1) I want to share with the Reader my discomfort and dissatisfaction with many of the public statements of Tom Bearden and Richard Hoagland.

2) At the same time, I want to be constructive, not just destructive, and thus to share with my Reader some of the technical knowledge that I have (and also some of my dreams).

3) I also want to get as much feed-back as possible concerning the problems and questions discussed in these notes.

 First of all, how does it happen that I am where I am and that I am writing what I am writing... Well, it is a long story. Some of the relevant info is on my Quantum Future pages, especially Quantum Future History. Some is in my curriculum vitae. Finally some can be found in Physics and the Mysterious and my wife's writings: Amazing Grace. You may, if you wish to, check all these links later on, as well as my list of publications.

For now it may be enough to say this: I am a theoretical physicist, with a lot of experience, quite a number of publications in respected, mainstream physics journals, and who, at the same time, tries to be as open minded as possible while still guarding myself against making claims and statements that I would not be able to defend in front of any "scientific committee".

I am a scientist. But there are many scientists, as you know. All kinds of them.... So, let me tell you what are my areas of expertise.

My most recent domain is quantum theory, its foundations, its paradoxes, its philosophical consequences. Many of my recent papers deal with these subjects in one way or another.

Quantum theory, as such has little to do with the ideas of Bearden and Hoagland which I want to discuss on this pages. Therefore I need to point out another area of my experience as a physicist: experience with mathematical theories of space and time, hyperdimensional physics, Riemannian geometry, geometrical theories of gravity and electromagnetism, Kaluza-Klein theories of extra dimensions, spinor structures, quaternions etc. All of this will be very useful when discussing some of the claims of Bearden and Hoagland, as well as other claims so often propagated in the "new Age" literature. If you like, you can go to Amazon.com, search for "Jadczyk" and order my textbook "Riemannian Geometry Fiber Bundles Kaluza-Klein Theories and All That" , written together with Robert Coquereax - it is only $53, and it will tell you about the math involved in studies of Hyperdimensional Physics. Or you can order "Quantum Future : From Volta and Como to the Present and Beyond : Proceedings of the Xth Max Born Symposium" (Held in Przesieka, Poland, 24-27 September 1997) - but this one is conference proceedings and costs $73!

Anyhow, joking aside, I am not going to cheat you. I am going to be as straightforward here as I possibly can be. There is however one thing that I do need to draw your attention to: experts do no not always agree! In fact experts often vigorously discuss problems that are never questioned in textbooks used in our high schools and colleges and universities.

Bertrand Russel once remarked that whenever experts disagree on a given subject, layman would do better by abstaining from a definite judgement. This is, however, only one of his famous sayings. There is a complementary one which needs to be taken into account as well: "Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken."

I want to discuss here about Hoagland's version of "Hyperdimensional Physics" - that is, I want to write about what I think of his ideas, whether I can make any sense of what he is talking about, and also how his ideas relate to my own ideas and the ideas of other qualified experts.

While reading Hoagland it is clear that he is under the influence of certain public disclosures of Tom Bearden. It is also rather apparent that Bearden knows quite a bit of physics and math, while it seems that, for Hoagland it is only a hobby. In trying to speak constructively, I will say that it is rather clear to me that Tom Bearden, more often than not, sends us a coded message that sometimes needs to be read backward. On the other hand, Hoagland relies mainly on his intuition - which sometimes leads even the most successful prophets astray.

I will write this story as a series of pieces that will continue for while. One day I will will write more, another day I will write less, still another day I will replace my previous piece by a revised version and so on. And so I will be updating this story day by day ... until the day will come when the story will stop, because there will be another strong urge - to do something else. You see, it is a difficult decision... There is always the problem of choosing: should I spend the little time that I have discussing ideas of other people? Would it not be better for me to spend this time developing my own ideas? But, somehow, in this particular case, I feel that discussing, if only initiating the discussion, of some of the ideas of Hoagland and Bearden will do only good - to me and to my my readers. Thus let me start.

I. Introduction

To start with let's go to Richard Hoagland's website where we find the following: .

'Unknown to most current physicists and students of science (if not the general media and public), the beginnings of modern physics launched over 100 years ago by the so-called "giants" -- Helmholtz, Lord Kelvin, Faraday, Maxwell and many others -- laid a full and rich tradition in this currently little-known field: the open, heatedly debated scientific and philosophical premise that three-dimensional reality is only a subset of a series of higher, hyperspatial, additional dimensions, which control not only the physics of our very existence, from stars to galaxies to life itself ... but potentially, through time-variable changes in its foundations.'

I don't know where Hoagland got the impression that the idea of additional dimensions is unknown to most modern day physicists. My own experience is quite different.

There are chapters in classical textbooks on gravity dealing with Kaluza-Klein theories. Every student of physics who even casually searches through the physics journals will easily find hundreds of papers on dimensional reduction, spontaneous compactification and Kaluza-Klein theories.

Try it yourself: Go to http://www-slac.slac.stanford.edu/FIND/hep - Stanford Linear Accelerator preprint archive - and type in "find title dimensional reduction" and you will be returned 329 documents.

Go to http://xxx.lanl.gov and search for the term "Kaluza" in the abstracts, and you will be returned (at the time of writing this piece) 368 documents, which you can download to your computer, print and study. It starts with hep-ph/9908505: "Asymmetrical large extra dimensions" by Joseph Lykken, Satyanarayan Nandi. The next document is hep-ph/9908469: "Gravitational Lensing and Extra Dimensions" by Xiao-Gang He, Girish C. Joshi, Bruce H.J. McKellar, the next document is hep-ph/9908462: "Unified Models at Intermediate Energy Scales and Kaluza-Klein Excitations" by G.K. Leontaris (CERN, Ioannina Un.), N.D. Tracas (NTUA, Athens) etc. etc.

Thus Hoagland's claim that the subject is unknown to most current physicists is, at least, not quite adequate. In fact, it is downright misleading. What is also inadequate, if not also complete disinformation, is connecting the names of Helmholz, Kelvin, Faraday and Maxwell to this subject. I do not know even one contribution of any of the the above authors that is relevant or significant to the subject...

Hoagland continues:

'Oliver Heaviside, described by Scientific American (Sept. 1950) as "self-taught and ... never connected with any university ... had [however] a remarkable and inexplicable ability (which was possessed also by Newton and Laplace...) to arrive at mathematical results of considerable complexity without going through any conscious process of proof ...

" According to other observers, Heaviside actually felt that Maxwell's use of quaternions and their description of the "potentials" of space was "... mystical, and should be murdered from the theory ..." which -- by drastically editing Maxwell's original work after the latter's untimely death (from cancer), excising the scalar component of the quaternions and eliminating the hyperspatial characteristics of the directional (vector) components -- Oliver Heaviside effectively accomplished this singlehanded.

This means, of course, that the four surviving "classic" Maxwell's Equations -- which appear in every electrical and physics text the world over, as the underpinnings of all 20th Century electrical and electromagnetic engineering, from radio to radar, from television to computer science, if not inclusive of every "hard" science from physics to chemistry to astrophysics that deals with electromagnetic radiative processes -- never appeared in any original Maxwell' paper or treatise! They are, in fact-- "Heaviside's equations!" '

Now, here Hoagland evidently follows previous disclosures by Tom Beardean who wrote extensively about the subject of Maxwell, quaternions and the regrettable ignorance of contemporary physicists and electrical engineers.

Is this really the case? Is anything being hidden from us?

To answer this question I will use pieces of discussion on the subject that was going on "newphysics" mailing list.

Notes

Bearden and Hoagland

Critical Notes on Val Valerian