Tour Dates Posted

More interviews and virtual blog tour dates have been posted for October. Interviews include Toward The Light, Author's Voice and Writers in the Sky Podcast.

The Virtual Blog Tour runs from October 19-27 and includes sites hosted by Kathleen Gage, Joyce Anthony and Phil Harris.

MaAnna will also be speaking live to the Knoxville chapter of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in November.

For more information and full tour dates, visit The Sage Age website.

The Sage Age featured in Publishers Weekly

In the September 22nd edition, Publishers Weekly featured The Sage Age in the article: New Age Pragmatism Crystals and tarots give way to more practical and mainstream subject matter. Written by Juan Martinez.

Upcoming Interview

Upcoming September interviews include

Toward The Light with Rev. Juliet Nightingale
Sept. 21, 2008 live at 5pm ET
Read Toward The Light News to find out how Juliet and MaAnna first met.
Click here to go directly to the BBS Radio site.

Author's Voice with Joe Carroccio
Sept. 26, 2008 (podcast)

New eBook available on The Sage Age

A new eBook titled How Thoughts Become Reality is now available. Written exclusively for newsletter subscribers, it contains excerpts from chapter four of The Sage Age about what thoughts are, how they affect us, as well as how our intentions directly impact our reality.

To get your free copy, visit The Sage Age.

The Sage Age to be featured in Publishers Weekly

In the upcoming September 22nd edition, Publishers Weekly will feature The Sage Age in an article on the genre of New Thought.

To get your copy of The Sage Age at the publisher's discount using PayPal, either click here or contact Nightengale Press during normal business hours at (847) 810-8498.
The Sage Age is also available at all major online retailers.

The Mythos of the Large Hadron Collider

The Mythos of the Large Hadron Collider

Billions of years from now, a father and his young daughter may be enjoying the twinkling beauty of a clear summer night when she asks, “Dad, how did all those stars get there?” To which he will reply, “It all started with a big bang.” Today, as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ramps up to speed, speculations abound as to whether science is on the verge of the biggest breakthrough in history or on the event horizon of creating a black hole. Even some physicists are concerned that while we think we are safely recreating only the first instant of the Big Bang, we may actually be hitting the “Reset” button on the entire cycle of creation instead.

High energy particle colliders are nothing new. The first ones were developed in the 1930s and called cyclotrons. This type of device used large magnets to guide and accelerate particles ever faster through a spiral configuration. By the early 1940s, such a device was used to enrich uranium for the Manhattan Project. The cyclotrons were eventually developed into extreme high-energy particle colliders which were the biggest machines ever conceived and can only be seen in their entirety from the air because, instead of spiral tracks, they use full circles that are miles wide. They are often referred to as “atom smashers” because they send two particles at high speed around a circle in opposite directions and then document their collision. There are currently seventy-five particle colliders located on six continents around the world. Of the largest, one is the International Linear Collider located at Fermilab. The other is the Large Hadron Collider built for CERN, which is the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The expanded use of so many colliders opened the door for multiple research projects revealing the existence of one new particle after another. Of course, with every new particle came its anti-particle twin. The cornucopia of new particle discovery was so plentiful that it eventually became known as “the particle zoo.” It’s important to realize that few, if any, of these anti-particles have actually been recorded. They are merely theorized to keep the mathematical equations balanced. This same sort of theoretical balancing act is also applied to the existence of many fields and forces. For every force, there must be a particle to carry it. Conversely, every new particle found by the colliders must be associated with a force.

The most elusive of these particles, and one that the LHC was specifically designed to find, is the Higgs Boson, which is associated with the Higgs Field. It is commonly referenced in science circles as the “God particle” and is thought to be the reason why things have mass. The force of gravity is associated with mass. In Einstein’s pursuit of a single Theory of Everything (TOE), he simply could not get gravity to play well with relativity theory. And neither could anyone else. Mass and gravity have successfully provided a monkey wrench to thwart all attempts by physicists to establish a Grand Unified Theory (GUT).

Considering the fact that much of the science behind the experiments that will be conducted at the LHC are, at best, theoretical, is it any wonder so many folks are nervous about what might happen? Let’s get a historical perspective. Even though theories of the world being round instead of flat were recorded as early as fourth century B.C., many still thought that Columbus would certainly fall of the edge of the Earth if he sailed west into the unknown. Many people, scientists among them, thought that a plane would simply explode if it attempted to break the sound barrier. When the U.S. was ready to send a living being into orbit, they chose a chimp rather than a human because they were concerned about unknown contaminations from space. It’s often overlooked that Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize in Physics for E=mc2. At the time, relativity theory was looked upon with a raised eyebrow and the scientific community withheld its laurels until the theory could be substantiated. History shows us that new theories are usually not embraced immediately. More often than not, they are fully accepted only after they are proven.

Will the LHC create an uncontrollable Big Bang or a black hole big enough to swallow the Earth and all its surrounding space, as sensationalized by the popular media? Not likely. It’s more likely that the quantum leap of faith taken by a few contemporary physicists will demonstrate a lack of fear based on an understanding that transcends the science and the math. In doing so, they just might give us a small glimpse from a unique perspective into the nature of reality.

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

September Interview Schedule

Upcoming September interviews include

Toward The Light with Rev. Juliet Nightingale
Sept. 21, 2008 live at 5pm ET

Author's Voice with Joe Carroccio
Sept. 26, 2008 (download podcast)

Visit The Sage Age where you can see the full schedule on the Interviews page. Get a peek of the topics that will be discussed by clicking the links for the Interview Questions on the Media page.

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 which 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.

The next article will cover 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