Beyond Belief: Jaw-Dropping Breakthroughs That Will Shatter Your View of the Mind and Reality

by Douglas E. Richards

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

Even if you think science isn’t for you, prepare to have your mind blown.

Beyond Belief is the first in a planned series of captivating books designed to fill you with wonder. Short enough to be easily read in one sitting—roughly 90 pages—these self-contained, non-technical volumes will explore breathtaking scientific discoveries and profound speculations. Concepts that you’ll be pondering long after you’ve read the last page.

Douglas E. Richards, a New York Times bestselling author and former biotechnology executive with a master’s in molecular biology, has been celebrated for his meticulously researched science fiction and uncanny knack for making complex science accessible. With the Beyond Belief series, Richards takes readers beyond his fiction for the first time, drawing on more than two decades of exploring big ideas and his experience writing popular-science articles for major outlets.

In many ways we’re trapped within a narrow filter—oblivious to massive, hidden truths operating just beyond our senses. So, what if our conventional understanding of life and consciousness is woefully incomplete? What if we’re beginning to make discoveries that could dramatically alter how we see the nature of the cosmos—and our own existence? What if emerging data is beginning to reveal a universe even wilder than science fiction?

Written in Richards’ signature page-turning style, with chapters brief enough to read during a long commercial break, Beyond Belief ventures into the fascinating territory where established science, emerging research, and informed speculation collide—where the impossible can start to look inevitable.

What is scientifically established? And what startling truths might be just beyond our reach?

You don’t need a scientific background to explore these questions. Just an open mind and a willingness to consider that reality may be far stranger, and far more wondrous, than you’ve ever imagined.

Because the more we discover about reality, the more extraordinary it becomes.

Beyond Belief is the first self-contained volume in a wide-ranging series. Future volumes will focus on such mind-bending subjects as immortality, artificial superintelligence, the hidden forces shaping human behavior, the science of happiness, higher dimensions, and so much more.

Release date: October 29, 2026

Print pages: 85

Sample

INTRODUCTION
(Sleeping with the fishes)

“The universe is not only stranger than we imagine. It’s stranger than we can imagine.”
—J.B.S. Haldane, British geneticist.

I wrote Beyond Belief hoping to wow you with mind-expanding concepts, fill you at times with a sense of wonder, and perhaps change the way you view reality and what might be possible. To give you a sense of how human beings—our biology, birth, consciousness, and behavior—and the universe itself are so much stranger, so much grander, than our minds and senses can perceive.
We’re basically fish, living deep in an ocean our entire lives, unable to see above the surface and having zero idea of what might exist just beyond our watery universe. Not only unaware of the vast real estate we can’t perceive, but unaware of the nature of that real estate.
Unable to even imagine the absence of water.
If another fish were to suggest that there was a mind-bending reality just above us called air, we’d think it mad. If it claimed to have mathematical evidence that something called fire was possible—a dancing plasma of glowing, ionized gas capable of devouring everything in its path—we’d consider it an absolute lunatic.
We’d laugh at this fish, dismissing its ideas as utter nonsense, while smugly applauding ourselves for our superior, more rational understanding of the universe.
So how much of reality are we missing? Reality that’s all around us, but which we can’t sense in any way?
Consider the electromagnetic spectrum, which includes radio, microwave, infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays. What part of this spectrum can we detect? Almost none. Visible light only, which makes up a narrow band between infrared and ultraviolet. A band that’s only about one thirty-thousandth of the total.
Which means that if the EM spectrum were a hundred miles long, we’d only be able to see eighteen feet of it. Eighteen feet. The rest is completely invisible to us, crammed with information our senses can’t detect.
Radio waves, which are all around us, carry music, phone calls, and Wi-Fi signals. Not only can’t we see them, we can’t hear them or feel them, either.
The same is true of powerful magnetic fields. You could be standing right next to an electromagnet in an auto salvage yard, one capable of lifting a five-ton truck, and feel nothing at all. The field would pass straight through your body. But if you were a car—or if you made the tragic decision to wear steel underwear—you’d get yanked right off the ground.
Seems like we’re missing a lot.
Imagine you could bring someone from three hundred years ago into our world and tell them that the air is saturated with invisible waves carrying music, voices, videos (whatever those are), and entire libraries of knowledge. And that this information isn’t just streaming all around us, but actually streaming through us. Right through our bodies, every second, without even slowing down.
Any chance they’d believe you?
Of course not. Many of us in modern society find this hard to believe—and we know it’s true.
Next time you go outside, think about how every inch of the world around you is filled with invisible waves crammed with information, and marvel at how humanity ever managed to figure this out, let alone generate and harness this information for our own needs.
Then there’s the insect world, another jaw-dropping reality that’s largely invisible to us. If you think our wars are bloody, you haven’t seen anything yet. The wars and slaughter that bugs experience around the world on a continuous basis almost defy the imagination. The number of insects killed by predators and other insects each second greatly exceeds the total number of humans killed in all wars throughout history. Spiders alone kill an estimated 400 to 800 million tons of them a year, and birds take another 400 to 500 million tons. Add in all the predatory insects, along with bats, frogs, lizards, and so on, and the body count is staggering.
Tens of billions of insects are killed each second.
A universe of warfare and predation on an inconceivable scale, taking place on our own world, yet one that almost never enters our sphere of consciousness.