The extraordinary phoropter machine

Of all the odd explorations by science into the possibility of alternate universes, a century-old device called the phoropter may be the strangest of them all. If you've ever visited an optometrist or an ophthalmologist you may have submitted to a phoropter. Created in 1917, it places different lenses or combination of lenses before you eyes so your doctor can determine what kind of glasses you need.

As you peer through the various lens the phoropter carries you look at a chart on a wall and identify letters or numbers, which tells your doctor what refractive error your eyes have and he can thus choose the appropriate corrective lenses. In 2003, Kevin Blunting, a physicist at the Diametric Institute for Physics in Simi Valley, California, picked up some ophthalmological research that wife had brought home. She was an optomotrist and was interested in the phenomenon of "heterophoria," that tendency in some patients for one eye to deviate its direction from its partner eye, causing a split vision. Patients suffering from heterophoria have reported seeing flashing lights and even flashes of images that weren't actually there.

These "visions" were long dismissed by researchers as aberrations or imaginings. But Blunting wondered if, by introducing electric current and an imaging screen like an old-fashioned cathode-ray TV, it would be possible to view these images. He convinced his bosses to let him try using a standard electrode array used to measure brain waves, attached to the phoropter and the screen. Study volunteers with heterophoria sat before the imaging screen and looked through the phoropter. What Blunting and his colleagues saw was extraordinary.

Apparently the patients were indeed seeing things that were out of place, sights not found inside the test lab. A foggy city street appeared, and in another case a baby. The images never last long, no more than a few seconds.

Blunting found that by boosting the signal through the use of elaborate and powerful batteries, clearer pictures that stayed on the screen longer were possible. But were these nothing more than the thoughts of the volunteers being projected (an extraordinary feat in and of itself)? What evidence was there that these were other worlds?

Surprisingly, when a vision of Market Street in San Francisico appeared on the screen there was a very clear street sign. The street was named "Blancaro Road," not Market Street. More anomolies in identity appeared on other sites as well. For example, there was a sighting of not one Eiffel Tower in Paris, but five of them, clustered in a pentagon shape. There was a group of Asian pedestrians on a street in Hong Kong, all of them with Icelandic-style blonde hair.

The initial research has been scoffed at by researchers in both ophthalmology and physics, but Blunting's research continues. Is it a really a view into a universe that is slightly different from ours? Or is it an elaborate scam? We still don't know.

As usual, this blog is also in aid of promoting my new novel, Mayhem, which could can read for free on Wattpad or buy at Amazon's Kindle site. If you'd like a free sample for your Kindle, click here.

The physics of the paranormal

Are ghosts the dead still wandering with little use or intent (or do they simply work for the civil service?) Joking aside, the popular perception of ghosts is that they are dead people. But what if we're actually seeing people who slip in and out of our universe from an alternate one. Either by intention or accident, are people crossing over? Can we see into other universes? These are the big questions that paranormal and science fiction writers work with. But now, there is growing interest in the notion of alternate universes among another group: physicists.

Many people have heard the term string theory--that the universe is arrange on a series of strings. But among a growing number of physicists, there is a new idea called M-Theory. "M" stands for membrane and refers to the idea that our universe is separated by other universes by membranes, or "branes," as science calls them. The idea sprang from the realization that electrons can seem to be in two places at the same time, or at least they flicker back and forth into and out of existence as we know it.

The BBC's Horizon science series looked a M-Theory back in 2002. Today, there is still no complete formulation of M-Theory, which should describe branes as two- to five-dimensional objects, which are roughly 11-dimensional supergravity. I had to watch the Horizon program three times before I began to grasp a little of what physics is grappling with. If M-Theory is true and there are multiple universes beyond our own, floating about and bumping into one another like soap bubbles, the implications are immense for science and for how we narrate our lives and fears as artists.

So were ghost hunters right all along about supernatural spirits. Perhaps, but they may not be dead at all, just popping in from another universe for a quick visit.

In the next post I'll look at how there may be a duplicate of you in an alternate universe. Meantime, this blog is also in aid of promoting my new novel, Mayhem, which could can read for free on Wattpad or buy at Amazon's Kindle site.

The house on Parry Street

How could this happen? How could this be true?

There is a street in downtown Toronto I'll call Parry Street. There is only one house on it, and the friend of a friend rented it. I'll call her Sheila, to protect her identity (and for that of the owners of the house in question, I've changed the name of the street as well). Sheila  and her husband moved in to the two-storey Victorian worker's cottage just north of Bloor Street. Then strange things started happening. There were sounds, shadows glimpsed out of the corner of her eye, bumping noises and creaks. When she was alone in the house the noises grew more pronounced and deeply unsettling.

Then, one night, Sheila found a pair of red trousers on her husband's pillow. She called to him and asked him when he'd bought them. "I've never seen them before in my life," he said.

Then, just as she was about to step into the bath she glanced in the mirror over the basin. A face was looking back at her.

Sheila was so unnerved by this growing creepiness that she actually called in an exorcist to advise her on what to do. The minute he stepped inside the door, he had an answer: "Oh we've been to this house before," he said. "You need to get out of here."

What would cause this haunting? Humankind's thirst for order in a disorderly universe makes us search for narratives. And that's how we construct the notions of ghosts and supernatural. Some peoples are better at it than others. The historian Peter Ackroyd has written a marvelous compendium called The English Ghost, in which he states that no other people on earth see as many ghosts as the English. Does that mean ghost-sighting is a cultural preoccupation and not a paranormal one? This blog seeks to find the intersection between narrative, the paranormal and physics.

I'm new to this subject, but because I'm currently living with a ghost in my house, I'm naturally very interested. In the coming months I'll describe it more in detail. Meanwhile, this blog is also in aid of promoting my new novel, Mayhem, which could can read for free on Wattpad or buy at Amazon's Kindle site.