I thought of it, the more I liked the notion that an increasing degree of duplication of identical thought structures might cause such a resonance through time. I began to develop the theme, and it occurred to me that if a thought structure in the brain was duplicated many times in the same location at regular intervals, then here was a complex of firing synapses connecting neurons that would comprise a highly detailed structure resonating with itself through time. I then wondered whether it was possible that a thought repeated obsessively could actually ever be totally identical to an earlier thought structure, which in turn led me on to consider whether two structures could ever be exactly identical on a molecular or even atomic scale. My gut feeling was probably not, but I could not rationalise why this should be.

At this time, I was also coincidentally reading about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and I realised that I could possibly incorporate it in my argument. I had already reduced this famous principle down to a simple definition “if a very small particle is so small that it is always in rapid motion in its own scale of dimension, then it is impossible ever to be certain of its location”. I had reasoned that one interpretation of the reason for the Uncertainty Principle was that it was equivalent on the micro scale to the reason we can never be sure on the super macro scale, of the precise locations of distant star in the galaxy, or even whether they still exist, by the time their light reaches us. It was all a question of scale.

If a star explodes into a supernova, an observer on earth could not know that it had ceased to exist until many years it actually happened. If he could not be sure of its existence how much less certain could be of its precise location. By the same token, where the velocity of a tiny particle, say an electron, is large compared to its dimensions, and the distance to an observer is relatively speaking astronomical, it would be impossible for that observer ever to be sure of the precise location of that particle. Due to the limiting factor of the absolute velocity of light, by the time the signal or photon emitted from an electron had reached an observer, that electron would have inevitably moved on at least a fair number of electron widths, maybe thousands or millions, in who knows what direction.

The conclusion reached was that one could never be sure of the location of a very small energetic particle. I realised that this was an implication of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. It seems that Heisenberg arrived at his conclusions via a different route, more to do with the realisation that a photon would knock an electron of course. But, his conclusion that it is possible to measure with certainty either the velocity or the position of a particle, but never both together, was equivalent to my conclusion that one could never be sure of the location of a microscopic particle in motion. Indeed, most of quantum physics is governed by a mathematical description of this observation with the velocity of light as one of its controlling factors.

The principle can be defined succinctly and extrapolated somewhat for my purposes as follows: If a small particle is in motion, we can never be entirely sure of its location, but since all small particles are by definition always in motion, then we can never know the precise location of anything. Similarly if a structure is comprised of a large number of small particles, and since although relatively fixed, they will be in motion of some sort, if only a vibration, so we can never be exactly sure how far apart each component particles is distant from its neighbour. Even if the structure is a very precise crystalline structure, with each molecule identical distances apart, this identical quality will be flawed. The resulting implication is that no two structures can ever be identical, even though they might appear so, on a relatively gross scale.

This was a crucial point in the development of the theory. It occurred to me that it might be that although it was impossible along these lines ever to have two identical structures (either in different places, or for that matter in that same place at different times) it was certainly possible to have increasing close approaches to perfect duplication. Maybe as such a close approach was made, to perhaps very precise quantum tolerances, then might there not come into effect some sort of resonance as the two separate identities almost became one and the same, and then start to resonate across both time and space? There might be a stage when the two were so nearly exactly identical that it would be difficult to decipher which was which: the one in the present of the one in the past. It did not seem to be so unreasonable to me and no great rules of logic seemed to me to have been broken in the process, other than it was merely a conjecture. The problem was to consider why this might be so, and clothe the possibility in more reason, for if it were the case then all sorts of anomalies to do with the passage of time might become capable of explanation.

I was then able to incorporate the result above into some further considerations of the impenetrability of matter or the fusion process in nuclear reactions by realising that perhaps the latter was nothing to do with any preconceived notions we might have about the solidity of matter.

Perhaps rather it was because if we can never be sure that two particles were in the same location, then this was the same as saying they could never occupy the same space simultaneously. This is a reasonably difficult philosophical argument and it caused me some hours of painful re-analysis at the time. It is the same argument in Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity that says that since it would be impossible to detect an object moving at a velocity greater than that of light, then no material object can travel at light velocity. That is the fundamental observation from which, I suspect, the whole of relativity was developed. From this I then made a further assumption that the reason two particles could not occupy one space at the same time was the same as the reason that two separate identical particles could not occupy precisely the same location at different times, and that further more this in turn was the same reason that two identical structures at different times in the same location, or at the same time in different locations, could never be perfect duplicates.

I then made an assumption, a fairly large one, that if the fusion of two nuclei of Hydrogen into one of Helium converts some of its composite mass to radiant energy, and if this result is regarded as a close approach to two particles occupying the same space, there might be an equivalent effect when two structures became very nearly identical, so that there might be the potential, if not the actual result, for one of the structures, presumably that later in time, to convert a minuscule element of its rest mass to energy. As indicated above, the two circumstances are effectively the same, both being driven by the Uncertainty Principle. This was a large assumption but it seemed not impossible to me and I ran with it to produce some fascinating possibilities, and in doing so sought a justification by considering what happens generally when states exist in nature (or in thought) that can never be achieved although close approaches can be made: I termed these as singularity states for convenience of reference.

Under this heading came such notions as light velocity, absolute zero temperature, the minimum quantum of distance and time, perfect fusion of matter, and this also applied to intellectual notions such as infinity. I also noticed that although such states might be unachievable, that did not prevent close approaches being made to them and when this happened it seemed very often that the laws of nature as they were formerly familiar, began to change, and further more, when a new singularity state was identified, very often some form of intellectual breakthrough or new paradigm was established. For light velocity and quantum dimensions this was certainly the case, as did the concept of infinity allow Euclid to form a new mathematical theory. I had also read a fair amount about black holes and singularities at that time and I was able to use this in further conjectures. In the case of light velocity matter can make very close approaches but it can never reach the singularity state of light velocity. We can never detect the simultaneous occupation of one space by two tiny particles since we cannot be quite sure of the precise location of any microscopic particle in any event. If this simultaneous occupation could never be detected, then it can never occur, and the reason why this is so is intimately connected with the velocity of light.

But this is now beginning to repeat the arguments set out in more detail in section B above, some extracts of which have already been inserted above and there is no need to rehearse them all. If the reader’s attention has been kept thus far then perhaps he should now attempt section B for the fuller description of the mechanisms involved, but if not, and such detailed arguments are tedious, then do not bother but just accept the hypothesis that there is a resonance across time between two similar structures so that they interact, and continue with this account of how the implications of such arguments were developed as follows.

The problem was that I was not aware of any near perfect duplicate structures ever converting their component mass into radiation energy although it occurred to me that such an effect might only demonstrate itself as an increasing potential to do so. After a few weeks absorbed study of anything relevant that I could extract from the interstices of the British Museum’s (BM) library in the wonderfully comfortable reading room, I realised that although I could not immediately identify any such observable resonance or duplication effects in real life, the phenomenon of eidetic memory or perfect recall was a good example of transference or duplication of one structure with another through time.

Ten years earlier when a student in Dublin I had attended a stage show conducted by a hypnotist and I had been staggered at his abilities. I saw at once that they were not faked since one of our number had been put through her paces on stage, and was unable to recall any of it afterwards. It was apparent that his subjects in the trance state had access to abilities and perfect recall that were not available to them in a normal conscious state. This made such a huge impression at the time that I considered giving up my tedious legal studies and starting at once on hypnotism, which of course I never followed through. As a result the subject of photographic memory and the fact that perfect recall is made possible for most people in the trance state had always fascinated me, and I could not understand why it was a subject which appeared to have been ignored by most of the older established sciences, and this was one of the subjects which I attempted to research together with memory during those months pent dreaming in the BM. I had read just enough about the operation of memory to know that nobody else knew much about it either. I learned that a fair amount was known about the biochemistry of the firing of the synapses between neurons to pass electrochemical signals across the brain. I also knew that embarrassingly little was known -virtually nothing- of how these tiny currents and patterns of signals came to be organised into coherent patterns of thought which controlled the body and mind.

I then made the safe assumption that a specific thought must be created by a specific pattern of firing synapses to form a structure of interconnected neurons. If such a thought was repeated as a memory then the same pattern or structure would be invoked in the brain, and if this was done in trance thus shutting out the perturbing incoming information that otherwise floods in continually through the senses, then it seemed reasonable to me to assume that the pattern of firing synapses would be near perfectly identical with the structure caused by the original thought or observation: eidetic memory or perfect recall. So here I had my example of a structure being duplicated through time in perhaps a great deal of accurate detail, possibly even down to a molecular level, and certainly involving great complexity. From this I continued to develop my hypothesis for eidetic memory as described above.

By this stage in the development of my ideas, I was pleased with myself just to have produced a reasonably rational hypothesis for something for which no adequate explanation already existed. I did not take these ideas as anything more than ingenious, and by no means took them that seriously: I was just enjoying my time tinkering with idle reflections, and there was no great pressure to manipulate arguments to fit my requirements, simply because I had no fixed or premeditated direction for the development of my argument. My ideas seemed to have developed almost as randomly as I argued the brain to operate in trance state. However, they also fitted in with some much more general observations I had made about seven years earlier, which at the time appeared rather inconclusive.

I had been wondering at that time what it was that dictated whether something was beautiful or not. I think that it must have been a very hot evening when I was alone, insomniac and had nothing better with which to occupy my mind. I found myself wondering how much changing fashions created some arbitrary concept of good design or whether the concept of timeless beauty was governed by some fundamental law. I knew something of the golden mean but had not heard at that time about the Fibonacci series. I tried to decipher some essentials of good design by stripping my observations down to basic common denominators, and concluded the following.

All material was comprised of structures of particles although at different levels of scale, this granular nature of material might not be apparent. All design or representations on flat surfaces could certainly be reduced to series of points, which could be mathematically described if such an exercise would form any useful purpose. Now if a mass of particles were randomly distributed, they would appear as a formless blob without perceivable shape or form. If, on the other hand, a number of particles were to arrange themselves into a pattern, then at once a structure would become apparent. From the amorphous nothing of randomicity, a new dimension of perceivable form would become manifest, through the simple process of pattern being imposed.

What was it so phenomenal about pattern that produced form and structure out of nothing? Thereafter I analysed the concept of pattern down to basic components, and I saw that it was nothing more than the duplication of equal intervals in space. Of course, there could be infinite variations on this fundamental theme, sophisticated harmonics of distances apart and symmetries in different directions, but it could all be reduced to this phenomenon of identical intervals in space. I was concerned lest perhaps my conclusion was nothing but a truism, something so obvious that it went without saying, but my curiosity was aroused and I took my musings further. I reflected that every single field of worthwhile human endeavour could be reduced to show that it was fundamentally nothing more than an ordering process. Always pattern and arrangement were seen to be imposed on activities or concepts that previously had little structure or form connected with them. It mattered not whether the subject were music, fine art, literature, science, philosophy or a game of football. The enjoyment of all subjects was always greatly increased as soon as the structure or order behind what first might appear as random activity, was perceived and then understood.

Indeed, the whole business of understanding, and therefore the operation of intelligence seemed to depend on this perception of the order from erstwhile chaos. But since the concept of order and structure were dependent on the simple phenomenon of pattern, and in turn if pattern only was only brought into existence by nothing more difficult than the repetition of equal intervals in space, then I concluded that there must be a great deal more in this business of duplication than first might meet the eye. I could not for the life of me think what it might be or why at that time, so I set my conclusions down in the form of 20 sides of notes, scribbled down during an interminable night of insomnia, and forgot about them. Seven years later, I found I was able to pull my vague conclusions out of mothballs, dust them down, and with the minimum of reappraisal, slot them effortlessly into my new scheme of resonating structures. This was gratifying and I was encouraged to continue to sit down to study more of what little was known about memory and the mind’s operation, together with as much of the principles of quantum physics that could be absorbed by a layman with no mathematical ability.

Having dreamed up a possible explanation for total recall or photographic memory, I immediately started to think that ordinary conscious memory must work along the lines of an abbreviated form of total recall, a sort of synopsis, with just those parts retained that might be useful for increasing an individual’s chances of survival. I could also see at once that any mechanism that allowed resonance through both time and space must also contain a basis of possible explanation for fringe phenomena such as telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis, and clairvoyance, as well as a few more familiar other phenomena such as coincidence, crowd behaviour, religious ritual and theories of the universal unconscious. Even before I had started to develop ideas along these lines, I had in any event read a fair amount about ESP, which I found so fascinating that I needed little persuasion to tempt me to investigate this minefield, although since that time I have learned that it was safer and less contentious to concentrate on the explanation of memory rather than these more exotic fringe phenomena, especially for someone who possessed so few relevant academic qualifications. I was still unemployed at this time with little hope of finding work, so I was able to sit many long hours in the wonderful British Museum reading room, absorbing all I could find on these subjects (no wikipedia in those days), and the more I read, the more confident I began to feel about my ideas.

However, at the back of my mind persisted a nagging sensation that something else quite vital was necessary. I felt I was right in principle as far as I had taken things, but that if only I could precipitate out one last critical factor, then I would really be up and running. Through my reading I had by now appreciated that everything in the material universe could be reduced to a mathematical description in terms of time and space. I realised that I had made a thorough investigation of identical structures in space but had done nothing about the corollary of structures in time, if such things were possible. It came to me that all events were structures in time, and that if identical events were repeated at regular intervals, then maybe it was possible to produce duplications of events that were near enough duplicates of each other to approach singularity.

Very quickly I realised that such things abounded in modern technology in the form of electromagnetic or radio waves. The regular oscillations of an electric charge could be seen as a very large number of identical electrons passing back and forth past a specific point at very regular intervals, probably to the point of near singularity in terms of perfect duplication. The larger the charge of the oscillating point, the larger the number of identical electrons were involved to increase the number of identical events. Similarly, the higher and the more regular the frequency, the greater the number of identical events, and if these were identical to the point of near singularity, then from the reasoning described above, one might expect curious effects resulting. Of course this is what is observed, except we have become very familiar with it in the last century and no longer regard it as novel, in the electromagnetic effect of force at a distance. Further more, the higher the frequency and the higher the charge of the oscillating point, the stronger is the electromagnetic force, again as we might anticipate from earlier arguments.

Electromagnetic force is transmitted in all directions as simultaneously as the velocity of light allows to all points of the universe, which is, after all, a fairly phenomenal effect. This is a direct corollary of the space duplication effect, and since electromagnetic energy is a very familiar well-defined effect, I was able to define it in terms appropriate to my own ideas as follows:

“Equal intervals in time or similar actions tend to duplicate themselves throughout all space simultaneously”.

Having done this, I was led straight into the symmetrically opposite definition of space duplication, which I had not yet been able to formalise:

“Equal intervals in space or similar structures tend to resonate or duplicate themselves throughout all time at one location in space.”

Both definitions had to be qualified by saying that these effects will only be easily observable in near perfect circumstances where external forces of perturbation are minimal and there are large numbers of similar actions or the structure is complex. I was not immediately sure that this new, much more precise qualification of space duplication given to me as a corollary was necessarily correct, but the more I tested it, the better I liked it, and a number of other unsatisfactory niggles that had previously worried me, were immediately resolved. As far as I was concerned the fact of the two effects being a direct corollary of each other was the revelation on the Damascus Road: it was so simple and so tidy, I was compelled to think there had to be something in it. Thereafter I began to take my ideas rather more seriously than the idle fancies I had previously considered them to be, especially when I realised that the definition could be made entirely symmetrical, so that the words time and space are interchangeable without losing the sense at all. It became rapidly apparent that in nature, since everything had to have an element of movement in it, the two forms of duplication potential always occurred together, usually with one of them predominating.

The next step to rationalise my theory of eidetic memory in terms of my new definition, I obviously had to consider very carefully my notions of ‘the same location’, because memories retained by patterns of synapse firings in a brain attached to an ambulatory being could not at first sight be in the same location. But I also knew that Einstein had destroyed the classical concept of an absolute location in space, and I deduced that a structure could be considered to be in the ‘same location’ as long as its surroundings on the same scale were the same. For instance, if there is a memory of a thought structure of firing brain cells, then as long as the overall surrounding structure of brain cells in which the memory pattern is set, remains the same, then that second thought structure is in the same location relative to its immediate surroundings. Geographically, on larger scale, the head that contains the brain cells will be in another location, but that does not matter. However, the structure of the surrounding cells would have to remain fairly constant through time, and in the trance state this seemed quite possible. If the mind in trance was instructed to void itself of thought entirely, then if it was impossible for the nerve cells of the conscious mind to stop firing altogether, then they would have to fire randomly, without structure or form. This seemed a fair enough assumption, but when I went on to analyse out of curiosity the nature of random motion, some fascinating possibilities occurred to me: I later realised that this was a crucial and very useful assumption.

I realised that perfect random motion was yet another singularity state. It is impossible to attain since if it were perfect, all movement would be absolutely regular, perfectly structured, with each particle duplicating exactly the motion of its neighbours. This would no longer be random, but instead perfectly ordered, and some months after I deduced this I read about the experimental work for which Ilya Prigogine was awarded a Nobel Prize when he demonstrated this effect. I applied the same reasoning as previously to speculate what curious phenomena might occur when close approaches were made to the singular perfect random motion, and I came up with this conclusion. The closer to pure random motion a system came, the greater it’s potential to copy or duplicate any other structure in the universe. As explained, pure randomicity is equivalent to perfect order and structure, and the most perfect form of order is a perfect duplicate of something. Therefore, if the mind is perfectly void under trance, the moment a small element of structure is introduced in the form of a memory resembling an earlier thought structure however inexactly, the minimum energy principle will then take over to reproduce that earlier structure in minute near perfect detail.

If there were any possibility that such a scenario were correct at least in principle, never mind too much about detail, then this was an important conclusion. It could explain the operation of intuition which is most of the process of thought not already contained in the operation of memory. Having got this far, I could see at once a possible rationalisation of the method of gaining insight and understanding practiced by most Eastern mystic religions, through stilling the mind. This subject has baffled Western intelligence for centuries, although some scientists are beginning to see parallels in modern physics.

In near perfect trance or random firing state, the structure of neurons connected by firing synapses in the brain are more likely to reproduce an accurate or correct interpretation of nature and its mechanism than an inaccurate one, simply through the operation of the minimum energy principle. If a scientist is attempting to divine a mechanism of how, say, molecules combine to form a certain complex molecule and there are literally millions of possible combinations and permutations, the task might seem beyond him or even the largest computer to check through all the possibilities. However if he has all the elements of the problem in his mind at a subconscious level, and he sleeps on the problem, or manages to bring about a self induced trance state, where the elements of that problem are allowed to insert themselves into the otherwise random blankness of his mind, then on a quantum scale it will take slightly less energy for the synapses firings in his brain to take up the structure that duplicates what actually occurs in nature than any other possibility. The correct answer then presents itself through resonance, if perhaps he can bring himself out of trance state with some conscious vestige of its memory.

How this structure of firing synapses between neurons creates both visual images and thought is explained in more detail in section B, but briefly it requires an assumption that the passage of huge numbers of electrochemical currents between the neurons causes holographic interference patterns. If this were so, it does not require a great leap of imagination to how such images might be the basis for the experienced visual images of sight, albeit more difficult to rationalise thought processes. The mechanism by which these images, which I refer to as holocepts, are viewed and which the very perceptive physicist Arthur Eddington in the 1920s described as the vexing Problem of Mr. X, is also given a surprisingly simple explanation under section C2 on intuition, and is not delved into here.

This involvement of the randomicity of the conscious mind in trance state need not necessarily be applicable to scientific problems, but also perhaps to more general notions of how things work in nature. On the assumption that a duplicate holoceptual image can be formed in the brain of the essential parts of a mechanism or principle under consideration, then under trance the image that most accurately duplicates what happens in Nature will be reproduced as thought or holoceptual images. These might be very hard to explain verbally which is often what is experienced from avatars and religious leaders, but whom the rest of the world can often appreciate, have some deep subjective understanding of the way things are and how the universe operates. Questions of ethics could well be settled in this way. It would also be possible to redefine notions of right or wrong in terms of increasing understanding of the operation of nature and the external world. The concept of understanding itself can be defined in terms of degrees of accurate structure duplication of what occurs in nature in holoceptual form in the mind. The more accurate the detail of the image, the deeper the understanding.

I was also able to take develop further my explanation of Electromagnetic radiation in terms of a resonance effect. I assumed that when equal actions or duplicated intervals in time (of say many electrons oscillating at high frequency) were close enough to singularity, then each near perfect duplication caused a distortion in the fabric of space which radiated out from that location at light speed in all directions, effectively in a sphere. When this outward spreading wave front passed through another free electron, maybe light years away, it would then have a tendency to duplicate the action of the original singularity. In other words it would resonate in the same manner and information could be passed across space, albeit without the need for an exchange particle or photon, but just a wave front of distortion. This did away with the need for a single unit of energy in particle form in that it was spreading out as a wave front, but it also rationalised for me how a discrete action or unit of energy could suddenly materialise out at one particular point in space, when it could just as easily done so at the other end of the wave front, maybe ten light years away.

By this stage I had taken things far enough to draft an outline of my proposals, now embarrassingly awkward to read, and sent it off to one or two pundits, some of whom did not respond but Arthur Koestler, whom I very much admired was encouraging, as was Karl Pribram who was a neuroscientist working on the concept of the holographic function of the brain. I borrowed from his proposal to conjecture that the firings of many synapses would cause patterns of complex electromagnetic waves to radiate out and which would interfere with each other to produce holograms. These would then be the substance of thought although at that stage I had no suggestion of what mechanism within the brain then viewed these patterns which I christened holocepts. One or two others of the consulted experts were not entirely dismissive of my efforts and this was encouraging enough. At this point in late 1978, I had completely lost sight of writing any novel and was instead totally bound up in these proposals for the operation of memory and mind, and testing possible other applications of this resonance effect in other phenomena such as ritual, group behaviour, probability, symmetry and the reproductive ability of life.

This was as far as I was able to develop the theory by late 1978 after 18 months of sitting in the Reading room of the British Museum. This was certainly the most civilised work place that I had encountered, and I was loathe to resign from such a life style. But funds had dried up, and I had been out of regular employment for two years and my first son was one and a half years old. The longer I stayed out, the harder would it be to find appropriate new employment. People in the property business do not understand a voluntary decision to stay out of the business for more than 5 weeks, never mind two years: think of all the possible deals you might have missed during that time, and all the money that you might have amassed had you been in the right place at the right time, and the BM hardly qualified for the former.

As it was, it was not easy to find re-employment in the West End of London where all the big deals are generated, and as I wanted to live in the country but did not want to commute, I accepted the offer of a job as a negotiator with a provincial firm of commercial surveyors in Reading, a dull town but surrounded by fine Thames Valley country side in which we settled just out side Henley, on the edge of the Chilterns. The partners were rotarians to a man, not an apogee to which I aspired but it occurred to me that work as a provincial surveyor would not be so demanding as that in the city, which would leave me more time to spend on my new found obsession, and indeed the creation of original ideas did not quite die over night when I returned to office life. Within six months of returning to work, another possibility manifested itself. If one made the assumption that the universe was closed and finite, then it seemed a reasonable conclusion that the universe was spreading out from the original centre of the big bang in an ever-expanding sphere. If so then there would be an outer limit to the universe of space and time as we know it, spreading out at light velocity. The outer edge, or singularim as I termed it, would indeed be a belt of radiation moving at light speed, behind which would be increasing amounts of small but very energetic particles moving at slightly less than light speed.

But the singularim would represent the boundary between space and time, our universe, and beyond it would be the biggest singularity of all: not space and not time, like an all-surrounding black hole. But if this huge frontier of singularity were moving out at light velocity, by the reasoning already developed above, could I not anticipate that every small action of time singularity within the universe might duplicate its motion? Yes, I thought this entirely reasonable, and the obvious result would be that every single such time duplication would be dragged out at the same velocity in all directions: hence the expanding wave front at light velocity.

It was just a duplication of the mother and father of all time duplication singularities, which would control every similar little such distortion in the space-time continuum. Such a line of reasoning I found would also explain most conveniently the fact that light velocity is isotropic or the same whatever the velocity of the mechanism attempting to measure this absolute quantity, and this is explained in more detail above in section D. I also made further assumptions about how this might also have implications for the existence of Dark Matter and for Mach’s Principle, both of which being completely inexplicable by modern physics as far as I could discern, then and now. I was so much out of my depth here that I committed nothing in writing in much more than note from until 1990, and still today I fear my extrapolation of the main gist of my work here into cosmology does little for its credibility.

For the next ten years I did little further original work on my ideas, other than commit them to a half-decent typescript and also correspond fitfully with a few individuals whom from their work I considered might be interested by what I had to say. A few minor applications occurred to me over the years, but then in 1982 there was the one event that caused me to believe that I had not been wasting my time during those two years unemployment. In 1981 Rupert Sheldrake published his Book ‘A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation’ which I read in early 1983. The book caused a storm of protest from the established hierarchy of life scientists, and went on to infuriate the academics further by selling about 400,000 copies over the next few years. Sheldrake won a scholarship to Cambridge, studied at Harvard and took a PhD at Cambridge in biochemistry and became was a fellow of Clare College Cambridge and director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology from 1967 to 1973. He then joined the staff of the International Crops research Institute at Hyderabad in India until 1978 where after he lived in an Christian ashram where he wrote his book.

Ever since then he has been working to show that his hypothesis of morphic resonance must be taken seriously to show how the shapes and instincts of living organisms are determined. He has met great opposition which I deduce has been mainly for the reason that if he were able to present a convincing experimental proof for his proposals, then most of the life scientists would have to go back to school and learn to re jig a substantial part of their existing knowledge of their subject. The conclusions he makes are remarkably similar to one half those of Duplication Theory, that to do with the resonance of similar structures through time although he does not deal with resonance of similar events through space, and he does not attempt an explanation for the mechanism behind his morphic resonance. The manner in which he reaches these similar conclusions is derived from a totally different view point, and presented in a far more academically acceptable form than mine. I at once wrote to him and met fairly soon thereafter to discuss the similarities and differences. He was so articulate and had such a convincing delivery of his ideas in the lecture hall, his qualifications were so strong, and his book seemed to me so well argued that I reckoned it would be a matter of a few years, perhaps ten at the most before he was accepted as the new Darwin. If so I could just wait for that to happen and when people then started to look seriously for the physical reasons behind the effect, then my ideas would come in useful.

Thirty years later, this has not happened, although Rupert has toiled magnificently to this end against surprisingly difficult odds and some fairly patronising response descending often to rancour. All his critics almost without exception seem to fail to indicate in any detail exactly why his reasoning on a biochemical level must be incorrect. Instead they usually resort to the general comment that his conclusions are so radical and extreme, and so much contrary to current established scientific beliefs that they must be delusional.

Rupert Sheldrake’s first book, and his second published in 1988 ‘The Presence of the Past’, explain in great detail physical applications of morphic resonance, all of which I endorse. The second book made the point which had never occurred to me and which I find staggeringly significant is his question as to whether the laws of nature evolve. He presents a strong case to show that they are probably not constant and do indeed evolve as time passes. If this is so then the way that we now regard laws of science and physics has to change radically, and yet how many of the great minds of science have consider this problem seriously? Not many, and yet it is crucial: a sine qua non, or so it seems to me, especially so since there are now a number of well qualified physicists and astro physicists busy carrying out experiments to establish whether the velocity of light is variable. There have been a number of Sheldrake’s books published since the early eighties, most on the results of experiments he has carried out to demonstrate that telepathy and other ESP phenomena must exist, culminating in his latest book the Science Delusion published in January 2012 in which he lists ten areas of scientific study which require serious reappraisal.

Now my family has been educated and left home, I choose and can at last afford to work at property usually only a few hours per day so I am now able to give more time to consider how best to promulgate my proposals, and this website since 2007 has been the first step in that direction. In the last two decades I have done little other than write to a few experts in the field from time to time whenever I note somebody coming up with ideas which seem sympathetic to mine and published a couple of short papers in esoteric journals, one in 1988 and one in 1999. A proof is needed and although I have laid out some possible proposals in principle in that respect (see section G), these require funding and practical expertise to set up, neither of which I have. The latter might become more early available if a degree of credibility were brought about by this website.

In January 2010 a Dutch physicist Erik Verlinde published a paper on “The Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton”, which seems to have caused a stir and which postulates that “Gravity is an entropic force caused by change in the amount of information associated with the positions of the bodies of matter”. He concludes that gravity is an emergent rather than a fundamental force. This encouraged me to produce an essay with somewhat similar conclusions , but from a different approach, on gravitation and Mach’s principle which I have been harbouring mentally for the last 15 years or so but had previously considered too outrageous to mention. This is now included as section F.

Afterthought 2015:

Experiments were carried out by Dr. Rita Pizzi of Milan University from 2004. These produced an anomalous result when laser light was directed at a bowl of neural tissue, connected to a micro electrode array and a separate and completely shielded bowl of neural tissue from the same source then produced a similar signal via an MEA. Such an effect, if it can be reliably repeated, would appear to be explicable in terms of Duplication theory and would represent a strong example of quantum connectivity. This latter effect has been demonstrated by the experiments of Alain Aspect and others for individual photons but not an any larger scale. It is also explained by Bell’s Inequality theorem, and is considered by a number of experts to possibly be a basis for the operation of thought but is without proof yet. It seems that Rita Pizzi could not carry on her work due to lack of funding and the incredulity of the expert physicists at such a result. This would seem to cry out for variations on her experiments to be carried out at greater distances apart of the two bowls of neural tissue and other possibilities. Or if the Milan experiment were carried out using holograms in motion projected onto the neural tissue, it might be possible to demonstrate a resonance through time effect which would then validate Duplication Theory.

Afterthought 2016

In May 2016 I published a book in the form of a novel (Mind out of Time available on Amazon). This describes a variation of the Milan experiment using just such holograms in motion which produce an anomalous result inexplicable to existing beliefs. The book describes the difficulties in arranging funding and carrying out such an experiment, and the opposition provoked when it eventually produces a successful conclusion. Some the possible consequences of the resulting ability to develop artificial intelligence from this increased understanding of memory’s operation, are discussed.

This is a novel, and written as such in the hope that it might appeal to a wider non specialist readership, not being that technical so that anybody with a strong inclination to understand more about the mind should be able to get through it. However it will doubtless be a little too involved with physics for many to digest, although it has not been drafted in the manner of a heavy academic tome: quite the opposite.

The first half explains the hypothesis of Duplication Theory in dialogue form between Alfred, it’s proponent, and Lucius, the entrepreneur and possible source of funds. Parts of this are based on the thinly disguised personal experience of the author. The second half describing the experiment and the results with intriguing results, are of course fiction

Further Afterthought 2016:

The work of professor Anton Zeilinger of Vienna University has recently demonstrated instantaneous quantum entanglement across large distances by transmitting information 144 kilometres between two island observatories in the Canary Islands. Apparently this transmission depends on both parties being given access to a random number generator, which is remarkably similar to the role of randomness explained above in C1.7 (Random motion, Trance and singularity states). This effect has very practical applications currently for quantum computing and quantum cryptography for which research is being eagerly funded by banks and other financial institutions, since information transmitted thus cannot be hacked. This has led me to start speculating on some possibilities to show how information taken in through the eyes manifests itself as vision within the brain in holographic form using principles set out by duplication theory.