Nationality American Name Evan Walker | Role Physicist Fields Physics | |
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Books The physics of consciousness | ||
C Bangs, artist interview with Dr. Gregory Matloff, & Dr. Evan Harris Walker.
Evan Harris Walker (1935 – August 17, 2006), was an American physicist and parapsychologist.
Contents
Biography
Walker was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland in 1964. He received over a dozen patents and published more than a hundred papers in scientific journals.
Walker said he had undergone a Zen enlightenment experience in 1966 while walking in a field at the University of Maryland. This led him to reassess quantum mechanics, finding its indeterminacy incomplete.
He worked at the Ballistic Research Laboratories of the US Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. He wrote several articles which appeared in the Journal of Arthur M. Young's "Institute for the Study of Consciousness" ( founded in Berkeley in 1972). These papers greatly interested Nick Herbert and Saul-Paul Sirag, who invited him to talk to the Fundamental Fysiks Group in the mid-70s.
In 1981, Walker founded the Walker Cancer Research Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Aberdeen, Maryland, which funds public awareness of the risk of cancer and research for a cure.
Evan Harris Walker died, aged 70, on August 17, 2006, at Harford Memorial Hospital in Havre de Grace, Maryland.
Writings
Walker promoted the charge that Albert Einstein "stole" special relativity from his first wife, Mileva Marić. (This claim has not been accepted by mainstream historians of science.) [Pais (1994), pp. 1–29; Holton (1996), pp. 177–193; Stachel (2002), p. 26-38; 39-55; Martinez, (2005), pp. 49–56.]
Walker believed that a quantum observer theory could explain paranormal phenomena.
In 1979, Walker and Richard Mattuck published a parapsychology paper proposing a quantum explanation for psychokinesis. Physicist Victor J. Stenger wrote that their explanation contained assumptions, not supported by any scientific evidence. According to Stenger their paper is "filled with impressive looking equations and calculations that give the appearance of placing psychokinesis on a firm scientific footing... Yet look what they have done. They have found the value of one unknown number (wavefunction steps) that gives one measured number (the supposed speed of PK-induced motion). This is numerology, not science."
Martin Gardner noted that Walker's parapsychological work was not supported by any scientific evidence and his quantum mechanical calculations to explain paranormal phenomena and God were an example of pseudoscience. In 2000, Walker published The Physics of Consciousness. The book attempts to describe how quantum mechanical processes may be responsible for the creation of human consciousness. According to a review Walker believed something of us survives death and the book "opens the door to paranormal phenomena and God as Quantum Mind."