I am going to share something I have never written about before but get asked about a lot – what it was really like to be a part of the Hidden Science show.
A request
Around July 2013 I got a message from internationally renowned David Icke asking me to create a TV show for his new venture The People’s Voice TV (TPV). He wanted to create a credible show which would debate various scientific issues and be able to invite skeptics into the studio.
James and I quickly put together a proposal and a video highlighting the sorts of areas I had been involved with so far. David had come to me asking me to create a Punk Science show so a natural progression was to align it with the types of topics covered in the book. For the first time ever, we are making this audition footage available to the public. As you can see this was when the show was still called ‘Punk Science’
The planning stages
As time progressed, I thought it best to separate the show from my persona and brand, Punk Science so it was not all about me. The first producer involved came up with the name ‘Hidden Science’ and the graphics person, Miki Zoric got to work immediately on the amazing graphics that you see on the show.
To attend meetings, I had to travel down from Derbyshire, where I lived at the time, all the way to Wembley in North London where David’s team had kitted out a large office and TV studio. Through the hard work of some dedicated individuals who were either volunteers or receiving very little money, the sets and the office for TPV slowly took shape. Equipment was donated or obtained second hand and the office and studio gradually started to take shape.
The Hidden Science team
There was an initial shuffling around of the staff which ended up with bringing the director John Webster of Patient Zero Productions on board with the musician and producer, Clifford White. Both worked without pay or expenses for the entire time of the project. John Webster and myself eventually emerged as the main production thrust of the project and despite the fact that neither of us were getting paid, we both insisted on high standards in our complementary skills which contributed to the show’s success.
Yes you read that right, despite the fact that Hidden Science pretty much became my full time work for eight months, I did not receive a penny in payment for work or for expenses even though I was traveling from London to Derbyshire to take shoot the show, which was a round trip of 300 miles. Luckily I had some other work that came in during that period but it was a bit touch and go for myself and James. In an attempt to limit the amount of travel I had to do, I insisted that we prerecord two shows in a day so that I could fit shows around my speaking schedule.
Co-ordinating our skills
Between us we created a list of topics, guests and went about booking them. It was all hands on deck each of us using our skills to put the project together. Clifford composed the music to Miki Zoric’s opening title graphics. He also co-ordinated the guests with me and liaised between TPV and Hidden Science.
John created the set design and even came up with the printed background idea that enable TPV to quickly change studios in between shows. He created the running order and format and directed the show with the gallery director. This included a new experience for me – having someone talking in my ear whilst I was on the show. It reminded me a bit of seeing patients as a doctor as I needed to be conscious of several lines of thinking at once.
John would also film the mini documentaries that you see in the show with the actress, Grace Willis. He would also put all the footage together including the graphics and sometimes take the footage into Wembley to be uploaded in person.
We also had a great team from TPV which would include people helping with the set, audio technicians, gallery directors and more. Liz Roberts was the main point of contact for all the shows and she did an amazing job at coordinating everything for the entire channel.
Some of the TPV crew getting ready for the show Image:James Gordon Graham
With my experience in the field of science and spirituality I was able to book a lot of the guests as I have a lot of contacts in this area. Coordinating things so that three people ended up on the sofa in Wembley on the correct day to talk about the right topic took many hours and I did this from home. After the first show, I also wrote the scripts and the running order as well as sorting out the teleprompter and even doing the makeup for the guests and myself!
It was hard work to research the topics of each show which often involved reading the books which had been written by the guests. I felt it was almost like sitting exams again as I needed to be prepared for each show. I also wrote all the questions for the guests and their introductory biographies.
The success of the show
We knew that we had high standards but we did not expect what happened next. For a lot of the time that TPV was running, Hidden Science became one of the most viewed shows on the channel based on the Youtube views. The shows were added to Youtube after airing on the internet channel. Some of the statistics have been lost as the Youtube channel was hacked and all of the videos deleted but even with the replaced videos you can still see the popularity of the shows.
You won’t see the success of Hidden Science reflected in any of the trailers for TPV which are still on the internet because for some reason, despite me twice making the unpaid 300 mile round trip to the studio for promotion events when asked, we were not interviewed for them or the footage was not used. I still don’t know why this was the case because communication with management remained poor and chaotic throughout the experience. In fact I wasn’t ever sure whom to address issues to apart from Liz Roberts. There were no contracts or known management structure to refer to.
Interestingly the skeptics did not agree to come on the show. So we didn’t have the debates that David originally wanted. Instead a lot of the content was about exploring new scientific vistas with me playing devil’s advocate if needed. The shows opened up new possibilities instead of just pointing out what was wrong with the world right now – it was a message of hope and new growth. To our surprise this approach was very popular.
Would I do it again?
Ultimately, although I am glad I did the show as I was able to bring in the benefit of my experience and contacts to the show to elevate it to something of a serious scientific discourse. However, I don’t think hosting a TV show is really my forte although I enjoyed the production side of it. I am glad that I was part of bringing something of interest to a lot of people from the numbers of appreciative messages the team received.
Because the filming of the shows were often so hectic, we did not have much time to take footage of behind the scenes but sometimes James would help with the shows and this is some of the footage that was taken of the studio and in the gallery.
If you would like to find out more about the shows and watch the episodes, click here.
Physicists generally avoid discussing consciousness. It seems to be too ethereal a subject for them really to get hold of. It forces them to enter a world outside of calculations and experiments and examine the world of human behaviour which is far less predictable and controllable.
But the past twenty years has seen a shift in science as a whole where the once forbidden topic of consciousness is coming to the forefront. Possibly because it is the last frontier and people are running out of other topics to study for their PhDs.
Yet it was still a surprise when Max Tegmark, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge tackled the problem in 2014 and published a paper suggesting that Consciousness could be a state of matter. You can read the abstract here. http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219
You can see his TED talk below.
He is basically arguing that consciousness is not something external that is animating matter, but a consequence of the way in which matter is arranged mathematically.Tegmark himself states that there are many gaps in his idea.
One that really springs to mind for me is what happens when people are clinically dead and then are resuscitated? Or how much of a rearrangement is necessary from moment to moment for a being to be alive at one point and then dead the next?
Questions and gaps aside it is good to see that such a prominent physicist actually tackling the question at all as he open the gates for others to consider the topic too.
Of course here at Paradigm Revolution we have been discussing consciousness and matter for many years. You can get started by exploring this website or checking out Simply Divine which is an easy guide to the Science of Spirituality.
One of the most popular interviews I have ever done for Punk Science was in 2008 with Iain McNay of Conscious TV.
It has been shown many times on television channels such as Edge Media TV on Sky amongst others.
What you might not know is that Iain McNay is involved in the music industry and has had a lot of dealings with punk music. So before the cameras started rolling, we had a great chat about music and discovered a shared love of Courtney’s Love’s work – which is grossly underestimated in both our opinions.
Later Ian McNay actually named Punk Science as one of his favourite books of all time which is a great honour especially considering how many authors he interviews!
The interview itself features insights on how the Black Hole Principle came to be as well as musings on the nature of consciousness and quantum physics. You can see the interview here.
In my first book, Punk Science I described how areas of the universe are made up of matter which we are familiar but also the universe is made up of antimatter.
The process of these coming together to make light in the form of gamma-rays is a process that occurs in black holes which I have described before, but did you know it may be key in your own life?
Building on the work of Dr John Demartini, author of The Breakthrough Experience, I also realised that the antimatter region of your own self may represent your shadow emotions – those aspects of you that you do not want to face.
Dr John Demartini author of the Breakthrough Experience. Credit Dr Manjir Samanta-Laughton
Life, however will provide you with opportunities with which to face your shadow self – this is what we call the journey of life. It is how we handle these events that determines the level of transformation that they give us.
I hear a lot of spiritual teachers, some of them very famous, who tell you to ignore your emotions and people who may bother you in life. I teach the exact opposite; it is in the difficult events and people where the real treasure lies.
These events hold the clues to your own shadow self and emotions and it is by integrating your matter and antimatter in your own consciousness that you can increase the light in your being – just like in a galactic black hole!
This quick exercise can help you to integrate your shadow self and emotions.
For centuries, humans have looked at Mars and pondered if this fiery planet can sustain life. To many people the equation is simple – find water and there will be life. I remember when we looked out to space wishing that one day we would find water and therefore we discover that we are not alone.
Within a few decades that wishing has been replaced by real evidence of water and it turns out it is everywhere. It is almost embarrassing as the equation that water equals life is so embedded into science and our psyches. Underlying this equation is the belief that life has arisen completely spontaneously without any intelligent input.
This is essential to the God-free, unspiritual world that science likes to portray – that life and ourselves are just random accidents of no significance in a sterile world devoid of consciousness. So life just started in a warm pond easily and spontaneously and this led to evolution and here we are: all through random, unintelligent, unconscious events.
So finding oceans on many planets and on moons and even in jets from sunspots should be rocking these such beliefs especially if we do not find even the most simple of bacteria in them. Maybe we have to face that life is so extraordinary complex that the creation of just one single cell in a warm pond by chance and random collisions alone would not just take one miracle and defy the laws of entropy but it would need repeated miracles.
So the finding of water on Mars should provoke and stir up a lot of these old wistful notions but it may also force us to face that life could involve more than some random collisions in a warm pond. Before 2015 we knew that channels on Mars suggested there was water on the planet in the past. So far so safe, we don’t have to face up to the prospect of life on Mars. But then evidence of seasonal water on Mars was found and it was realised that water on Mars is not only currently present it is also being renewed. The importance of the news warranted a NASA press conference in autumn 2015.
But the question really should be why? Why is there water on Mars and elsewhere? If you have been following the Black Hole Principle you will know that I have been saying for some time that the gamma-ray bursts in the Earth’s upper atmosphere that produce gamma rays, fast moving electrons and antimatter are demonstrating the same mechanism that black holes at the centres of galaxies do. These so called Terrestrial Gamma Ray Flashes or TGFs are associated with thunderstorms. The fast moving electrons that come out of them are what we normally call lightning.
There is one feature of thunderstorms that for many years I battled with and that is rain. It means that for the Black Hole Principle to be truly universal and occur in a similar fashion at all levels of the universe, black holes need to produce water. It also means everything that almost everything we understand about our water cycle becomes null and void. Water becomes the end point of a higher dimensional process. I think, but I am not sure that water is produced by the process of light splitting into antimatter and matter at the edge of a black hole. I would have to do some more work on the mechanism. But I did realise that water would have to be produced by galactic black holes in order to be a truly universal process.
To see my presentation at the International Conference on the Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Water 2015 on the subject of water coming from black holes at every level of the universe visit
So when it was revealed that black holes do indeed produce water, I was amazed and realise that the Black Hole Principle had been vindicated all this time. This is a universal process that happens from the macroscopic level – huge galaxies in the far reaches of space, to the microscopic – potentially your cellular processes work this way too to somewhere in between – the rain clouds you see in the sky now.
I also made this prediction about the oceans of planet Earth when giving a keynote address at the Institute of Noetic Sciences,
The Earth’s Oceans have long been a mystery as to where they originated and the question was fobbed off with some garbling about an asteroid seeding water here in the past. I knew that the Earth’s interior too is a black hole dynamo and therefore capable of producing water. So it was not a big leap for me to predict that Mars is capable of producing water in real time as are other bodies that are ejecting water such as comets and the moons of Saturn.
So this is why the renewed water on Mars was not a big shock to me. However, we may have to revisit our long held equation that the presence of water automatically means that life is also present.
That is simplifying what life is enormously. Life is not a random arrangement of atoms – this does not make sense from the perspective of science either – see Punk Science for a break down of these issues.
So for now we are having to admit that our previous mantra of ‘follow the water to find life’ may not have been correct. This was whilst finding water in space was unexpected. Now we know it is everywhere maybe we need to look again at why biological life has occurred on Earth in the first place and also why water is present there at all.
This National Geographic article discusses the problems will taking the water = life equation.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/150928-mars-liquid-water-life-space-astronomy/
This sidebar contains carefully evaluated and recommended software tools. If you sign up for any of these offers, I will receive a percentage but it will not cost you any more.
Create your own online courses with the best all-in-one system.
