I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics,.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
Awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize for the development of quantum elextrodynamics
Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.
If folks like Nobel Prize winners don’t understand quantum theory, what hope have we? What does one do when reality comes knocking at your door and tells you things that are confusing, baffling and puzzling? How you react, how you proceed in life and what your options are tells a lot about you, but that’s a mystery for a later chapter. Right now, let’s gossip about electrons, photons and quarks, and how something (if it is a thing!) so tiny could be so unfathomable and rip apart our well-ordered and understandable world.
On the one hand, this is an acutely paradoxical, puzzling, conceptually confusing theory. On the other hand, we have no option of throwing it out or neglecting it because it is the most powerful proven tool for predicting the behaviors of physical systems that we have ever had in our hands.
—David Albert, Ph.D.
The Known Meets the Unknown
Classical Newtonian physics was based on observations of the solid, everyday objects of ordinary experience, from falling apples to orbiting planets. Its laws were repeatedly tested, proven and extended over several hundred years. They were well understood and did a great job of predicting physical behavior—as seen in the triumph of the Industrial Revolution. But in the late 19th century, when physicists began developing the tools to investigate the very tiny realms of matter, they discovered something very puzzling: Newtonian physics did not work! It could neither explain nor predict the results researchers were finding.
The term quantum was first applied to science by the German physicist Max Planck in 1900; it is a Latin word that simply means amount or quantity, but is used to mean the smallest unit of any physical property, such as energy or matter.
Over the next hundred years, an entirely new scientific description has grown up to explain the world of the very small. Known as quantum mechanics or quantum physics (or simply quantum theory), this new knowledge does not replace Newtonian physics, which still works quite well to explain large, macroscopic objects. Rather, the new physics has been invented to (boldly) go where Newtonian physics could not go: to the subatomic world.
“The universe is very strange,” says Dr. Stuart Hameroff. “There seem to be two sets of laws that govern the universe. In our everyday, classical world, meaning at roughly our size and time scales, things are described by Newton’s laws of motion set down hundreds and hundreds of years ago. . . . However, when we get down to a small scale, to the level of atoms, a different set of laws takes over. These are the quantum laws.”
Fact or Fiction?
What quantum theory has revealed is so mind-boggling that it sounds more like science fiction: Particles may be in two or more places at once. (A very recent experiment found that one particle could be in up to 3,000 places!) The same “object” may appear to be a particle, locatable in one place, or a wave, spread out over space and time.
Einstein said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but quantum physics has demonstrated that subatomic particles seem to communicate instantaneously over any expanse of space.
Classical physics was deterministic: Given any set of conditions (such as the position and velocity of an object), you could determine with certainty where it would go. Quantum physics is probabilistic: You can never know with absolute certainty how a specific thing will turn out.
Classical physics was reductionist: It was based on the premise that only by knowing the separate parts could you eventually understand the whole. The new physics is more organic and holistic; it is painting a picture of the universe as a unified whole, whose parts are interconnected and influence each other.
Perhaps most importantly, quantum physics has erased the sharp Cartesian distinction between subject and object, observer and observed, that has dominated science for 400 years.
In quantum physics, the observer influences the object observed. There are no isolated observers of a mechanical universe, but everything participates in the universe. (This is so important that we will talk about it in a separate chapter.)
If you want to put your finger on one of the profound philosophical shifts between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics, [it is that] classical mechanics is built from the ground up around what we now know is a fantasy: the possibility of observing things passively . . . Quantum mechanics put a decisive end to that.
—David Albert, Ph.D.
Mind Boggle #1—Empty Space
Let’s start with something familiar to most of us. One of the first cracks in the structure of Newtonian physics was the discovery that atoms, the supposedly solid building blocks of the physical universe, were mostly made up of empty space. How empty? If we use a basketball to represent the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, the electron circling it would be about twenty miles away—and everything in between would be empty. So as you look around, remember that what really is there are tiny, tiny points of matter surrounded by nothing.
Well, not really. That supposed “emptiness” is not empty at all: It contains enormous quantities of subtle, powerful energy. We know energy increases as we go to subtler levels of matter (nuclear energy being a million times more powerful than chemical energy, for example). Scientists now say there is more energy in one cubic centimeter of empty space (about the size of a marble) than in all the matter of the known universe. Although scientists have not been able to measure this directly, they have seen effects of this sea of immense energy.1
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1 For more information on this, look up “Van der Waals Forces” and the “Casimir Effect.”
Mind Boggle #2—Particle, Wave or Wavicle?
Not only is there “space” between particles, but as scientists probed more deeply into the atom, they found that the subatomic particles (the constituents of the atoms) are not solid either. And they appear to have a dual nature. Depending on how we look at them, they can behave as either particles or as waves. Particles can be described as separate, solid objects with specific locations in space. Waves, on the other hand, are not localized or solid, but are spread out, like sound waves or the waves in water.
As waves, electrons or photons (particles of light) have no precise location, but exist as “probability fields.” As particles, the probability field “collapses” into a solid object locatable in a specific place and time.
As Schrödinger was formulating his wave equation, Werner Heisenberg solved the same problem using advanced matrix mathematics. But the math was obscure, not relatable to our experience and didn’t roll off the tongue like “wave,” so “matrix transformations” were dropped in favor of the “wave” equation. It’s all just an analogy.
Amazingly, what seems to make the difference is observation or measurement. Unmeasured, unobserved electrons behave as waves. As soon as we subject them to observation in an experiment, they “collapse” into a particle and can be located.
How can something be both a solid particle and a soft, flowing wave? Perhaps the paradox can be resolved by recalling what we said above: Particles behave as a wave or particle. But the “wave” is just an analogy. Just like “particle” is an analogy from our everyday world. This wave notion was solidified into quantum theory by Erwin Schrödinger, who with his famous “wave equation,” summed up mathematically the wave-like probabilities of the particle before observation.
In an attempt to make it clear they don’t really know what the BLEEP they’re dealing with, but that whatever it is they’ve never seen anything like it, some physicists have decided to call this phenomenon a “wavicle.”
When a subatomic “object” is in its wave state, what it will become when it is observed and becomes located is uncertain. It exists in a state of multiple possibilities. This state is called superposition. It is like flipping a coin in a dark room. Mathematically, even after it has landed on the table, we can’t say whether it is heads or tails. As soon as the light goes on, we “collapse” the superposition, and the coin becomes heads or tails. Like turning on a light, measurement of the wave collapses the quantum mechanical superposition, and the particle appears in a measurable, “classical” state.
Mind Boggle #3—Quantum Jumps and Probability
In studying the atom, scientists found that when electrons move from orbit to orbit around the nucleus, they do not move through space the way ordinary objects move—rather, they move instantaneously. That is, they disappear from one place, one orbit, and appear in another. This was called a quantum jump.
As if that didn’t break enough rules of commonsense reality, they also discovered that they could not determine exactly where the electrons would appear, or when they would jump. The best they could do was to formulate the probabilities (Schrödinger’s wave equation) of an electron’s new location. “Reality as we experience it is constantly being created freshly at every moment, out of this pool of possibilities,” says Dr. Satinover, “but the real mysteriousness in this is that out of that pool of possibilities, which one is the one that is gonna happen is determined by nothing that’s part of the physical universe. There is no process that makes that happen.”
Or as is often stated: Quantum events are the only truly random events in the universe.
Mind Boggle #4—The Uncertainty Principle
In classical physics, all of an object’s attributes, including its position and velocity, can be measured with precision limited only by our technology. But on the quantum level, whenever you measure one property, such as velocity, you cannot get a precise measurement of other properties, such as position. If you know where something is, you can’t know how fast it’s going. If you know how fast it’s going, you don’t know where it is. And no matter how subtle or advanced the technology, it is impossible to pierce this veil of precision.
The Uncertainty Principle (also referred to as Indeterminacy) was formulated by Werner Heisenberg, one of the early pioneers of quantum physics. It states that no matter how hard you try, you cannot get a precise measurement of both velocity and position. The more we focus on one, the more lost in uncertainty the measurement of the other becomes.
Mind Boggle #5—Non-Locality, EPR, Bell’s Theorem and Quantum Entanglement
Albert Einstein did not like quantum physics (putting it mildly). Among other things he responded to the randomness described above with the infamous quote: “God does not play dice with the universe.” To which Niels Bohr responded: “Stop telling God what to do!”
In an attempt to defeat quantum mechanics, in 1935 Einstein, Pedolsky and Rosen (EPR) wrote out a thought experiment that attempted to show how ludicrous it was. They cleverly drew out one of the implications of quantum that was not appreciated at the time: You arrange to have two particles created at the same time, which means they would be entangled, or in superposition. Then you shoot them off to opposite sides of the universe. You then do something to one particle to change its state; the other particle instantaneously changes to adopt a corresponding state. Instantaneously!
What is the sound
of one electron
collapsing?
The idea of this was so ludicrous that Einstein referred to this as “spooky action at a distance.” According to his theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. And this was infinitely fast! Furthermore, the idea that an electron can keep track of another one on the other side of the universe simply violated every common sense of reality.
We stand on the shoulders of billions of genetic lifetimes to give us this perfect genetic body, this perfect genetic brain that it took thousands of years to evolve, so that we could have this conversation in the abstract. If we are here to be embodied in the greatest evolutionary machine there ever was, our body and our human brain, then we have deserved the right for “what ifs.”
—Ramtha
Then in 1964 John Bell created a theory that in effect said yes, the EPR assertion is correct. That is exactly what happens—the idea of something being local, or existing in one place, is incorrect. Everything is non-local. The particles are intimately linked on some level that is beyond time and space.
Over the years since Bell published his theorem, this idea has been verified time and again in the lab. Try and wrap your mind around this for a minute. Time and space, the most basic features of the world in which we live, are somehow superceded in the quantum world by the notion of everything touching all the time. No wonder Einstein thought this would be the death shot to quantum mechanics—it makes no sense.
Nevertheless, this phenomenon seems to be an operable law in the universe. In fact, Schrödinger was quoted as saying that entanglement was not one of the interesting aspects of quantum; it was the aspect. In 1975, the theoretical physicist Henry Stapp called Bell’s Theorem “the most profound discovery of science.” Note that he says science, not just physics.
Quantum Physics and Mysticism
It’s probably getting easy to see why the two domains of physics and mysticism rub up against each other. Things being separated but always touching (non-local); electrons move from A to B, but never in between; matter appearing (mathematically) to be a distributed wave function and only collapsing, or becoming spatial existent, when measured.
Mystics seem to have no problems with these ideas, most of which predate the particle accelerator. Many of the founders of quantum had a major interest in spiritual matters. Niels Bohr used the ying/yang symbol in his coat of arms; David Bohm had long discussions with the Indian sage Krishnamurti; Erwin Schrödinger gave lectures on the Upanishads.
But does quantum physics prove the mystical worldview? If you ask physicists, you’ll get answers all over the map. Ask this at a physics cocktail party and state one view emphatically, and you may (quantum is probabilistic after all) get a fistfight.
Aside from the dyed-in-the-wool materialists, the consensus seems to be that we are at the stage of analogy. That the parallels are just too amazing to ignore. That the mind-set to hold a paradoxical view of the world is the same in both quantum and Zen. As we quoted Dr. Radin before: “But there’s another way of thinking about the world which is suggested; it’s pointed to by quantum mechanics.”
Questions about what causes the collapse of the wave function, or whether quantum events are truly random, are still largely unanswered. But while the urge to produce a truly unified concept of reality, which of necessity includes us, and which answers the quantum mysteries, is compelling, the contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber also urges caution:
The work of these scientists—Bohm, Pribram, Wheeler and all—is too important to be weighed down with wild speculations on mysticism. And mysticism itself is too profound to be hitched to phases of scientific theorizing. Let them appreciate each other, and let their dialogue and mutual exchange of ideas never cease . . .
My point, therefore, in criticizing certain aspects of the new paradigm is definitely not to forestall interest in further attempts. It is rather a call for precision and clarity in presenting issues that are, after all, extraordinarily complex.2
Conclusions
Conclusions? You’ve got to be kidding! Please, if you have some conclusions, run with them. Regardless, welcome to the contentious, exhilarating, puzzling, revelatory world of abstract thought. Science, mysticism, paradigms, reality—look what we humans have investigated, discovered and debated about.
Look at how the human mind has explored this strange world in which we seem to have found ourselves.
This is our true greatness.
Ponder These for a While . . .
• Think of an example of an experience of Newtonian physics in your life.
• Has Newtonian physics defined your paradigm?
• Does having new knowledge about the wacky, weird world of quantum change your paradigm? How?
• Are you willing to experience beyond the known?
• Think of an example of a quantum effect in your life.
• Who or what is the “observer” that determines the nature and location of the “particle”?