A New Science of the Heavens: An Interview with Robert Temple
Printed in the Winter 2023 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "A New Science of the Heavens: An Interview with Robert Temple" Quest 111:1, pg 12-17
By Richard Smoley
Robert Temple is a multifaceted writer and thinker whose work extends across many disciplines. From his work with Joseph Needham, author of the monumental Science and Civilisation in China, he wrote a book on Chinese science and technology, The Genius of China. He has also written The Crystal Sun, a study of over 400 ancient optical artifacts that were hidden in the basements of the world’s museums.
Temple is perhaps best known for The Sirius Mystery, which discusses a West African tribe called the Dogon, who possess knowledge of the Sirius star system that preceded recent astronomical discoveries.
This Zoom interview is dedicated to Temple’s latest book, A New Science of Heaven. It contains astonishing revelations about the new frontier of physics, which has to do with plasma—a fourth state of matter in addition to solids, liquids, and gases.
Richard Smoley: You’ve done an extraordinary number of fascinating things across the course of your career; any one of them would be a subject for a much longer interview, but we will focus this one on your latest book, A New Science of Heaven. It’s about a fourth state of matter called plasma. This comes out of physics, not metaphysics; it’s not occult in any way. But you say that it has an enormous significance for us. To begin with, what is plasma?
Robert Temple: Plasma is a fourth state of matter. It was officially discovered in 1879 by the English scientist Sir William Crookes, who was the inventor of the vacuum tube.
He discovered this phenomenon going on in his tubes, and he named it “radiant matter.” The name was changed in 1928 by Irving Langmuir to “plasma.” (I must stress that it has no connection whatsoever with blood plasma.)
Plasma is a form of matter that’s not made of atoms; it’s made of particles: electrons and protons, which have opposite charges to one another, and ions. Ions are often considered incomplete atoms, because they don’t have a balanced charge. I look at it the other way around: I look at atoms as value-added ions. They can have positive or negative charge, but we’re really only concerned with positively charged ions, which are the most common and which compose, for instance, the solar wind that blows out from the sun and fills the solar system.
When plasma was originally encountered, it appeared to be only a gas, but we now know that it can be a liquid. And it can not only be a solid, it can be crystals, so for some years now the few scientists who work on the fringes of physics and deal with these things have been dealing with plasma crystals. There are hot plasmas and cold plasmas. Most of the work that’s taking place at the moment is on the hot ones, because those are concerned with trying to control nuclear fusion to make energy. They haven’t succeeded in doing that.
The plasmas that I’m most concerned about in my book are the space plasmas, and they tend to be cold plasmas—much colder than anything on earth.
I should point out that until 1962, it was universally believed by the world’s scientific establishment that outer space was empty. We grew up as children being told outer space was a total vacuum and nothingness, and we now know that it’s actually the very opposite.
Smoley: How does this new discovery of plasma change our understanding of the universe?
Temple: It changes it completely. Because the universe is now known by astrophysicists to be composed of 99.9 percent plasma. For instance, our sun is completely made of plasma; it’s not made of atoms. And we have a universe which is made of plasma: nonatomic matter.
Our basic physics—classical physics—has already been left behind by relativity theory and quantum theory, but even what we consider today to be advanced modern physics is wholly inadequate, because it’s based upon the assumption that the universe is made of atoms, and it’s not. It’s made of plasma, which is very different and behaves very differently from atomic or physical matter. The equations which govern its behavior are all nonlinear equations, which are hard to deal with, and it doesn’t follow all of our customary laws: it won’t sit and beg like a good dog. In fact it’s a big, black, barking, threatening universe, and it doesn’t want to have tiny humans on rocky planets in the middle of nowhere trying to impose their laws upon it.
So we have to change our science. We need a new physics, but don’t worry: it’s already on the way, because there are branches of physics at this moment where the new science is being created. There are other branches as well: there’s topological physics, which is very exciting, and there’s information physics, which is an extension of it; it’s being driven forward by the search for quantum computers.
Yet a great deal of plasma physics is not publicly known, because a lot of these advances are taking place in two different areas which have vested interests in keeping them secret. First of all, if you have a corporation, you’ve got commercial motives.
If you’re in possession of some great new idea about how to make quantum computers work, you’re not going to tell the other companies, so all the scientists working on this have signed confidentiality and secrecy agreements. We can understand that perfectly, because there’s hundreds of billions of dollars involved for anybody who’s got the new angle. This may impede the flow of knowledge and certainly public understanding, but these commercial imperatives are at work.
Even stricter than those are the military controls, because most of this kind of work is funded by the defense establishment and the security establishment, and they overclassify everything. They’re not really interested in the public: who cares about those stupid morons out there who pay their taxes? It’s all got to be secret, because there are always enemies, and we can’t say anything, because the enemies might know.
So what with the military and security restrictions and the commercial restrictions, these frontiers of physics don’t have much of a chance to trickle down to us.
That’s why I believe that my book is unique, because I’ve gone to immense trouble to gather this information to the extent that is possible (and indeed I went beyond the possible in many instances) and boil it down into a book that can be understood by somebody who doesn’t know any science at all. As you read the book, I lead you by the hand, and I explain everything as I go on. If you don’t know what a semiconductor is or what superconductivity is, I tell you in an easy way.
Furthermore, I’ve done an audio recording of the book myself, which is available from the same publisher, and some of my friends who have read or listened to my book are reading it or listening to it twice—not because it’s difficult: they all say they understand it. But there’s so much information that they have to go over it again, because everything in the book is new, and it takes a bit of getting used to.
Smoley: I’ve read your book, and I would agree with the things you’ve said about it. I did find it very comprehensible. Yet it was overwhelming, not because it was difficult, but because it transforms our view of reality. What we think of as reality has very little to do even with what we conceive of as physical reality. How do these ideas affect our understanding of the day-to-day world?
Temple: They have the potential to change everything. We’ve got an infinite future ahead of us, since I don’t believe that anybody can die, much less does die. We have to get ourselves in shape to face that, and we can’t do it with our present concepts.
I’ve struggled with all of this myself. You’ve mentioned how difficult it was for you, not to take it in but to face the consequences. I’ve been going through that agony for years. Because I knew how overwhelming it was, I tried to lessen the challenge by making it as accessible as I possibly could.
We have to realize several key things which are different than what we think. There are very few rocky planets made of what we call physical matter. Of course, there may be hundreds of billions of them, but that’s a mere nothing compared to the others. We also need to realize that our physical bodies are what I tend to call smart overcoats, our real selves being bioplasma bodies. That’s what leaves the physical body at death and continues its existence on what you could describe as another plane.
The intelligence in the universe is cosmic. These plasmas can form dusty complex clouds, which have the capacity to self-organize by the process which has become known as emergence and develop intelligence. There are complex plasma clouds throughout the universe. We see them everywhere: every star is a complex plasma cloud, including our own sun. Lightning, by the way, is plasma; the center of a candle flame is plasma. We have plasma in us: our physical bodies are full of currents of plasma; every cell has protons going across the membrane. The heart is an electromagnetic device, which happens to activate itself as a muscle, but the fact is that we, even in our physical form, are electromagnetic beings. And the core of ourselves is our bioplasma cells, which are entirely plasma and electromagnetic.
Plasma has positive charges and negative charges, and it can contain modules within it, countless ones. For instance, a bioplasma body that is the same size as a physical body will have an interior structure far more complex than our physical bodies. Indeed, we are very complex bioplasma bodies, which exceed in complexity the anatomy of our physical bodies.
Smoley: It has long been held that there are all sorts of subtle bodies, which are nonphysical. Some of these have been described as etheric bodies or astral bodies; there also seems to be the substance called the life force, which science, for some reason, refuses to admit the existence of. How does plasma relate to these concepts?
Temple: There have been many inspired people—psychics and seers and so on—who have intuited all the things which modern science can now demonstrate. You mentioned subtle bodies, and you can look at that wonderful book The Subtle Body by G.R.S. Mead, which is a classic example (he’s one of my intellectual heroes, by the way).
I believe that there’s more than one level to the bioplasma body. That was known to the ancient Egyptians, who had many different souls; the ba and so on, the highest one being the akh.
This is the perennial wisdom, and this is what Mme. Blavatsky was trying to institutionalize. She thought she ought to get this deep wisdom organized, propagated, and preserved—and to be analyzed as well. This perennial wisdom is true. Just because it’s been mocked and sneered at by people who arrogantly believe themselves to be rational (this just means narrow-minded) doesn’t mean that it’s false.
Science has finally begun to catch up with ancient wisdom. We’re getting to the point where, on the very fringes of science, unreported to the public, never mentioned in the media, is all the stuff that I’ve gathered together in my book, which proves scientifically that this ancient wisdom is all true.
That’s why it’s so important. We have to get this basic material propagated, we have to tell people, because the entire future of the planet really depends on this. Forget CO2 and climate change, compared to what we’re talking about. Ultimately it doesn’t even matter if the earth should be destroyed by climate change; the fact is, the universe won’t be. I don’t think that the planet is going to be destroyed, but even if it were, we won’t be destroyed. We will continue to exist as bioplasma beings in a plasma world, which cannot be destroyed by climate change, because there’s no climate in the plasma world; there’s no weather; there’s no rain; there’s no heat; there’s no cold. Even if everything were to be destroyed on this planet, we would all still exist. The efforts that we make here and now to understand the universe and get ourselves into gear properly will continue, even if only on what’s traditionally been called the spiritual level.
Smoley: You have pointed out that the ancient Egyptians knew about these subtle bodies, and there are teachings about them in most esoteric traditions. Does that mean that humans have a capacity to somehow organically perceive the subtle bodies?
Temple: I’m so glad you asked that, Richard. Yes, I do believe that. Today we live in a society which is intensely materialistic, I would say very decadent. It’s shut itself off from what is traditionally called the spiritual.
I do believe that every human being has the capacity for intuition of the deeper truths if they’re sufficiently open, but most people today are being artificially closed by bad forces, like addiction to cell phones. Nobody any longer has any reflection time or time to get their heads together. We need to clear away the information clutter and the excess radiation that is being generated by all these devices and give ourselves a bit of peace. We need to set aside time to sit and meditate; we need to make our lives more peaceful if we possibly can.
When we do that, I believe that we can have the truths come to us, because we are surrounded by information space, as I call it. I get a lot of my intuitions from my ability to contact and penetrate information space. If we really concentrate on that and give it its chance, we can open ourselves. In ancient times, the priests and seers were attempting to draw the deeper truths and sacred intuitions down into their minds. I think that there was more of a direct connection to the deeper truths in simpler times.
Smoley: One thing that I found fascinating in your book was the plasma clouds that you described between the earth and the moon, Could you explain those a little?
Temple: We have programs looking for extraterrestrial intelligence. I’m convinced we have it in the form of these two giant clouds, which together are eighteen times the size of the earth.
They are between the earth and the moon—not in a direct line of sight, but at sixty-degree angles to the left and to the right as you look towards the moon. They are at Lagrange points four and five. These are points in between bodies in space where the gravitational pull of those bodies is effectively neutralized,
where the gravitational pull of the moon and the gravitational pull of the earth balance out, and there’s nothing pulling you anywhere.
These clouds were first discovered in 1961 by a Polish observational astronomer called Kordylewski. They don’t emit any light, and they’re almost entirely transparent and therefore very difficult to detect. In 2019, their existence was finally confirmed by a team of Hungarian astronomers, which Kordylewski couldn’t do in 1961 for two reasons: he didn’t have modern equipment, and as his great grandson has told me, the Polish Communist government didn’t like him and stopped his work. The Hungarians came charging in on their white horses to the rescue, and they proved that he was right.
I found the Hungarian scientists, contacted the woman who’s in charge of them, and asked, “Are you studying the plasma aspects of the clouds?” She said, “No, we’re only studying the celestial mechanics aspects.”
I thought, “I’m going to do something about this quick,” so I got on to my great friend the professor of astrophysics Chandra Wickramasinghe, who was the main protégé of the astronomer Fred Hoyle (whom I knew very well). Chandra didn’t know about these Kordylewski Clouds; very few people did. “We have to do a paper; would you do it with me?” I asked. And so we did a paper together, which was an advance in astrophysics, and it’s reprinted as an appendix to my book.
We call attention to the fact that dusty complex plasmas in space like this would almost certainly have evolved intelligence. Considering that they are probably billions of years old, they would have intelligence so great that it would dwarf the pretenses of the American security establishment, with their supercomputers in Utah, where they store every phone call and every email. They think it’s going to make them all-wise, but of course they can’t process all that, whereas these clouds can process everything, since, I believe, they’re conscious; they’re alive.
Their existence was intuited in antiquity, because in Gnostic Christianity, there are descriptions of gigantic intelligent entities above the atmosphere between the earth and the moon. They were superentities presiding over the earth. One of them was called Metatron, which is the name of the angel of the Lord.
It’s a big stretch to realize that we may have intelligent, although inorganic, extraterrestrial life between us and the moon.
We don’t know whether they would have emotions and feelings—maybe they do—but they would have fantastic and imaginable computing power. They would know everything about the entire history of the earth and everything on it. They would probably also be great predictors of the future. They could probably tell us what’s going to happen six months from now.
I do believe that these entities have attempted to communicate with us, and that we didn’t notice. There is a history of their attempts to communicate with us. I had a whole section of the book about that, which was removed by the publishers, so I’ll have to publish it at some point. But that’s another story.
These entities are not just big; they’re different, and they’re not necessarily going to look at things the way we do here on planet earth. The security agencies will consider this—as they already consider the whole question of extraterrestrial life—as the number one security issue for the world.
Now we come to the question, are the clouds friendly, or do they hate us? I think the answer is very plain: if they weren’t friendly, we wouldn’t be here. I believe that they’re hoping we will make it, and they keep trying to help us by sending down waves of thought that sensitives can pick up. They can’t declare themselves, come down, and say, “Look, we’re going to sort out your politics for you; we’re going to stop wars.” But they must be quite worried about what we’re going to do with the planet, and I’m convinced that they want us to make it.
Smoley: How do we know that these plasma clouds are intelligent?
Temple: Having read the book, you have seen that there’s been a lot of work done, mostly by Russian scientists; it’s all laid out in the book. By spontaneous processes of self-organization when these clouds come together, they can generate emergence: intelligence, which then becomes more and more intelligent and keeps growing. If they are billions of years old, you can’t even begin to imagine how intelligent they are.
Dusty complex plasmas are a very special kind of plasma kind of plasma. To become intelligent, a plasma cloud has to have dust. If there isn’t any around that it can gather up, it’ll make its own. It’s self-sufficient in a way, but it does need energy coming in.
Smoley: You suggest, as many people have, that there are forces that are very much interested in our awakening. Yet there seem to be all sorts of factors that impede or subvert these efforts toward illumination. It almost seems as if there’s one group out there that is trying to enlighten us, and another group that is trying to put the lid on us.
Temple: I think there’s a war between good and evil going on throughout the universe, and we’re in the crossfire. Let’s face it: we live in a world today where authoritarianism is spreading rapidly everywhere, and we’ve got all these horrible people who are trying to enslave humanity.
I think that humans are of some very special interest to the higher entities. You can imagine there must be lots of other physical spaces in the universe, whose beings are incredibly dull but very good. And then there will be others who are totally bad. We’re kind of a mixture.
I believe that we are bringing interest to the cosmic anthropologists because we’re a strange kind of experiment on the borderline between madness and creativity. We are uniquely able to be creative. Where does all this come from? At the same time, a lot of intensely creative people are pretty wild and wooly characters, and a bit crazy. There’s a thin line between genius and madness; a lot of the supermathematicians are autistic.
We’re not boring as a species, but we’re also loaded with psychopaths. I would say, at least 10 percent of humanity is psychopathic; some people would say 20 percent. We can never seem to quite get rid of all the psychopaths.
Now this is all part of the cosmic anthropological study of us, you see. What the higher entities want to know is, can this work? In other words, can they somehow come up with a model of a human species that isn’t quite as crazy, but still retains the creativity? Or do we have to be this crazy in order to be this creative?
We don’t know the answer to that question. I bet these entities don’t either, because we’re a running experiment, and they are interested to see the outcome. They try not to interfere because it would disturb the experiment. They can’t come down and kill all the bad guys; that would perturb the experiment, and then it wouldn’t be an experiment anymore.
We have been studied without being interfered with. We have to be left to our own devices as long as possible, until we get to the point where we might really all destroy ourselves in a sort of huge catastrophe; then there might be intervention.
But after all, even if the physical world were to be destroyed, as I’ve already said, we as bioplasma beings would still exist. But where would we go?
Smoley: I would like to ask a question raised by something Fred Hoyle said that you quoted in your book: that the scientific peer review process is merely a retardation of the advancement of knowledge. Could you expand on that a little?
Temple: In my book, I give case histories of scientists who have made crucial experiments but who have been prevented from publishing. One leading case is Fritz Zwicky, a Swiss astronomer who in the late forties and all through the fifties kept trying to publish his paper showing evidence that outer space was not empty. The establishment insisted that it was empty; it was a vacuum. So he couldn’t get his paper published for ten years.
Zwicky went to every physics and astrophysics journal in the world. They all said no. They refused to publish his evidence that outer space was not empty. The head of his own observatory wrote to the journal editors and said, “Whatever you do, don’t publish Zwicky’s paper.” Of course, this man behaved illegally, but he was never held to account.
Finally Zwicky went to a biology journal and got it—an astronomical article—published; it was in a peer-reviewed biology journal. This meant that he could have offprints from the publication, which he could then send to all the astronomers. It took him ten years to get around the blockage.
This is an example of how the advancement of knowledge is held back, not just by the peer review process, which is almost continually abused, but by the knowledge control freaks. The establishment doesn’t want to be shown to be wrong, because people would lose face and their reputations would be damaged. They want to always be correct, and they want to be the wise ones. If you come up with anything that goes against what they’ve already said, they’ll try and stop you, just for egotistical reasons.
The whole peer review process is to maintain the status quo of science and prevent advances and anything that challenges the establishment; that’s what it’s for. Fred said this because he could not get certain important discoveries published. It happens to everybody. My book is full of these terrible stories of suppression.
A lot of scientists, unfortunately, are human, with human faults, and egotism is one of the worst of them. My book is full of the sad stories of the heroes of plasma science, who have fought against all the odds to get us to where we are now, which is just the beginning.
The theme for this issue is “Other Worlds.” One may think of many ways in which discussion of this theme could diverge. For example, in Columbus, Ohio, there is an immersive art experience called OtherWorld. It is filled with large-scale interactive art, mixed reality playgrounds, and secret passageways where visitors are encouraged to explore and interact with a surreal world of science fiction and fantasy. Numerous videos on YouTube focus on information about the planets in our solar system and others that center on bizarre science fiction videos. Austin, Texas, holds an Other Worlds science fiction film festival every year. There are online interactive learning sites that are labeled “Other Worlds” as well as various stores around the country with that name, not to mention many books and movies. So the possibilities for articles in this issue are essentially unlimited.
When someone speaks of other worlds, images of outer space and distant planets often come to mind. We may tend to think of these worlds as far away from us, alien and unreachable. However, each of us inhabits many worlds right now, even though we aren’t commonly able to observe them.