New Dimensions · New Dimensions Foundation

Science Set Free - Rupert Sheldrake - ND3476P

January 28, 2026·53 min·4 clips
The head of metrology at Britain's National Physical Laboratory admitted to Sheldrake that physicists worldwide adjusted their speed-of-light measurements to match the expected value — a phenomenon the scientist called 'intellectual phase-locking.'
Recorded in 2012, the archive starts quietly. New Dimensions introduces Rupert Sheldrake as a British biologist shaped by Cambridge and Harvard, with scientific papers, books, and questions that do not sit neatly inside academic habit. The question is plain enough, and a little uncomfortable. Why do some possibilities get dismissed as fraudulent or flawed before anyone has sat with the evidence for long? Sheldrake begins with nutrition science. Caloric restriction, he says, has produced one of the field's findings: organisms fed fewer calories often live longer. That anomaly gives him room to ask whether other forms of energy could be involved, including the quantum vacuum field. Medicine comes in through the same door. Many medical systems from other cultures work with ideas of energy, while ours does not. He is careful not to sound certain. He points instead at the assumption that matter and energy always remain fixed in total amount, then asks whether that confidence has earned its authority. Physics and biology, as he describes them, look less settled than scientific language often makes them sound. Even the universe refuses to tidy itself up. Sheldrake notes that 96 percent of it is not regular matter and energy, while experimental discrepancies keep troubling clean explanations. Then come constants: the gravitational constant and the speed of light become test cases for a larger unease about nature's supposed fixities. He introduces morphic resonance with some care, as a theory of memory in nature where laws may act more like habits than eternal decrees. The point is not to sell certainty. It is to keep the question open a little longer.

As heard by us

A patient challenge to science's settled assumptions.

New Dimensions keeps its focus on Rupert Sheldrake as he revisits ideas science usually treats as settled, ranging from morphic resonance to nutrition, medicine, and whether the laws and constants of nature are fixed.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want Rupert Sheldrake, in a 2012 New Dimensions Archive Edition, questioning fixed assumptions about nature, mind, heredity, and the laws of science.

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