旷世奇书《神秘化学(Occult Chemistry)》的故事（三）

    By the end of the 1970s the physicists' model had developed into six 

different kinds of quarks, five of which had been identified and given the

Alice-in-Wonderland "flavors" of up, down, charm strange, and bottom. 

The last, and heaviest, remained elusive until mid-1994 when physicists

at Fermilab discovered "top" quark, leading Dr. P. K. Iyengar, eminent

scientist and former chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission,

to finally give the theosophists a modicum of credit  when he remarked, 

"The top quark discovered recently substantiates that occult chemistry

is a phenomenon which exists should be accepted as such."

    Further, to differentiate the newly discovered quarks, physicists as-

signed them three different colors—red, blue, and green—though they 

were quick to point out that the choice had nothing to do with our 

ordinary perception of color. It was just a conventional way of labeling

difffering mathematical qualities encountered by theorists.

    So quarks were a fact, validating—better late than never—the theo-

sophists' diagrams of three such particles to a proton.

    As the proton was seen to be made of two ups and one down quark,

the neotron of one up and two downs, this give the proton a positive

charge of 1.0, leaving the neotron neutral with a charge 0.0. With

three quarks to a proton, add an electron and you have an atom of hy-

drogen. It—as all the other elements—turns out to be made of nothing

but quarks and electrons. The whole universe must therefore be put

together basically with but two quarks—one up and one down—plus

the electron.

    And quark? Of what are they made?

    The problem propelled Phillips into some abstruse mathematical

calculations, which inexorably led to the conclusion that quarks must 

consist of subquarks, also tree in number—just as the theosophists

had presaged with their UPAs. For these postulant particles Phillips

coined the name omegons.

    This omegon theory was reassuringly backed by Dr. Lester Smith

as being "straight orthodox science founded upon recent theory of

quantum chromodynamics which could be and was offered for pub-

lication in a scientific journal." Duly accepted, it appeared under the

typically abstruse title of "Composite Quarks and Hadron-Lepton 

Unification."

    It was at this point in his mathematical quest that Phillips came

across the theosophists' book in California, with its "hydrogen atom" 

clear depicted with six quarks, each of which showed three ultimate 

physical atoms for a total of eighteen—described by them as the basic

building blocks of nature. But why eighteen instead of the nine ome-

gons that appeared in Phillips's mathematical model? Why the doubling

effect in an otherwise remarkable match?

    For many long hours Phillips puzzled over the discrepancy until he 

realized that what the theosophists might have been viewing was a di-

proton, normally an unstable and short-lived amalgam of two hydrogen

nuclei. But to account for how the theosophists could have come upon

such an anomaly required more searching. Finally Phillips came up with

a solution based on the modern theory of quantum physics—unknown

to the theosophists at the turn of the century—of a dynamic interplay

between observer and observed. The actual act of capturing atoms 

for observation and slowing down their "wild gyrations" must have

profoundly disturbed them. This interplay, Phillips reasoned, must

have released the tightly bound quarks and omegens from the nuclei

of two atoms and merged them into a single chaotic cloud, analogous

to extremely hot plasma, which then condensed into the double nucleus

observed. In support of the hypothesis, Dr. Smith noted that normally

this could be done only at exceedingly high temperatures such as those

postulated to have been prevalent 10ˉ6 seconds after the so-called Big

Bang. But "cold plasma," he pointed out, can also exist: in it the strong

forces between omegons come back into play, causing them to recom-

bine and condense into a new stable grouping: the theosophists' dou-

ble-imaged atoms.

    Rewardingly, once this doubling-up effect was taken into account,

every other element described and illustrated by the theosophists in 

Occult Chemistry, including compounds and crystals, fell into its proper

place in the periodic table with the requisite number of constituent

particles. With their siddhi powers, the theosophists had accurately

described every known element years before the physicists and in a

few cases even before these elements were scientifically discovered.

    Not only were the theosophists vindicated, so was Phillips. With

deserved satifaction, and no fear of rebuttal, he could categorically

state, "The new patterns derived by application of the rules of theo-

retical physics tally perfectly with the diagrams which illustrate Occult

chemistry."

    In opening a window for the physicist into the world of matter, Lead-

beater and Besant left open an even wider door into the realm of the

spirit—there, like it or not, to ponder on its gnomes and elves, its sylphs

and undines.

                                         CHAPTER 8

                                     Orthodox Cosmos

Adeptly clairvoyant, clairaudient, and clairsentient, Leadbeater and 

Besant claimed to have learned from Indian and Tibetan masters to 

break through to continuous "astral consciousness, with the body 

awake or asleep," and thus be able to investigate "the constitution of

superphysical matter in the structure of man and the universe, as 

well as the nature of occult chemistry."

    To these two investigators the basic constituent of matter, an ulti-

mate physical atom, or UPAs, smaller than a proton, smaller by far than

a quark, appeared as "a little miniature sun," dual in nature, positive, but

with a negative mirror image. Ovoid in shape, each consists of ten

closed stringlike spirals made up of millions of dots of energy whirling

in and out from what the investigators called a fourth-dimensional astral

plane, entering the male UPA and exiting the female. "Bright lines" or

"streams of light" that linked the UPAs were called by the theosophists

"lines of force."

    Leadbeater specialized in the geometric arrangement of these UPAs, 

identifying and counting their number in each element examined, while

Annie Besant studied the configuration of the "lines of force" linking and

holding together the groups of these particles. Force, said Leadbeater,

"pours into the heart-shaped depression at the top of the UPA and issues

from that point, and is changed in character by its passage as it rushes

through every spiral and every spirilla, changing shades of color that flash

out from the rapidly revolving and vibrating UPA." These color changes

appeared to Leadbeater to depend on different activities of the ten whorls,

each of 1,680 spirillae, as one or another was thrown into more energetic

action. To ascertain the number 1,680, Leadbeater says he meticulously

counted the turns in each whorl in 135 different UPAs selected from nu-

merous substances. Each whorl of the first spirilla he found to be a helix

made of seven smaller circular whorls of second-order spirillae, and so

on, through seven orders, each finer than the preceding one.

    By willfully "pressing back and walling off the matter of space," Lead-

beater identified the seventh and last-order spirillae as consisting of

seven "bubbles" spaced evenly along the circumference of a circle, 

bubbles  he referred to as existing in the invisible plenum of space and

to which he gave the name "koilon," from the Greek word meaning 

"hollow." Leadbeater callculated that each major whorl consisted of 

about 56 million bubbles which gave a total of some 14 billion bubbles

for each UPA. The theosophists therefor concluded that all matter in 

the ultimate analysis must consist of bubbles or holes in space, "like

pearls upon an invisible string." It was a description that two genera-

tions later would tie them to the most advanced and challenging con-

cepts of modern physics: the superstring theory and the Higgs field

theory, on the cutting edge of physics, both clearly presaged by lead-

beater and Besant a century earlier.

    The Higgs Field theory is a sort of revenant. Way back in the middle

of the nineteenth century, in the time of James Clerk Maxwell, physicists

felt the need for a medium that would pervade all space and through

which light and other electromagnetic waves could travel. To satisfy

these requirements, they postulated ether: an all-pervading, infinitely

elastic, massless medium, poetically the personification of the clear

upper air breathed by the Olympians.

    What happened to this elixir or quintessential underlying principle?

Einstein, with his special theory of relativity, sent it to join phlogiston in

the dustbin. Yet, like the memory of an amputated limb, the need for 

ether spookily persisted. What now replaces it for the theoretical phy-

sicist is a controversial "field" named after a young physicist from the 

University of Edinburgh, Peter Higgs, the full dimensions of which are

yet to be known. Some physicists believe it to consist of fundamental

particles such as the electron; others believe it to be composed of 

quarklike objects. A third group believes the Higgs particle to be a 

bound state of "top" and "antitop" quark.

    But why, asks Leon Lederman—eminent particle physicist, author

of The God Particle—hasn't Higgs been universally embraced? Tartly

he replies, "because Veltman, one of the Higgs architects, calls it a rug

under which we sweep our ignorance. Glashow [professor of particle 

physics at Harvard], a toilet in which we flush away the inconsistencies

of our present theories."

    Yet physics will not work without the equivalent of a Higgs field. 

    The notion is simple enough: all space contains a field, the Higgs

field, which permeates the vacuum and is the same everywhere. The

word vacuum, says Dr. Smith, may make the reader's mind boggle.

Normally used to indicate a space from which air or any other gas has

been removed, vacuum is used by physicists in the same nonliteral

sense as they use color or flavor to describe mathematical properties

that cannot be expressed in ordinary language, such as properties of 

quarks and omegons.

    Search for a Higgs field "in the vacuum of space" developed after

all efforts had failed to find a clue to the origin of mass, mass being

described by physicists as "a body's resistance to acceleration,"

quaintly measured in "slugs."(1)

(1) A slug is a unit of mass equal to the mass accelerated at the rate of one

foot per second when acted upon by a force of one pound weight.

    Lederman hints that the function of the Higgs particle is to give mass

to massless particles, mass no longer being considered an intrinsic

property of particles but a property acquired by the interaction of par-

ticles with their environment. Pervading all space, says Lederman, the 

Higgs field is "cluttering up the void, tugging on matter, making it 

heavy." Waxing both sinister and fey, he describes the problem: "We

believe a wraithlike presence throughout the universe is keeping us from

understanding the true nature of matter..... The invisible barrier that

keeps us from knowing the truth is called the Higgs field. Its icy tentacles

reach into every corner of the universe..... It works in black magic

through a particle, the Higgs boson, or God particle."

    To find their sneaky entity, Lederman and his fellow physicists have

come up with no better system than to rev up their colliders to attack

atoms with ever more powerful artillery, hoping thus to produce more 

particles—sleptons, squarks, gluinos, photinos, zinos, and winos—

whose mass, spin, charge, and family relations they can then catalogue

along with the particle's lifetime and the product of its decay.

    All of this has coast taxpayers billions of dollars, half a billion alone

for an accelerator at Fermilab. Fermilab's collider-detector facility,

known as CDF, lavishly housed in an industrial hangar painted blue and 

orange, was designed to accommodate a five-thousand-ton detector

instrument. It took two hundred physicists and as many engineers more

than eight years to assemble what Leon Lederman, one of its distin-

guished directors, describes as a ten-million-pound Swiss watch, the 

electric bill for which runs to more than ten million dollars a year.

    By the 1990s the CDF was employing 360 scientists as well as stu-

dents from a dozen universities and national and international labs and 

was equipped with 100,000 sensors, including scintillation counters, 

organizers, and filters. A special compter was designed to sort through

the atomic debris, programmed to decide which of the hundreds of 

thousands of collisions each second are "interesting" or important

enough to analyze and record on magnetic tape. In one millionth of a

second the computer must discard, record, or pass data into a buffer

memory to make way for the next item. Data encoded in digital form

and organized for recording on magnetic tape at the rate of 100,000

collisions per second in 1990-91 were expected to increase to a million

collisions per second some time later in the 1990s.

    Already the system stores close to a billion bits of information for

each event: in a full run the information stored on magnetic tape is 

equivalent, as reported by its director, to five thousand sets of the 

Encyclopedia britannica. It then takes a battalion of highly skilled and 

motivated professionals armed with powerful workstations and analysis

codes two or three years, says Lederman, to do justice to the data

collected in a single run.

    The primary task of these Higgs field players is, of course, to locate

the ball they're supposed to be playing with. To accomplish this ap-

prentice sorcerer's mirage they envisaged an even more collider, one

with an even longer circuit, larger source of energy, and bigger punch

to produce an even smaller particle: a superconducting supercollider

circling fifty-four miles through the wasteland of Wasahachie, Texas, 

its generator to produce not billions but trillions of electron volts—at a

cost to the public of several billion dollars.(2)

(2) The project was quashed by Congress in early 1994.

    With this leviathan Lederman hoped to nail his God particle to the

establshment barn door by the year 2005. But the theosophists appear

to have found it already in what Leadbeater calls "koilon, the true aether

of space," the medium in which the bubbles of his UPAs are but holes. 

In orthodox physics the latest breakthrough, developed at the end of

the 1970s, was formulated to demonstrate that quarks and antiquarks, 

the antimatter counterparts of quarks—if regarded as pointlike mag-

netic charges—were held together by "strings" or tightly knit bundles of

magnetic " flux," lines of force analogous to the magnetic field around a

magnet embedded in the Higgs field permeating all space. This Higgs 

medium was seen as squeezing together the magnetic lines of force 

into tubes of magnetic flux.

    But this model didn't quite work; so back to the drawing board. By

1984 a "superstring" theory had been formulated to eliminate the ab-

normalities: its basic premise replaced points as the smallest existing

particles with tiny strings. All fundamental parrticles (Including quarks)

were regarded as different quantum states of strings, strings with no

ends known as "closed" superstrings, all interacting with one another 

by joining together to form more closed superstrings, in a maze of 

Chinese boxes.

    For some time, says Phillips, this second model was thought to be 

physically unrealistic. But in 1985 a new kind of closed superstring was 

discovered, the "heterotic superstring." Occupying nine mathematical

dimensions of space, it not only became the most studied model by 

physicists but, as Phillips demonstrates, has remarkable similarities with

Leadbeater's ultimate physical atom.

    Omegons, of course, are nothing but the UPAs so carefully depicted

by the theosophists back in 1895 as emitting and receiving "bright lines"

or "streams of light." Annie Besant, responsible for reporting how groups

of UPAs were bound together, depicted hundreds of stringlike configu-

rations or "lines of force" linking UPAs. Such diagrams, as Phillips points

out, are essentially identical to pictures of subatomic particles appearing

in physics research journals today.

（未完待续）