The fifth force steps forward: three unusual physical properties of the torsion field

June 16, 2026 new

1990 | Observing "external qi" in the remarkable practice of qigong

When Prof. Si-Chen Lee, former President of National Taiwan University, was reading for his doctorate in electrical engineering at Stanford University in the 1970s, his subject was semiconductor materials and devices, which meant becoming thoroughly at home in quantum mechanics, modern physics, solid-state physics and the physics of semiconductor devices. In 1982 he returned to teach in the Department of Electrical Engineering at National Taiwan University, taught those same courses, and wrote a Chinese-language textbook, Physics of Semiconductor Devices, which won the 20th Golden Tripod Award. This body of physics was second nature to him.

In 1987, answering a call from Chen Li-An, then chair of the National Science Council, Prof. Si-Chen Lee joined a qigong research programme led by the Council. He was intensely curious about the external qi of qigong, but it was not until 1990 that he had the chance to run an external-qi experiment with a qigong master, Master Li, invited by the Council. The master held his palm toward a sealed test tube fifteen centimetres away and directed "killing qi" at it for two to five minutes. Afterwards, the fibroblasts cultured inside were found to have widespread chromosome breakage, and the rate of protein synthesis had fallen by forty per cent.

The result was baffling. Did the external qi contain shock waves, or ultraviolet light? How else could energy break chromosomes? But ultraviolet light would have injured the master's palm, and his palm was entirely unharmed; and a long-wavelength shock wave would have great difficulty damaging molecules on the scale of a micrometre. So what, physically, is external qi? Is it a fifth force field alongside gravity, electromagnetism, the strong interaction and the weak interaction?

With the physics available at the time there was nothing to be done and no way in. The question could only be set aside, waiting for the right occasion to understand it.

1999 | Finding the information field (the spiritual realm)

From 1993 onward Prof. Si-Chen Lee worked on research into finger reading, psychokinesis and other exceptional human functions, and trained several young people with strong abilities, among them Miss T and a girl surnamed Wang. In 1999, when the president of the Physical Society of Taiwan brought more than ten professors of physics and psychology to the laboratory to examine the finger-reading phenomenon, Prof. Si-Chen Lee met Dr Chen of the National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center — also the first scientist to test Miss T's finger reading with the character for "Buddha" and observe the anomaly it produced.

Out of this the group came to a shared view: that alongside the material universe of four-dimensional spacetime we know, there exists another realm, an information field — a spiritual realm — filled with consciousness. It is populated by all manner of highly intelligent consciousnesses and information sites; every religion has its own information site, rich and varied in content. Beyond the material world, in other words, there is a spiritual realm, a world of consciousness: the first is hardware, the second software, and only together do they make a complete life.

Dr Chen then set out to find a physical instrument for communicating with the spirits or masters of that realm, in order to bring it within the reach of modern physics. But what physical instrument could do that? He gathered some information suggesting that a powerful crystal qi field might break through the barrier between the two worlds and open a channel to the other side.

Dr Chen was working at the Synchrotron Radiation Research Center of the National Applied Research Laboratories, and was skilled at building precision equipment. From 2000 onward he made all sorts of "crystal qi field generators" and "qi field detectors", hoping to measure the strength and shape of these fields — but no matter how the magnetic, superconducting or electronic detectors were designed, none could pick up a qi signal. Miss T had exceptional abilities: her palms were sensitive to a qi field and she could feel the strength and shape of a crystal qi field, which made her the best detector we had for experiments on the physical properties of these fields. Because human sensation allows only subjective comparison and not objective quantification, though, the results could serve as a qualitative reference only — pointing to a direction for research, so that once a detector capable of actually registering a signal existed, the findings could be checked quickly.

2004 | The torsion field suddenly appears

In January 2004, Prof. Si-Chen Lee travelled to Beijing with Wu Mei-Yun, editor-in-chief of Echo Publishing, to visit Professor Shen Jin-Chuan and Sun Chu-Lin at the Institute of Human Body Science of the China University of Geosciences. The plan was to produce a book in dialogue form, going over the extraordinary history and results of the two researchers' work of the previous twenty years for the record. Prof. Si-Chen Lee, Professor Shen and Sun Chu-Lin had not met for years, and no sooner had they sat down than Professor Shen handed over two articles by Professor Jiang Xing-Liu of Beihang University, introducing a field the Soviet Union had spent the past fifty years researching: the torsion field. Prof. Si-Chen Lee was astonished: "Good heavens — I had never so much as heard the term, and had no idea what it was."

He found time in the evening to read the articles, and the further he read the more astonished and the more excited he became, going through them four or five times in a row, unable to put them down. It was as though a new world had opened in front of him.

The torsion field turned out to be no new idea at all. As far back as 1915, when Einstein put forward general relativity, he held that the geometric properties of time and space are determined by the energy and momentum of matter, and that the presence of mass causes a curvature of spacetime. To simplify the mathematics, however, he set the twisting of spacetime — the torsion field — to zero, so general relativity is a torsion-free theory of gravity. If curvature of spacetime is equivalent to producing gravitation, then twisting of spacetime should equally be equivalent to producing a twisting force — but Einstein discarded that force field. In 1922 the French mathematical physicist Élie Joseph Cartan added the spin angular momentum carrying spacetime torsion into general relativity, filling it out into a more complete theory, though the work never received the attention it deserved. From the 1960s onward, Russian scientists carried out substantial theoretical and experimental work on torsion fields and set out several important physical properties they proposed for them:

🔸 A torsion field is a twisting of spacetime, much as a gravitational field is a curvature of spacetime, and it is not shielded by any natural material. If there is a wall between two objects, for instance, it does not shield gravity, and it should not shield a torsion field either. So as it propagates through natural matter it loses no energy, though it is scattered, and its only effect is to alter the spin state of matter.

🔸 In four-dimensional spacetime, a torsion field propagates without being confined to the light cone — that is, it travels faster than light, and can carry not only into the future but into the past.

🔸 After the source of a torsion field is removed, a spatial spin structure remains behind at that spot: a torsion field leaves a residual effect.

These properties, as described by the Russian scientists, were exactly what three years of work had taught us about the crystal qi field. I understood at once: the crystal qi field is a torsion field — the fifth force field had shown itself. All that remained was to design experiments to test the idea.