Open letter to Stephen Hawking

[johnrudkin]

To: Professor Stephen Hawking
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics


Dear Professor Hawking
You are uniquely and universally admired and respected for outstanding personal courage in confronting severely-debilitating illness, for exceptional innovative thinking, and for books and television presentations which have widened and deepened popular interest in science. In pursuing your stated goal - to achieve a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all – you have demonstrated that major advances in scientific knowledge can arise from fundamental theoretical consideration.
With the above in mind, I am writing in the hope of interesting and encouraging you to turn your brilliantly-insightful intellectual ability to the remarkable, well-attested anomalies that challenge our understanding of the nature of reality of human experience. Einstein said: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science”. However, science seems largely determined to ignore many significant anomalies, the number and nature of which are such that they clearly show that the current commonly-accepted scientific view of reality must be far from complete. What may seem to be anomalous can turn out, of course, to be due to error, artifact or even fraud, and the unscientific ”new age" or "occult” are of no interest or value in this context. As a pragmatic professional scientist and engineer, my reference is to anomalies for which the evidence is so robust that they cannot be dismissed or explained away, as is the case in the following examples, for which chapter and verse are available.

There are many recorded instances of one identical twin being hurt - in one case by being shot dead - and the other, elsewhere, not only simultaneously feeling pain, but even suffering a bruise in the same place on the body. It has been shown in laboratory studies that the sudden shining of a bright light into the eyes of a subject evokes electrical responses in the brain of the subject as expected, but also, simultaneously, in the brain of a distant person who has been in recent close association with the subject. Further, the results of numerous, extensive, rigorously-controlled, replicated studies, particularly those independently carried out in New York, Edinburgh and Gothenburg have demonstrated that information can be anomalously transferred between individuals with odds of greater than a thousand million to one against it having been by chance.
A meticulously controlled, five-year research study led by the Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of London demonstrated that, purely by the exercise of intention, children can produce measurable mechanical, electrical, magnetic and structural effects in metals.

Devices which produce outputs of random sequences of zeros and ones have been used at Princeton University to study the effect of human intention at the sub-atomic level. More than two decades of scientific studies have shown consistently that such sequences can be influenced by the pre-stated volition to produce – for example - more zeros than ones, or vice-versa. The substantial body of accumulated data is such that the statistical odds against the results being due to chance are many million millions to one.

Impartial analyses have been made of the results of thirty formal scientific investigations into attempts by intention alone to influence the autonomic nervous systems of distant persons. The inescapable conclusion was that there were characteristic, significant biological variations during distant intentionality periods when compared with randomly interspersed control periods. The results of a specific, exhaustive, two-year laboratory research programme at The Connecticut Health Centre show that human intention is reproducibly able to promote the growth of human tissue.


Recent acoustic investigations have demonstrated repeatedly that the characteristics of sounds made normally – for example, by rapping a tabletop with knuckles - differ significantly from those produced as meaningful responses to questions by an apparently non-material consciousness. Although indistinguishable to the ear, normally-produced sounds show an almost-instantaneous rise to peak amplitude, whereas the anomalous sounds have a significantly slower rise to peak, similar to that shown by an earthquake.

Many hundreds of in-depth studies have been made of children, mainly between three and eight years of age, who say spontaneously that they have lived previous lives. In a normal waking state they typically give details about distant places, previous families, occupations and circumstances of death. . Thorough investigations find close correspondences between apparent memories and historical facts. The findings are especially remarkable in the cases where a child bears a scar corresponding in nature and location to the injury which, research reveals, was responsible for death in the remembered previous existence.

There are many recorded cases of individuals involuntarily having more than one personality, with uncontrollable switching between personalities. The personalities can differ very significantly in age, gender and character. There are even cases of one personality in two people at the same time.

A common feature of these remarkable anomalies is mind, or consciousness, which itself must surely be the biggest anomaly of all. It is unexplained by materialistic theories of reality that are based on belief in the primacy of the material world. However, relativity and quantum mechanics have demonstrated the inter-connectedness of everything, and that space and time are not absolutes, but also that an observer - or consciousness – is an implicit component of the reality that we experience. The steadily-accumulating evidence strongly indicates that consciousness is not just a function of the physical brain - nor confined to it. Our understanding of reality is moving in the direction of a new paradigm, one in which the primary reality is not matter, but consciousness.
The brilliant scientists who have recognized the fundamental significance of consciousness in the fabric of reality notably include Sir Arthur Eddington, Max Planck, Sir James Jeans, your collaborator Professor Roger Penrose, your eminent contemporary Professor Brian Josephson and Professor Bernard Carr, who was once your student at Cambridge.. All in all, however, it seems that you may be uniquely able to initiate and stimulate the radical new scientific thinking that is needed for a more complete understanding of the nature of reality, recognizing mind as being of the essence.
Such progress would surely be the most important leap forward ever in science.
With every good wish

Yours sincerely

John Rudkin

[CanadianBroad]

Hello Mr. Rudkin;

I have just a couple of quick thoughts about this, which bring up a few questions that I hope you can answer.

First, some questions about your assumption that "consciousness" is somehow independant of physical existance. Since the advent of the Functional MRI scanner, thoughts have been clearly demonstrated to originate in the brain. The brain is a physical organ that uses neurotransmitters to produce chemical reactions that produce electical impulses. These impulses travel through neurons and synapses to produce reactions. Different thoughts and sensations have been demonstrated to arise in distinct areas of the brain in reaction to various stimuli. Now - given that these thougths require physical energy to produce, are you seriously suggesting that this energy can somehow be produced without the support of a physical structure that provides nutrients to produce those chemicals? The body transmutes energy from food into processes - so where would a "disembodied" mind get this energy? Why, in cases of medically verified "brain death" is it a fact that a person can no longer influence their body when their brain is dead if "the mind" exists independantly of the body? Why leave it at all if you didn't want to? If "the mind" has some way to supply its own energy - why not use that energy to keep the body alive (or to "spontaneously" heal it?) if "the mind" is truly independant of the physical mechanisms of the body? Why would someone ever die, then? What is your proposed mechanism to explain physical death, then?

When these basic and fundimental questions have been answered, perhaps we can work from there to "esp" type questions. But if these questions are not answered, then there is no basis to assume that "the mind" is anything other than the manifestation of physical processses and therefore ceases to exist once these physical processes end.