Green Shoots in a Desert Kingdom

By Deepak Chopra, MD
Although fears over our planetary woes make headlines and keep people up at night, it should be apparent that finding solutions is about our mindset. The mindset of dread contributes to passivity and depression. Recently I encountered a mindset that holds promise because it combines consciousness-awareness raising with technology. The green shoots of a viable future were evident to me in the desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Ever since its oil wealth gave it tremendous leverage over world economics, the Saudi kingdom has faced a fork in the road, deciding between an old feudal social order or an unparalleled opportunity to serve as a laboratory for engineering the future. My contacts were with the Saudi elite—I went there to give workshops in self-awareness—and it became apparent that they are inspired to solve the country’s challenges with a strong focus on education, the younger generation (60% of the population is under thirty), job creation, and wellbeing.

It was the last topic that involved me the most. After 9/11, I became deeply concerned with the radical dichotomy of the Muslim world, where a struggle had emerged between tradition and the postmodern world, that is, between a more rigid religious authority, and a future-minded youth who wanted to look out on the wider world integrating Islam with a global focus on science and technology. It’s no longer a question of which side should win but rather how to integrate tradition with a global economy and an emerging Zeitgeist of respect for cultural and religious diversity. The biggest challenge facing the Saudis is how to create a moderate, economically secure middle class that can stand for modern values and simultaneously for Islamic ideals and Arab culture.
The Saudis today are both protectors of the faith in the most literal sense, being the home of Mecca, the most sacred site in Islam, while at the same time being a source for a modern progressive movement. As demonstrated by their 2030 vision, Saudi Arabia is attempting to make enormous progress in the space of economic innovation and technological breakthroughs while simultaneously maintaining cultural ideals, historical heritage and Islamic values. Vision 2030, is a demonstration of how modernity and faith can go hand in hand. The vision is an audacious template for developing the country on advanced technology, educational outreach and Saudi youth engagement. The focus and leadership for reform centers on the much-publicized Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the instigator of Vision 2030, which according to the prince’s Wikipedia entry “details goals and measures in various fields, from developing non-oil revenues and privatization of the economy to e-government and sustainable development.”

 

Western commentators have wondered aloud if the shambling, disorganized way that the US approaches future change and reform isn’t being outstripped by central planning of the kind we see in China, with its mushrooming purpose-built cities, and now Saudi Arabia. Ambitious projects like erecting a new seaport on the Red Sea, King Abdullah City, is directed at creating a million new jobs, the majority in non-oil sectors. With over a third of the Saudi population under 14, many leaving school without the skills to succeed in modern society, clearly the ruling authorities are faced with a carrot and a stick challenge: how to create a thriving economy and technology before widespread youth unemployment foments into disruption and outbreaks of violence.

 

On my visit, I centered my talks on consciousness and wellbeing. Without these underpinnings, massive building projects are hollow, a prime example of pouring old wine into new bottles. Saudi Arabia is extremely conservative, as we all know, and finding green shoots isn’t the same as overturning centuries-old traditions. In a long report covering the deputy crown prince, the Washington Post’s headline asked the crucial question: Can he make his vision come true?

 

No one has a definitive answer. The Middle East region remains a volatile place and needs a new approach. Whatever the old images we hold about Saudi Arabia, this is the one major Muslim state that has the resources and now the vision to turn future shock into peace and prosperity on a managed scale. As a laboratory of engineered change, the kingdom is taking a risk, and we all have a stake in how the experiment turns out.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are Super Genes co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com

The “New Old Age” Just Got Better

By Deepak Chopra, MD, Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

 

For at least two decades we’ve been living with a drastic revision of growing old. What is now dubbed the “old old age” prevailed for centuries; it was a set of beliefs that turned the aging process into inevitable decline physically and mentally. After a lifetime of work, people found themselves set aside, no longer productive or active members of society. Generation after generation these expectations came true. But everyone trapped in the old old age was mistaken to think such expectations were inevitable. Hidden factors were causing beliefs to turn into reality.

 

The “new old age,” created by the baby boomer generation, threw out the previous beliefs, exchanging them for more optimistic ones, and by now we’ve grown used to a set of readjusted expectations. Millions of people over 65 haven’t retired, and few have taken to the rocking chair. To be healthy and active one’s whole life seems possible. But as much good as the new old age has done, it faced two major obstacles. The first was that aging itself has long been a mystery, not explained by medical science because too many changes occur over a lifetime, and these changes vary from person to person.  The second obstacle, assuming that aging could be defined, was how to reverse it.

 

An enormous leap forward in overcoming both obstacles was made by Elizabeth Blackburn, the molecular biologist who shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for their discovery of telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes a section of DNA known as telomeres, which cap the end of each chromosome like a period ending a sentence. Telomeres are “noncoding” DNA, meaning that they have no specified function in building cells, but they are far from passive. Their function seems to be to preserve cells. Every time a cell divides, which happens constantly somewhere in the body, its telomeres are shortened. Longer telomeres are typical of young cells in the stage of luxuriant growth; shortened or frayed telomeres are typical of weary senescent cells.

 

Now the head of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, Blackburn covers every aspect of cell aging and renewal in her 2017 book, The Telomere Effect, co-authored with her close colleague, UCSF Professor and health psychologist Elissa Epel.  They convincingly describe telomeres and levels of telomerase in the cell as our best marker yet for the multifold process of aging. This also implies that by increasing one’s telomerase levels and thereby causing telomeres to grow longer, a healthy lifespan can be founded on cells that keep renewing themselves for decades.

In their book Blackburn and Epel cite a startling actuarial prediction. There are currently around 300,000 centenarians existing around the world, a number that is rapidly increasing. According to one estimate, reaching one hundred is about to become so commonplace that one-third of children born in the UK will live to be centenarians—the issue of protecting your cells is suddenly more urgent than ever.  We highly recommend reading Blackburn and Epel’s book–its wealth of information needs to be absorbed in detail. But the bottom line is to understand what puts your telomeres at high risk and low risk.

 

            Your telomeres are at low risk if you

 

  • Have no exposure to severe stress.

 

  • Have never been diagnosed with a mood disorder.

 

  • Enjoy strong social support, including a close confidante who gives good advice, friends who listen to you and with whom you can unburden yourself, and relationships where love and affection are shown.

 

  • Exercise moderately or vigorously at least three times a week, preferably more.

 

  • Get good-quality sleep for at least 7 hours.

 

  • Consume omega 3-rich food three times a week while avoiding processed meats, sugary sodas, and processed food in general. A whole-food diet is best.

 

  • Are not exposed to cigarette smoke, pesticides, and insecticides.

 

The opposite is also true.

 

Your telomeres are at high risk if you

 

  • Are being exposed to severe stress in your life.

 

  • Have been diagnosed with an anxiety or depressive disorder that lasted for many years.

 

  • Lack social support from friends and family.

 

  • Lead a completely sedentary lifestyle with no regular exercise, even light activity like walking.

 

  • Suffer from chronic insomnia or cut your sleep shorter than 7 hours a night.

 

  • Consume a diet high in fat, processed foods, and sugary sodas, with no attention to sufficient fiber and omega-3 fatty acids.

 

  • You are exposed to cigarette smoke, pesticides, insecticides, and other chemical toxins.

 

These summarize the research-supported risk factors presented in Blackburn and Epel’s book, and as with any risk-based program, some people are more affected than others. Severe stress is one of the most thoroughly damaging factors—in one study, caregivers who tended Alzheimer’s patients had shortened telomeres that predicted a shortened lifespan of between 5 and 8 years.

 

It’s also significant that the lifestyle choices known to decrease the risk of heart disease, as originally devised by Dr. Dean Ornish at Harvard Medical School, have a beneficial effect on telomere length. Extending the program to cancer, Ornish had another impressive finding. A group of men with low-risk prostate cancer were selected for study (low-risk means that their cancer was at an early stage and slow-growing. Prostate cancer can take decades to advance and the current recommendation advises balancing the risk and reward of doing any active treatments, a change from the era when any cancer was immediately treated and usually aggressively).

 

The men were put on a variant of the heart-disease protocol: they ate a low-fat, high-fiber diet, walked for 30 minutes a day, and attended regular support group meetings. Stress management was included, and there was training in meditation, mild yoga stretching, and breathing. At the end of three months the group that was on the program had higher telomerase levels than the control group, which meant that their cells were aging better. Stress seemed to play a key role, because the greatest increase in telomerase occurred among the men who reported having fewer distressing thoughts about prostate cancer. Ornish followed some of the men for 5 years, and those who stuck with the program showed telomeres that had increased by 10 percent, reversing the usual expectation as cells age.
In short, the era of the new old age has shifted into the “Now old age,” thanks to important Genetic findings by Blackburn and her colleagues, Ornish, and others. In a society addicted to the promise of a silver bullet, drugs may emerge to improve telomerase levels in the cell, leading perhaps to extended telomeres and effective anti-aging at the genetic level. But since no one can predict when such drugs will appear, and what side effects come with them, the best way to enter the now old age is through lifestyle choices, particularly those that counter stress and inflammation. The good news is that the aging process is less fearful and more optimistic than ever before.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are Super Genes co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

 

 

Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. is the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University and Vice Chair of Neurology at Mass. General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi is the co-author with Deepak Chopra of the New York Times bestseller, Super Brain, and an internationally acclaimed expert on Alzheimer disease. He was included in TIME Magazine’s “TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World”.

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Pankaj S. Joshi, PhD

Although it takes place outside the headlines, even those that deal with science, a heated debate is occurring about mind and matter. On one side is a camp of so-called physicalists, formerly known as materialists, who hold fast to the assumption that any and all phenomena in nature can be reduced to physical processes, namely the forces and the interaction between objects (atoms, subatomic or elementary particles, etc.) — these are the building blocks of the universe. On the other side is no single camp but a mixed assortment of skeptics who hold that at least one natural phenomenon–the human mind–cannot be explained physically through such methods.

When one explanation (the physicalist) is supported by the weight of highly successful theories in physics, biology, biochemistry, and neuroscience, and the other side has no accepted theory on its side, the debate seems totally unequal. But in David versus Goliath battles, be careful of rooting for Goliath. The possibility of a science of consciousness, which would involve a thorough explanation of mind and how it relates to matter, can’t begin until the obstacles in its path are removed and old accepted assumptions are overturned.

That has already begun, on all fronts. In physics, the essential problem of how something came out of nothing (i.e., the big bang coming out of the quantum vacuum state) stymies cosmologists, while at the microscopic level the same mystery, this time involving subatomic particles, emerging from the virtual state, is equally baffling. In biology the prevailing Darwinism cannot explain the quantum leap made, with astonishing rapidity, by Homo sapiens in terms of reasoning, creativity, language, our use of concepts as opposed to instincts, tool-making, and racial characteristics. We are the offspring of the newest part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, and yet there is no causal connection between its evolution and the primal Darwinian need to survive. This is evident by the survival of a hundred primate species lacking a higher brain, reasoning, tool-making, concepts, etc. Finally, in neuroscience and biochemistry, there is zero connection between nerve cells, and their chemical components, and mind. Unless someone can locate the point in time when molecules learned to think, the current assumption that the brain is doing the thinking has no solid footing.

The day-to-day work of scientists isn’t dependent on explaining how mind arose in the cosmos–not yet. The relation between mind and matter has existed in philosophy for centuries, and working scientists don’t consider philosophy relevant to their research. Collecting data and doing experiments needs no help from metaphysics or philosophy. But when you look at the unanswered questions in physics, biology, biochemistry, and neuroscience, it’s more than a coincidence that all, without exception, impinge upon the same inability to know how consciousness actually works. By taking for granted the obvious fact that it takes a mind to do science, we’ve reached the point where science is leaving out the very component that might answer the questions that urgently need answering, not because philosophy demands it but because science does.

The sticking point is physicalism itself. If everything must be reduced to the smallest units of matter and energy, and yet there is zero evidence that mind follows that pattern, it is unscientific to cling to physicalism. Even a staunchly mainstream physicist like Stephen Hawking has commented that reality doesn’t necessarily match the current models in science. The mind is real, and since that’s true, defective models are required to change or even be thrown out. To repair the most glaring defect of all–our inability to explain mind–imperils all the sciences for the simple fact that science is a mental activity. If we set physicalism aside, what would be another starting point for a new model of reality?

Instead of conceiving reality from the bottom up, moving from tiny building blocks to larger and larger structures, one could do the reverse and create a top-down model. In other words, the starting point would be the whole, not the parts. So what do we know about reality as a whole?

* Reality is knowable through the mind. What humans can’t know, either directly or by inference, might as well not exist.

* What we know is tied to what we experience.

* Experience takes place in consciousness, nowhere else.

* Experience is at once boundless and very restricted. The boundless part lies in the human capacity to create, invent, explore, discover, and imagine. The restricted part revolves around the setup of the brain, which is confined to the behavior of space, time, matter, and energy. The brain is four-dimensional, while physics poses the possibility of infinite dimensions at one extreme and zero dimensions at the other extreme.

* Because the physical processing done by the brain works in parallel to the mind doesn’t mean that the brain is the mind. To assert that brain equals mind involves showing the atoms and molecules can think, which can’t be proven and seems highly unlikely. Therefore, the ground state of reality, the place from which everything originates, is consciousness.

* Consciousness is the only constant in human experience that can’t be removed from consideration in science, or any other form of knowing.

* What we call reality “out there” is constructed in our own awareness. These constructs follow predictable paths according to mathematics, logic, the laws of nature, and so on. But this doesn’t prove that reality is independent of our experience, only that consciousness is capable of extremely precise, predictable organization. In a word, the notion that everything is a mental construct is just as valid as the notion that everything is a physical construct. The two are merely different perspectives.

* If reality “out there” is a construct dependent upon consciousness, explaining the universe entails explaining consciousness. Where physicalists are stymied by how atoms and molecules think, non-physicalists are stymied by how mind creates matter.

* This impasse is broken by taking a concrete approach to mind; that is, by investigating the qualities of reality “out there.” These qualities, such as how an object looks, sounds, feels, tastes, and smells, are entirely created in consciousness. As Heisenberg noted almost a century ago, there are no fixed physical characteristics of an atom or subatomic particle. Everything is built up from the qualities, also known as qualia, that the human mind knows, experiences, and can conceptualize.

* Ultimately, even where nature sucks or emits all matter and energy into or out of black holes and naked singularities, either through classical or quantum physics, the actual horizon for science doesn’t lie there, or with the big bang, by which matter and energy reappeared in manifest form. The real horizon is where the inconceivable source of mind meets the conceivable phenomena in nature. The problem of something coming out of nothing is exactly the same when the cosmos was born as when a thought is born. This is the level playing field where mind and matter can be investigated as two sides of the same process: consciousness interacting with itself.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, Clinical Professor UCSD Medical School, researcher, Neurology and Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are You Are the Universe co-authored with Menas Kafatos, PhD, and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. discoveringyourcosmicself.com

 

 

Pankaj Joshi is a theoretical physicist and Senior Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai India. Professor Pankaj Joshi has published many (more than 170) research papers, and monographs on cosmology and gravitation. He has made fundamental contributions on gravitational collapse, black holes and naked singularities. The new analysis on collapsing stars from Joshi and his collaborators, as reported and reviewed in his Oxford (1993) and Cambridge (2007) monographs, showed that both black holes and visible naked singularities form when massive stars collapse at the end of their life-cycles. Recent results from Cambridge, Princeton, Perimeter and others, now corroborate these results. His research was published as an International cover in “Scientific American.” He served as an adjunct Faculty with the New York University, and was awarded the A C Banerji Gold Medal and Lecture Award by the National Academy of Sciences, India, along with many other awards. He holds visiting faculty positions in many reputed universities and has won fellowships in various scientific academies. His research papers and monographs are widely cited internationally. His recent book, The Story of Collapsing Stars (Oxford University Press), explores the death of massive stars and the subsequent formation of black holes or naked singularities through gravitational collapse of stars.

The Evolving Cosmos: Is Reality Getting Any Closer

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Pankaj S. Joshi, PhD

Science is the modern authority for telling us what’s real, using verifiable facts to prove its theories. Over the last century many facts have emerged about the nature of the universe, and since we know we live in an evolving universe since the big bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago, naturally scientific knowledge has evolved. But strangely enough, this hasn’t brought reality any closer. The mysteries of the universe were expected to be solved by looking closer and closer at phenomena “out there” beyond Earth, “at smallest scales” as we probe within the matter, and then reality pulled a number of baffling tricks that brought everything into question.

The pattern that overlays everything has been breakthrough = disruption. The whole field of biology isn’t disrupted by discovering through genetic analysis that pandas don’t simply look like bears but are bears. In physics and cosmology, however, major discoveries have overturned the applecart, beginning in 1915, when Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity made a rupture from anything previously done in physics, by giving a geometrical model of gravity. Space and time were unified, and suddenly the cosmos was a four-dimensional continuum in which two fixed, and earlier separate entities, space and time, were now seamlessly linked, behaving not alone but relUntitled Design(38)ative to each other.

Einstein’s theory was massively important for physics, but it altered the relationship between the cosmos and human beings. First, our senses were now rendered either unreliable or pointless in grasping the complete reality, because relativistic effects were abstract and mathematical. In other words, these effects were simply not grasped by our usual sense perceptions. (Einstein used simple examples taken from ordinary life, such as standing in an elevator as it descended or watching a train approach the station, but these analogies only hinted at what General Relativity explained.) Second, relativity was a wedge that opened up the possibility that the human brain, which operates in linear time and three-dimensional space, might be inadequate to grasp alien dimensions and “spooky” behavior outside our experience.

Gravity is the force that governs large-scale objects like stars and galaxies, and armed with Einstein’s theory, observers scrambled to explain such things as the gravitational fields around stars but also how gravity operates in the universe as a whole, a problem that continues to be worked on (the theory of an expanding universe made gravity much more complex than if we lived in a steady-state static universe). At the same time, a rift developed between quantum mechanics (QM), which was enormously successful at explaining forces operating at the smallest scale in nature, and General Relativity (GR), which is just as successful at explaining space-time phenomena at the largest scale. Unfortunately, QM and GR weren’t compatible, and over the next century making them compatible has challenged the best minds in physics, as it continues to.

This disagreement between divided reality into a visible dimension—the universe we see “out there”—and a hidden dimension that behaves in mysterious ways divorced from everyday affairs. Again, a wedge was beginning to open the possibility
that the hidden dimension was reality itself. This possibility has only widened with the theories about ‘dark” matter and energy, which in some views occupy that vast majority of creation, the multiverse, which would make the known universe only one of trillions of universes, and black holes, which suck space, time, matter, and energy into a domain where only the most exotic mathematics can venture.

Starting in the 1920s, physics began to move away from gravity toward QM, in part because General Relativity was geometric and Einstein’s formulas were unapproachable to many physicists. But for the larger picture of reality, the hope of rescuing reality from its great schism between QM and General Relativity, which Einstein futilely pursued, almost on his own, was set aside. Q
uantum physics continued to make one discovery after another, which left the profession of physics largely willing to ignore the schism in order to play in the quantum domain.

But as various strides were being made—the precursors to powerful telescopes like the Hubble, the splitting of the atom to inaugurate the nuclear age and the advent of particle accelerators, and the consolidation of the big bang theory—these momentous events had to circle back to Einstein and gravity. As early as 1939 a model that applied General Relativity to an evolving universe, one where stars are born and die, predicted the existence of black holes. Gravity emerged as the supreme force that would determine the end game of stars and perhaps the universe.

Einstein wasn’t happy with this extrapolation or application of his theory, and in 1939 itself he published a paper in which he declared that the total collapse of a star wouldn’t occur in nature, because opposing forces within the star would restore balance and prevent it—one of his major wrong predictions. (In our last post we treated the fascinating problem of how stars collapse to form black holes and singularities.) But looking at reality as a whole, even as cosmology became ultra-sophisticated in its theories of an inflationary universe, all the hypothetical problems of explaining where humans stand in the cosmos began to pileup. These problems include

* The riddle of how something came out of nothing—i.e., how the vacuum state that preceded the big bang, and underlies every subatomic particle, acquired the qualities we call space, time, matter, and energy.

* The problem of the pre-created state. If the vacuum state is the nothing from which something emerged, what is it like? Having no recognizable features of the visible universe, the pre-created state may have no data or empirical evidence to tell us what it is like.

* The problem of the inconceivable. For the better part of a century the only lan
guage that can describe the fundamentals of nature is mathematics, but there is no proof that mathematical equations match reality. Models have their limits, and in this case the human brain, which is obviously a creation of time, space, matter, and energy, may have reached the limits of knowledge.

* Even if physics settles on a set of equations that satisfactorily unites the four fundamental forces in nature (gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak force), a reality divorced from human experience presents a divide far more important than the schism between QM and relativity. Experience rules human life. If there is a reality totally alien and divorced from our experience, how can we ever know it or accept it?

Any one of these problems undermines the very notion that “reality” consists of phenomena “out there” that only need to be explained in order to tell the whole story. The possibility that we live in a “participatory universe,” first proposed by John Archibald Wheeler, weaves human beings into the fabric of the cosmos, has begun to loom large, and then the most intriguing question that comes up with it is the possibility of whether with it the possibility that the universe is itself a single conscious entity. The pattern of breakthroughs being disruptions continues to prevail. In our next post we will weave the latest advances in the evolution of knowledge to test if the link between human mind and cosmic mind is valid, because if it is, many of the unsolved problems mentioned above may be solvable by taking an entirely new path.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Cen-ter for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transfor-mation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, Clinical Professor UCSD Medical School, researcher, Neurol-ogy and Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a member of the American As-sociation of Clinical Endocrinologists. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet sur-vey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times best-sellers. His latest books are You Are the Universe co-authored with Menas Kafatos, PhD, and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. discov-eringyourcosmicself.com

Pankaj Joshi is a theoretical physicist and Senior Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai India. Professor Pankaj Joshi has published many (more than 170) re-search papers, and monographs on cosmology and gravitation. He has made fundamental contri-butions on gravitational collapse, black holes and naked singularities. The new analysis on collaps-ing stars from Joshi and his collaborators, as reported and reviewed in his Oxford (1993) and Cam-bridge (2007) monographs, showed that both black holes and visible naked singularities form when massive stars collapse at the end of their life-cycles. Recent results from Cambridge, Prince-ton, Perimeter and others, now corroborate these results. His research was published as an International cover in “Scientific American.” He served as an ad-junct Faculty with the New York University, and was awarded the A C Banerji Gold Medal and Lec-ture Award by the National Academy of Sciences, India, along with many other awards. He holds visiting faculty positions in many reputed universities and has won fellowships in various scientific academies. His research papers and monographs are widely cited internationally. His recent book, The Story of Collapsing Stars (Oxford University Press), explores the death of massive stars and the subsequent formation of black holes or naked singularities through gravitational collapse of stars.

How Does Something Come Out of Nothing? A Cosmic Tale

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Prof. Pankaj S. Joshi

The question of where the universe came from isn’t solved by pointing to the big bang, because this begs the question of where it came from. In physics creation is often dubbed “something out of nothing,” meaning that the entire observable cosmos emerged from a pre-created state that is devoid of the familiar landmarks of reality: time, space, matter and energy. The boundary between this “something” all around us and that “nothing” that is also present but undetectable has fascinated physics in recent decades. It’s a fascination we should all share if we want to know where creation came from.

The trail leading to a scientific explanation of the universe has run into problems. In ancient Greek thought physis, usually translated as “nature,” meant the fundamental essence or guiding principle of creation. Today the motive to unravel nature’s secrets remains the same, but it’s been frustrating to find a single unifying theory underlying the universe. Modern physics has a formidable reputation for rigor, and its theories are supported by advanced mathematical equations and computations, but the key paradigms within physics have been constantly changing and evolving. The Holy Grail of physics, to unify all the forces of nature into a Theory of Everything (TOE), has remained out of reach because the two most successful areas of physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, are incompatible.

The solution is generally accepted to be a theory of quantum gravity, but in the usual regimes of natural phenomena that we observe and experience in daily life, it is impossible to observe quantum phenomena and gravity working together. Interestingly, Nature herself comes to our aid in understanding the gravity and quantum phenomena together or in a combined way. A quantum gravity laboratory is possibly created when a massive star collapses under its own gravity towards the end of its life cycle. The fascinating opportunity thus presents itself for making progress towards understanding of quantum gravity and TOE. At the same time, the collapse of massive stars takes us to the edge of the greatest mystery in creation: how something came out of nothing, and in this case, returns to nothing when its life cycle is over.

Having exhausted the fuel that sustained them for millions of years, massive stars are no longer able to hold themselves up under their own weight; they begin to shrink and collapse catastrophically under their own gravity. Modest stars like the Sun also collapse at the end of their cycle, but they stabilize at a smaller dwarf size. By contrast, when a star is massive enough, orders of magnitude larger than the Sun, its gravity overwhelms all the forces that might possibly halt the collapse. From a diameter millions of kilometers across, the star crumples to an infinitesimal dimension much smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.   Untitled Design(31)

What is the eventual fate of such massive collapsing stars? This is one of the most exciting questions in astrophysics and modern cosmology today. To give some background, the story began some eight decades ago when Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar probed the question of the final fate of stars such as the Sun. He showed that such a star, on exhausting its internal nuclear fuel, would stabilize as a “White Dwarf,” about a thousand kilometers in size. Eminent scientists of the time, in particular Sir Arthur Eddington, refused to accept this, saying that a star could never become that small. Chandrasekhar left Cambridge to settle in the United States, and after many years his prediction was verified. Later it also became known that stars which are three to five

times the Sun’s mass give rise to what are called neutron stars, about ten kilometers in diameter, after a supernova explosion.

But when a star has a mass more than these limits, the force of gravity is supreme and overwhelming. A star as massive as tens of solar masses burns much faster and lives only up to 10 to 20 million years, compared to a lifetime of some ten billion years for a smaller star like the Sun. When gravity is unopposed by countering forces, no stable configuration is possible, and amazingly the star’s catastrophic collapse happens within a matter of seconds. The outcome, as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, is a space-time singularity: an infinitely dense and extreme physical state of matter, not encountered in any of our usual experiences of the physical world.

As one possibility, a so-called event horizon of gravity can develop. This is essentially a one-way membrane that allows entry but no exit. If the star entered the event horizon before it collapsed to a singularity, the result is a black hole that hides the final singularity. Black holes are a permanent graveyard for the collapsing star. According to our current understanding, it was one such singularity, namely the big bang, that created the expanding universe. But the big bang isn’t unique. Such singularities will be produced whenever massive stars die and collapse. And so we arrive at the mysterious boundary of the cosmos, a region of arbitrarily large densities billions of times the sun’s density.

An enormous creation and destruction of particles takes place in the vicinity of a singularity. One could imagine this as the cosmic interplay of the basic forces of nature coming together in a unified manner. These energies and all physical quantities in the vicinity of singularity reach their extreme values; quantum gravity effects dominate this region. This is how collapsing massive stars present a laboratory for quantum gravity, holding out the potential for a TOE, if visible naked singularities occur in astrophysical settings in faraway skies. The basic question then arises: Are such super-ultra-dense regions forming in the collapse of massive stars, visible to faraway observers, or would they always be hidden in a black hole?

A visible singularity is sometimes called a naked singularity or quantum star. The visibility or otherwise of such a super-ultra-dense fireball that the star has turned into is one of the most exciting and important questions in astrophysics and cosmology today. This is because the unification of fundamental forces taking place here becomes observable, at least in principle.

A crucial point arises: while gravitation theory implies that singularities must form in collapse, we have no proof that the event horizon must necessarily develop. It was only a working assumption that an event horizon always does form, hiding all singularities without fail. This is referred to as the cosmic censorship conjecture, the foundation of the current theory of black holes and their modern astrophysical applications. But if the event horizon did not form before the singularity, we would then observe the super-dense regions that form in collapsing massive stars, and the quantum gravity effects near the naked singularity would become observable. Thus we could actually see the extreme physics near such ultimate super-dense regions. As a step toward this possibility, in recent years a series of collapse models have been developed in which the event horizon fails to form in the collapse of a massive star.

In short, it turns out that the collapse of a massive star gives rise to either a black hole or naked singularity, depending on the internal conditions within the star, such as its densities and pressure profiles, and the velocities of the collapsing shells. When a naked singularity occurs, small inhomogeneities (i.e., lumpiness) in matter densities close to singularity could spread out and magnify enormously to create high-energy shock waves. These, in turn, have connections to extreme high-energy astrophysical phenomena such as cosmic gamma ray bursts, which we do not yet understand today.

Will we actually be able to see this cosmic dance, the finale of collapsing stars in the theatre of the galaxies? Or will the black hole curtain always hide and close the end game off forever, even before the ferment of creation has begun? Only future observations of massive collapsing stars can possibly tell us. Interestingly, the 2014 sci-fi adventure Interstellar refers to naked singularities in the script, suggesting that without them we’d never understand how interstellar leaps in space travel are possible—but real science isn’t there yet.

As it stands, the closer we get to the boundary between nothing and something, the more urgent the problem of creation becomes. It’s as if “nothing” and “something” are merely symbols for domains of creation and pre-creation that can’t be understood with objective measurement. In the next part of this series we’ll look into the possibility that scientific knowledge is about to converge with the problem of how the human mind is able to know anything at all. In the end, our thoughts and feelings are “something out of nothing” just as much as collapsing massive stars and the big bang.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Cen-ter for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transfor-mation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, Clinical Professor UCSD Medical School, researcher, Neurol-ogy and Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a member of the American As-sociation of Clinical Endocrinologists. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet sur-vey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times best-sellers. His latest books are You Are the Universe co-authored with Menas Kafatos, PhD, and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. discoveringyourcosmicself.com

Professor Pankaj Joshi is a theoretical physicist and Senior Professor at the Tata Institute of Fun-damental Research (TIFR), Mumbai India. Professor Pankaj Joshi has published many (more than 170) research papers, and monographs on cosmology and gravitation. He has made fundamental contributions on gravitational collapse, black holes and naked singularities. The new analysis on collapsing stars from Joshi and his collaborators, as reported and reviewed in his Oxford (1993) and Cambridge (2007) monographs, showed that both black holes and visible naked singularities form when massive stars collapse at the end of their life-cycles. Recent results from Cambridge, Princeton, Perimeter and others, now corroborate these results.

His research was published as an International cover in “Scientific American.” He served as an ad-junct Faculty with the New York University, and was awarded the A C Banerji Gold Medal and Lec-ture Award by the National Academy of Sciences, India, along with many other awards. He holds visiting faculty positions in many reputed universities and has won fellowships in various scientific academies. His research papers and monographs are widely cited internationally. His recent book, The Story of Collapsing Stars (Oxford University Press), explores the death of massive stars and the subsequent formation of black holes or naked singularities through gravitational collapse of stars.