The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe - Tapa dura

A book which, like Capra’s Tao of Physics, explores the latest offerings from the scientific community who have found an explanation for the supernatural.

The energy found in the vacuum – or the zero point field – is enough to boil all the oceans of the world. These oscillating waves seem to be the key to all sorts of unexplained phenomena: ESP, homeopathy, energy medicine, spiritual healing, intercessory prayer, psychic phenomena, and the homing instincts of animals are examples.

Lynne McTaggart follows the life and work of disparate physicists who seem to be on the verge of bringing about the same type of revolution that occurred exactly a century ago when quantum theory changed the face of physics forever.

The book reads like a fast-paced detective story, introducing characters not only from the scientific community but also from the CIA and NASA. Lynne’s interviews with scientists working in Edinburgh, Russia and the USA build a fascinating picture of an interconnected universe and a new scientific theory which makes sense of supernatural phenomena.

It started out as a way to beat the 1973 oil crisis and ended up a scientific discovery every bit as revolutionary as relativity or quantum physics: proof that we and the world are all connected.

In the early 1970s, in the grip of the oil crisis, a handful of frontier scientists, in the course of trying to find an alternative to petrol as vehicle fuel, accidentally stumbled on an element of quantum physics that seemingly had enormous potential. The Zero Point Field, a field of unimaginably large quantum energy in the space between things – an ocean of microscopic vibrations – seemed to hold the answer to many of the big questions man has never had answers for. Here, in so-called 'dead space', lay the very key to life itself: to cell communication, to DNA, to strange effects like ESP or spiritual healing and even to that most elusive notion: the collective unconscious.

The story of their thrilling discovery is a thriller in its own right, involving the CIA, secret Russian testing sites, NASA space programmes and time travel, as a small band of men and women come to grips with the physics of the impossible.