PREDICTING THE AFTERLIFE

PREDICTING THE AFTERLIFE A Natural Corollary of the Present Life T HE physicist Paul Dirac predicted the existence of “antimatter” before it was observed. What Dirac did on a scientific level, the preacher of God’s word does on a spiritual level: he predicts the afterlife. Perhaps one of the main reasons why people fail to attach themselves to true religion in the modern age is that the teachings of religion cannot be observed or experienced in the normal scientific sense. Belief in the afterlife, which is the very crux of true religion, appears to most people as particularly hypothetical and far-fetched: if something cannot be seen, how can it be believed? Scientific discoveries made in the 20th century, however, should have made it much easier for people to believe in the afterlife. In their initial stages most scientific discoveries have been no more than conclusions reached from theoretical, abstract data; they have constituted an inference of scientific “truths” from scientific “facts”. Will Durant wrote in his The Story of Philosophy: Every science begins as philosophy…; (science) arises in hypothesis. In several cases it has been many years before discoveries were made in the laboratory. Yet even before these discoveries had reached the experimental stage, they were accepted as facts: they were not denied on the basis of the theoretical and abstract method of their presentation. The prediction by the Cambridge physicist Paul Dirac (1902-1984) of the existence of antimatter was one such discovery. The first antiparticle to be discovered was the positron—the antiparticle of the electron. Its existence was first effectively predicted by Dirac in 1928. It was not until 1932, however, that the particle was detected in cosmic rays by C.D. Anderson. By that time Dirac was making new and farreaching predictions on the basis of facts already at his disposal. As J.G. Crowther wrote in his obituary of the famed physicist, “Dirac was quick to perceive the general implications of his discovery.” In 1933 Dirac shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Erwin Schrodinger. In his address on receiving the reward he gave a virtually complete outline of antiparticles, antimatter and even hinted at the anti-universe. He specially forecast the existence of a negative proton, which was not observed until 1955.