People who take a stand are usually entertaining, and one of the freshest, most interesting to me has been provided by physicist Dewey Larson (1898-1990). I delighted in Larson’s opinion that physicists’ use of complex math sometimes impedes scientific investigation by obscuring weakness in their theorizing. Well, touche!—silly math-based “infinite multiverses” indeed.

Another Larson idea lent welcome fresh perspective in a whole different arena—forces. He focused new attention on modern physicists’ attitude towards the concept of force, as in “fundamental forces of nature” (gravity, strong, weak, electromagnetic). He reasoned that, by definition, forces have to be properties of underlying motions—they can’t just exist autonomously, as they typically are presented, because physics sensibly defines “force” as a property of motion. Discussions of big bang-derived energy manifestations have had relatively little to say about these most basic forces of nature for precisely this reason:  they don’t fit right—they feel contrived, arbtrary, somehow wrong.

Larson stands out in another way—as a victim of scientific bias’s usual expression in the form of ridicule:  if you can’t stamp out another thinker’s ideas that challenge your own committed ideas, do your best to criticize, trivialize, demonize that thinker in whatever visceral way feels to be the most efficacious ridicule. You can’t stop the message being read, so flog and demean the upstart messenger whose “pseudoscience” dares challenge you. Why did they so fear Larson’s ideas?

An objective summary of his unique explorations can be found by simply querying on his name: Dewey B. Larson. Dipping into similar thoughtful waters as some spiritual sources, Larson held that light really has no speed, “it just is.” He described a “reciprocal system” of physics that stood the accepted Standard Model of physics on its head. Since the space and time of Einsteinian spacetime cannot exist independently of each other, Larson posited displacement of spacetime with “scalar motion” as the basic constituent of this physical universe. This—he concluded—was because there must be some serious error in current beliefs about the phenomena in which these motions are involved. This radical shift in perspective had been previously advocated by thinkers back to Descartes, but Larson took the time to work out the details for two opposing motions—both being the same as the speed of light but in opposite senses, with one going “outwards,” the other “inwards.” I don’t pretend to understand his sophisticated physics and attendant math, but there’s nothing hard to understand about one obvious implication of his unique perspective:  it says light speed has two “sides,” and thus may constitute a boundary or “veil”—a possibility of key interest for studies of near-death experiences.

One consequence of his ideas was that subatomic particles, as conceived in modern physics, don’t really exist at all—what physicists call “particles” are actually transitory packets of motion. Science’s “recognition” that all particles are also waves—both things at once—can be regarded as significant here only because this paradoxical curiosity is understood by absolutely no living person. How, thus, can science claim to “recognize” it? Larson took the whole matter to a higher court, holding that the physical universe was actually composed of just one component—motion—which exists in three dimensions, in discrete units, with space and time being its two reciprocal aspects. The vibrations so frequently mentioned as having been noticed during near-death experiences (NDEs) —and at higher frequencies than in this universe—seem a consistent aspect of motion as fundamental.

Larson also perceived that, just as space has three dimensions, so does time, and treating time as three-dimensional is said to make the mathematics of relativity work out better than do more trendy approaches to an ever-elusive unified field theory. His concepts are a true third option that directly and credibly challenge the relativity-based models so roundly embraced throughout the science community since 1915. Anyone who has ever played with a gyroscope, that spinning, humming, vibratory in-motion little dynamo that seems to have a mind of its own—or has ever truly listened to the vibratory continuum from big growling motors to the pleasing hum produced as a fiddle bow swings smoothly from D to E string—or to the faint whine of wispy mosquito wings—can entertain at least the prospect that Larson was onto something. In our universe, vibrations have great meaning if we but pay attention and seek the understanding that resides in them. Good vibrations are at all times busily humming away inside every atom in the universe—and during near-death experiences. Does this “just happen,” as science lamely says of the big bang? Has it no meaning?

The radically original view of fundamental physics introduced by Larson is remarkably consistent with mysterious energetic phenomena that refuse to go away. The “transitory packets of motion” to which he alluded, for example, are precisely analogous to zero-point energy. Throughout the universe, these mysterious ZPE sparklets in their indescribable infinitude—far, far below the size of an atom—constantly pop into existence from nowhere discernable, tarry a fleeting micro-fraction of an instant, and *blink* are gone again, just that quickly, to some otherwhere unknown…across some “veil”…to be followed without pause by others, constantly, in every cubic millimeter of this entire universe, forever. This is going on right now directly in front of your eyes and mine, it’s just too small for us to see. What are they? And where, exactly, is that Otherwhere they pop in from and instantly return to? These super-strange and quite unexplained real phenomena are constantly happening in infinite abundance everywhere—throughout the intergalactic vacuum, on Broadway, inside you and me.

Some scientists acknowledge the reality of energy strangeness, but few research it—probably because it’s just a tad too much like the spirituality they don’t believe in. They generously treat as merely odd the few intrepid scientists who dare pursue oddly ubiquitous mysteries of the true reality we all live in. But Larson was resoundingly ignored by the physics community then and now, except when they criticized him, as they treat all scientific colleagues who adhere to high scientific standards while venturing research into the fairly common occurrences known as NDEs and psychic phenomena. Historically, lesser minds treated Alfred Wegener, George Gamow, Albert Einstein, Rosalind Franklin, Lise Meitner, Emmy Noether, Marie Curie…it’s a long list…the same way when their breakthrough ideas were fresh and new. Simple ability to question or disagree courteously, respectfully, politely, seems thinly distributed in science.

The omnipresent vibrating of absolutely everything in the quantum realm is not treated as the mystery it truly is. Few outside the scientific establishment are familiar with the science of vibrations as they occur in nature. Everything in the universe vibrates, and has been doing so since the big bang. Vibration is motion, just as Larson called it. The smallest known things in all Creation—quarks, those minute squiggles of energy that make up the nucleus of every atom—are known to vibrate in interesting ways which distinguish several types of them that come in six meaningless “flavors” known—charmingly—as “up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom.” From low to high, such gradations, called frequencies, can be seen on an oscilloscope as waveforms ranging from low peaks and wide valleys (ba-r-o-o-o-m-m) to zillions of high-peaked humming sawteeth (s-s-z-z-i-i-i-n-n-g-g). Vibrations are a fundamental element of reality—everything in our universe is different forms of energy, and all energy vibrates. How fast or slow it vibrates depends on which of the many possible forms energy happens to take. Why is that?

Even objects that appear stationary (e.g., the chair you’re sitting in; your teeth) are in constant vibratory motion because—as noted now quite redundantly so you’ll be sure not to miss it—all apparent matter is actually energy in its various guises: what we call “matter” is nothing more than the various vibrational motions of the underlying forms of energy. At every scale in nature, everything vibrates—an unquestionable fact which happens to be consistent with Larson’s suggestion that motion, not spacetime, is the true fundamental foundation in our universe. Maybe he was right? If so, what then?

NDE reports speak often of the “vibrations” that were noticed during the experience, sometimes accompanied by observation that everything in the heavenly God-realm vibrates—flowers, water, the very air, all humming with vibrancy. The context of such reports indicates heavenly vibrations are at frequencies far higher than any vibrations we may meet here in this material universe—far above lightspeed. Such observations invariably are buried beneath the gee-whiz fascination of “what happened” during the NDE, so nobody much keeps track of them, alas.

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T’aku wakan skanskan:  Something sacred is in motion through everything.

 – Lakota proverb