The quest to unify all of physics into one big framework called "the theory
of everything" has inspired a host of way-out ideas, with the current
leading concept involving a 10- or 11-dimensional universe. Now a pioneer in
the field of stem cell research has weighed in with an essay that brings
biology and consciousness into the mix.

Robert Lanza, vice president for research and scientific development at
Advanced Cell Technology, sets forth his view on the quest for a unified
cosmic theory in "A New Theory of the Universe," an essay appearing in The
American Scholar.

In the past, the intellectual journal has published the provocative musings
of such luminaries as Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell - and Lanza hopes
his perspective on one of the biggest questions of the cosmos will make a
similar splash.

Lanza argues that the debates over extra dimensions, unknowable multiverses
and cosmic landscapes are heading down the wrong road:

"The urgent and primary questions of the universe have been undertaken by
those physicists who are trying to explain the origins of everything with
grand unified theories. But as exciting as these theories are, they are an
evasion, if not a reversal, of the central mystery of knowledge: that the
laws of the world were somehow created to produce the observer. And more
important than this, that the observer in a significant sense creates
reality and not the other way around. Recognition of this insight leads to a
single theory that unifies our understanding of the world."

He points to recent research into retrocausality - the spooky idea that an
observer can apparently decide the outcome of an event after it has
occurred - as fresh evidence that observers create their own versions of
reality. The idea goes back at least as far as Immanuel Kant's 18th-century
philosophizing about space, time and other categories, and it also comes up
as a new-age twist on quantum mechanics in the movie "What the Bleep Do We
Know?"

So is Lanza's new theory actually a new-age spiritual tract rather than a
scientific proposition? "Absolutely not," he told me Wednesday.

"Very real experiments show that space and time are indeed relative to the
observer," he said, "and there are real experiments that also continue to
show that the properties of matter itself are observer-determined. ...
Science has to deal with these facts."

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/03/08/85328.aspx