Modern science tells us today that all things have a guiding field: a well known example is how the gravity field guides the orbits of planets. Even at the subatomic level the electron has a guiding field. Humans, too, have an electromagnetic field. Some fields radiate out into the environment, and some fields do not propagate but are attached to the object and move together with it.
Stories of the mystical power of stones have been passed down through history, folklore and legend. Many ancient cultures believe that the land and rocks hold a memory of all that has happened there, or that magical qualities or spiritual energies of ancestors or gods reside in the rocks and stones.
The electrical and magnetic properties of stones and minerals have been extensively exploited to perform the wizardry behind much of our modern technology. Quartz – abundant in the earth – has piezoelectric properties, which enable conversion of pressure patterns (eg sound waves) into electrical patterns, and vice versa. Magnetic material, also abundant in the earth, is used for storage of data. The use of light, photonics and optical fibre technology for superior speed, bandwidth, and data storage is revolutionising world communications.
In the story of the Aboriginal dreamtime, “the Creator came down to earth on rainbow to bring the message of peace to humans and at the point where his foot touched the earth, the stones started sparkling and came alive with all the colours of the rainbow”. These multicoloured ‘sparkling’ stones became the Australian opal, and are said to invoke visions during ceremonial dreamings.
The opal is a photonic crystal; it has no pigment colour of its own, but displays brilliant changing colours due to its ability to affect the propagation of the electromagnetic field. The same characteristic is seen in butterfly wings, iridescent fish scales, and some beetles. Photonic crystal structures are a promising area of research as materials to control and manipulate light, encoded with our communication and information.
It’s an interesting ancient idea that the land can hold information about all the things that have happened there, and that the human electromagnetic fields – the medical signatures of life – can interact with and change non-living matter fields.
It is an increasingly accepted definition in physics, that the physical world is made of information itself, and that the ‘properties of the universe are best described not by the laws that govern matter but by the laws that govern information’.