The Mysterious Allure of Fields and Forces

The actions of invisible fields and forces on objects in the material realm have fascinated humans for eons. The idea of a force came into existence long before the idea of a guiding field was recognized. In fact, fields of all sorts are just now coming under the microscope of collaborative scientific and intuitive investigation.

Since both fields and forces are invisible and can only be measured by how they affect material objects, the experimental findings are theoretical. Even when proper mathematical foundations have been provided and applied science moves forward in creating new ways to use these discoveries, it’s important to remember that the ideas behind them are subject to be overturned in the future. Many of the most important scientific advances on these subjects have been a mixed bag of amateur experimenters who had little formal training and, for the most part, simply followed their hunches or by physicists who made mathematical advances but failed to see the significance of the ideas.

A case in point is the discovery of global wireless communication. In the early 1830s, Michael Faraday found the connection between the combination of electric and magnetic forces, which were mathematically substantiated by James Clerk Maxwell and became the underpinnings of all experiments with radio waves. By the mid 1880s, Heinrich Hertz significantly advanced the research and by the early 1890s, Nikola Tesla suggested that global wireless communication was possible. Shortly thereafter, Guglielmo Marconi took up this research and by 1901 proved that long-distance wireless communication was indeed possible.

Faraday was an amateur experimentalist who was completely fascinated by electricity and its connection with magnetism. He did not, however, have the formal training necessary to validate his theories about these phenomena. Maxwell, an elite mathematician, provided that proof. Hertz, another elite physicist, significantly advanced the mathematical understandings of wave theory, and developed devices to produce both UHF and VHF waves but considered the technology of limited use. Tesla was a visionary experimentalist and had the formal scientific training to provide the necessary mathematical foundations to his theories but his ideas were so far ahead of the academic communities of his time that he was mostly misunderstood and sometimes feared. Marconi had been passionately absorbed by the discovery of radio waves since he was eight years old. With no formal training, but with substantial financial backing and a bit of secrecy to keep him from being considered a madman, he proved what few others even believed possible. He built devices that could transmit and receive radio signals beyond the curvature of the Earth, effectively establishing global wireless communication. All previous attempts were limited to short range line-of-sight transmissions.

But, here is the most important point. Even though Marconi had proved that it could be done, no one knew how it was possible. The theoretical foundation of these experiments was not established until several years later. These investigations also revealed what became known as the Schumann Resonance. This is an electromagnetic wave that constantly circumnavigates the globe at a dominant frequency of 7.8 Hz and has recently been correlated to many forms of psi phenomena including energy healing.

The discovery of invisible radio waves which could be made to carry information led some prominent physicist to suggest that they might be used to facilitate contact with those who have crossed over or to communicate with other disincarnate entities. This type of research is still ongoing today but has become mired in controversy and has fallen into the category of pseudo-science.

Experiments with radio waves led to the discovery of higher frequency electromagnetic waves that constitute the light spectrum, only a small fraction of which fall into the visible range. EM wave radiation then became the darling of science and the basis of quantum physics.

It also became a source of investigation by intuitive practitioners who dealt with subtle body energies because the “feel” of these bodies mimicked the scientific descriptions of EM wave properties. These descriptions also verified that various “bands” or ranges of EM frequencies were useful to different types of communication and that higher frequencies also carried more energy. Many intuitives found these descriptions appealing because they suggested that the energetic templates that constitute the material realm were of a higher frequency. Until recently, measurement of these energies has been out of the reach of rigorous scientific investigation. What science can’t measure, science can’t study. But, as technology progresses, more and more subtle readings have been taken and new investigations are being brought to bear on the mysterious and invisible energies that surround and permeate the entire material universe.

Also see What are All These Fields? to learn what constitutes a field and the various types that have gained popular attention such as the Zero Point Field, Morphogenic Fields and the Implicate Order of subtle energies as espoused by David Bohm.

Some content excerpted from The Sage Age – Blending Science with Intuitive Wisdom
© 2008 MaAnna Stephenson
Content may be used freely with proper credit and a link to www.SageAge.net