The Intention Experiment: Use Your Thoughts to Change the World. Lynne McTaggart

       CHAPTER ONE

       Mutable Matter

      FEW PLACES IN THE GALAXY are as cold as the helium-dilution refrigerator in Tom Rosenbaum’s lab. Temperatures in the refrigerator – a boiler-sized circular apparatus with a number of cylinders – can descend to a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, almost 273°C below freezing – three thousand times colder than the farthest reaches of outer space. For two days, liquid nitrogen and helium circulate around the refrigerator, and then three pumps constantly blasting out gaseous helium take the temperature down to the final rung. Without heat of any description, the atoms in matter slow to a crawl. At this scale of coldness, the universe would grind to a halt. It is the scientific equivalent of hell freezing over.

Absolute zero is the preferred temperature of a physicist like Tom Rosenbaum. At 47, as a distinguished professor of physics at the University of Chicago and former head of the James Franck Institute, Rosenbaum was in the vanguard of experimental physicists who liked exploring the limits of disorder in condensed-matter physics, the study of the inner workings of liquids and solids when their underlying order was disturbed.1 In physics, if you want to find out how something behaves, the best way is simply to make it uncomfortable and then see what happens. Creating disorder usually involves adding heat or applying a magnetic field to determine how it will react when disturbed and also to determine which spin position – or magnetic orientation – the atoms will choose.

      Most of his colleagues in condensed-matter physics remained interested in symmetrical systems such as crystalline solids, whose atoms are arranged in orderly array, like eggs in a carton, but Rosenbaum was drawn to strange systems that were inherently disordered – to which more conventional quantum physicists referred disparagingly as ‘dirt’. In dirt, he believed, lay exposed the unprobed secrets of the quantum universe, uncharted territory that he was happy to navigate. He loved the challenge posed by spin glasses, strange hybrids of crystals, with magnetic properties, technically considered slow-moving liquids. Unlike a crystal, whose atoms point in the same direction in perfect alignment, the tiny magnets associated with the atoms of a spin glass are wayward and frozen in disarray.

      The use of extreme coldness allowed Rosenbaum to slow down the atoms of these strange compounds enough to observe them minutely, and to tease out their quantum mechanical essence. At temperatures near to absolute zero, when their atoms are nearly stationary, they begin taking on new collective properties. Rosenbaum was fascinated by the recent discovery that systems disorderly at room temperature display a conformist streak once they are cooled down. For once, these delinquent atoms begin to act in concert.

      Examining how molecules behave as a group in various circumstances is highly instructive about the essential nature of matter. In my own journey of discovery, Rosenbaum’s laboratory seemed the most appropriate place to begin. There, at those lowest temperatures where everything occurs in slow motion, the true nature of the most basic constituents of the universe might be revealed. I was looking for evidence of ways in which the components of our physical universe, which we think of as fully realized, are capable of being fundamentally altered. I also wondered whether it could be shown that quantum behaviour like the observer effect occurs outside the subatomic world, in the world of the everyday. What Rosenbaum had discovered in his refrigerator might offer some vital clues as to how every object or organism in the physical world, which classical physics depicts as an irreversible fact, a finalized assemblage only changeable by the brute force of Newtonian physics, could be affected and ultimately altered by the energy of a thought.

      According to the second law of thermodynamics, all physical processes in the universe can only flow from a state of greater to lesser energy. We throw a stone into a river and the ripple it makes eventually stops. A cup of hot coffee left standing can only grow cold. Things inevitably fall apart; everything travels in a single direction, from order to disorder.

      But this might not always be inevitable, Rosenbaum believed. Recent discoveries about disordered systems suggested that certain materials, under certain circumstances, might counteract the laws of entropy and come together rather than fall apart. Was it possible that matter could go in the opposite direction, from disorder to greater order?

      For ten years Rosenbaum and his students at the James Franck Institute had been asking that question of a small chunk of lithium holmium fluoride salt. Inside Rosenbaum’s refrigerator lay a perfect chip of rose-coloured crystal, no bigger than the head of a pencil, wrapped in two sets of copper coils. Over the years, after many experiments with spin glasses, Rosenbaum had grown very fond of these dazzling little specimens, one of the most naturally magnetic substances on earth. This characteristic presented the perfect situation in which to study disorder, but only after he had altered the crystal beyond recognition into a disordered substance.

      He had first instructed the laboratory that grew the crystals to combine the holmium with fluorine and lithium, the first metal on the periodic table. The resulting lithium holmium fluoride salt was compliant and predictable – a highly ordered substance whose atoms behaved like