How science shows that almost everything important

we’ve been told is wrong.

Written and Illustrated by

Adrian Ellis

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Chapter 1: Physics

A most entertaining chapter in which Materialism is debunked, famous physicists’ heretical views are revived, free will is returned to the universe

and a demon gets to fondle our planet.

“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

Niels Bohr

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Hard rule to follow

There is a rule that is everywhere in modern science. It is never written on the walls of research institutions or engraved on a plaque in the foyers of faculties, but it is there nevertheless. The rule is as follows:

‘Only physical things exist.’

This rule may not be engraved on plaques but any scientists who disobey that rule, who openly profess that something different to it is true, are skating on very thin ice. They are in danger of destroying their scientific reputation, which in turn will decide whether they get funding, which in turn will decide whether they retain their academic positions, which in turn will decide whether they can pay the mortgage, the school fees, the medical insurance, the car repayments, the holiday budget and everything else that prevents them being thrown out into the wilderness to subsist on berries and the odd raccoon.

Not surprisingly, few scientists openly propose anything different to the official rule, which is known as the Materialist view of reality (even if they might want to). This is a strange situation because Materialism is actually a radical idea for human-kind. Materialists believe that only physical things exist and that there are no ghosts or spirits or God in our universe, but most human societies since the dawn of time have believed the opposite. Even now, many scientists are religious, which is entirely contrary to Materialism. This clash of beliefs is able to continue because there is an unwritten agreement in the world of science that scientists can continue to be religious, as long as they don’t bring their religious beliefs into the lab or include them in any scientific papers. This strategy is described by psychologists as

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compartmentalisation; it is the ability of a person to adopt contrary views at one and the same time by separating them off from each other. Compartmentalisation can cause mental stress in the subject concerned but then again, that might be preferable to being sacked.

Materialism as a way to view the world arose during the Classical Era of physics, which occurred between about 1700 AD and 1900 AD. This era began when Isaac Newton and others worked out formulae and rules that matched how the universe behaved. This was an incredibly important step forward because before that time, most people viewed the world as God’s creation, something whose workings were unknowable by mortal man. Newton showed that with mathematics and observation, one could understand what was going on in the universe and predict what would happen. The universe wasn’t a magical creation, it was a mechanistic system with predictable behaviour. Suddenly, we weren’t toys in the universe, the universe could be our toy. In this way, physicists proudly became materialists. They didn’t want to be stuck with the Church’s approach, that people shouldn’t try to understand God’s magical Universe. They wanted to see the universe as an inanimate system, a clock whose workings they understood.

This approach was very successful for several centuries and enabled mankind to take a huge leap forward in its knowledge of how the universe worked and its development of more and more advanced technology. Everything in the garden seemed rosy. By the end of the nineteenth century, mankind had discovered penicillin, developed chemistry, radiology, the lightbulb, telegraphy, railways, the radio, aircraft and crossed

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the planet in huge steamships. It seemed, to the scientists at that time, that they had worked everything out, that they knew absolutely and definitely for sure how the universe worked and what it was.

In fact, they were completely wrong. The next section explores how they were wrong and what

they’d missed. It involves a patent inspector, the worst scientific prediction ever and a dour-looking German physicist obsessing over a hot body.

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How physics went weird

In the history of science, there have been several periods when scientists thought that their description of reality was spot on, that they’d worked out all the important aspects of their subject and all that was left to do was to dot some ‘i’s’ and cross some ’t’s’, sort out a few, minor and unimportant bits and then they could retire for the rest of the day with a nice cup of tea, knowing in their heart of hearts that they definitely, absolutely, certifiably understood how things worked.

Unfortunately, it’s invariably at that point in the history of science that something comes along that throws their entire scientific field into utter turmoil and forces them to chuck their coveted description of reality out of the nearest fourth-storey window, go back to the drawing board and start all over again.

Such a situation occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century in the world of physics. At this time, many physicists were convinced that they understood exactly how the universe worked. For example, Here’s what Albert. A. Michelson said in a speech at the dedication of Ryerson Physics Lab, University of Chicago, in 1894:

"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote....

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Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."

In other words ‘we now know how the universe works, all that left to do is sort out a few fiddly bits’. Unfortunately for him and many of his colleagues, these small, fiddly bits would soon up-end their whole field of physics.

One fiddly, outstanding bit was to do with how bodies emitted light when they got hot. All warm bodies emit radiation in the form of light and when a metal, for example, gets very warm, it glows with visible light, hence the phrase ‘red hot’. As the metal gets hotter and hotter, the frequency of its light goes up; it starts red hot, then turns ‘yellow hot’ and so on until it’s ‘white hot’. Physicists at the end of the nineteenth century knew this fact very well and had a formula that could be used to work out how the temperature of the hot metal was related to the frequency of the light it emitted. The only problem was, it didn’t really work.

The problem with the formula was that it treated the hot body as if it was a vibrating string, with the light it emitted being like the string’s harmonics. This was an elegant and attractive approach, but it had a problem. if a metal was like a vibrating string, then it should be producing a lot of very high harmonics, or in light terms, very high frequency emissions. In other words, if the official formula was correct, everyone should get incinerated by X-rays every time they sat in front of their fire. This hopeless mis-match between what the theory expected and what was actually true became known as the ‘ultra-violet catastrophe’.

Clearly, there was a big problem with what science said hot bodies should do and what

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they actually did. This problem intrigued a German scientist called Max Planck. In 1894, Max worked hard to create a formula that did match how hot bodies actually emitted light. After a lot of trial and error, he realised that if the light given off by a hot body was treated as consisting of discrete, indivisible blobs, then he could create a formula that did match how light was actually emitted. In other words, the metal couldn’t just emit any old amount of light at a certain frequency. The metal had to possess enough energy to make a whole ‘blob’ of that frequency of light before anything could happen. What’s more, the higher the frequency of light, the more energy was needed to make one ‘blob’. This was why someone’s living-room fire didn’t bombard them with X-rays, because the fire didn’t have the energy levels required to produce the minimum allowed size of X-ray ‘blob’. Max used the word ‘quanta’ rather than ‘blob’, which does sound better but the meaning is effectively the same.

At the time, Max Planck didn’t actually believe that light existed in these discrete blobs or ‘quanta’; he just noted that if one thought of light existing as quanta, it would solve the problem of the ultra-violet catastrophe. The reason he avoided actually believing light was a blob, quanta or particle, was because it was very clear to physicists, and had been for a century or more, that light was purely a wave.

Light’s ability to behave as a wave can be shown in the classic double-slit experiment.

In the double-slit experiment, light is shone at a first slit from a

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lamp. The light from the lamp passes through the first slit, producing a coherent, focussed ray. This ray then passes through a pair of slits, positioned close together. Because light acts as a wave, the rays of light passing through these two, parallel slits then interfere with each other as they combine in the space beyond. When they combine and hit the backdrop, they produce places where they reinforce each other and places where they cancel each other out. This creates an interference pattern, similar to ripples on a pond.

The double-slit experiment is simple and elegant and it seems to show absolutely and without doubt that light exists as a wave. Max Planck must have known that if he had said to everybody else in physics that light existed as particles, he would have got an enormous amount of flak, or stick, or something else quite painful. All in all, Max was being sensible by talking about it as nothing more than a useful idea.

But the problem was, the quantum idea did fit how light was emitted from hot bodies. Light behaving as ‘quanta’ did fit with the experimental results. What was really going on, down at the atomic level? Physics needed someone who could think brilliantly and radically, someone who wouldn’t shy away from the profound change needed in how physicists understood the whole process of light and energy. Fifteen years later, such a person did enter the scene. His name was Albert Einstein.

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When many people think of Albert Einstein nowadays, they are immediately reminded of a picture of an old man sticking his tongue out at the camera. This image is wacky and memorable, but it's not a true picture of the man who transformed physics. Albert Einstein was a thoughtful, low-key young man in his twenties, working away diligently at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, when he produced the ground-breaking and brilliant theories that transformed physics.

Most people nowadays associate Einstein with his Theory of Relativity and that was of enormous importance, but Einstein’s work on radiation, in particular his theory explaining the ‘photo-electric effect’ was just as important to our understanding of the universe and it was in that theory that quantum physics really took off.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, physicists didn’t fully understand the photo-electric effect. They knew that if one shone a light at a metal, that metal would give off electrons. It seemed clear that light contained energy and that energy was causing the atoms of the metal to lose their electrons.

This seemed straightforward. The confusing part was that if someone shone a red light on certain metals, the metal concerned emitted no electrons at all, even if the scientist shone a really bright red light on the metal. By comparison, if the scientist shone a very weak blue light on the same metal, electrons were released. How, the scientist wondered, could a

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weak blue light make electrons leave the metal when a very bright red light couldn’t budge a single one?

Einstein realised that this strange effect made perfect sense if one concluded that light was emitted in discrete blobs or quanta. Just as in Max Planck’s black-body radiation problem, Einstein realised that a metal could only emit electrons if it received light of a sufficient energy level. That was why shining lots of red light on the metal did nothing. The ‘quanta’ packets of energy in the red light didn’t have a high enough energy level to knock out any electrons.

Einstein’s solution to the photo-electric effect was the real beginning of quantum physics because Einstein didn’t pussy-foot around. He stated quite clearly that light did exist as both a particle and a wave. Light had to be able to behave as both a particle and a wave for the universe to function the way experiments showed it functioned. From this point on, physics would never be the same again.

It would be nice to say that when the other physicists read Einstein’s ground-breaking paper, they all applauded him and leapt forward to use his new idea. Unfortunately, they didn’t. Einstein’s photo-electric effect paper was almost universally ignored. It took another four years before further experiments conclusively showed that Einstein was right and the quantum nature of light was a very real phenomenon. But it was still a very strange idea; how could light be both a wave and a particle? The next section investigates this with the help of a Scandinavia footballer with a very radical idea.

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Photon blues

To explore the strange nature of light, it’s worth looking again at the double-slit experiment explained earlier in this chapter. Just to re-cap, the double-slit experiment consists of a light-source, a single slit to focus the light ray, two further slits to split the light ray and a backdrop upon which the rays of light finally fall.

Since light behaves as a wave, the pattern of light on the backdrop will show the interference of the two rays of light that have passed through each of the two, parallel slits.

But Einstein showed that light must also be able to exist as discrete particles or quanta for the photo-electric effect to work. This fact doesn’t change the results of the double-slit experiment when there’s a ray consisting of billions of photons of light - we’ll still see a pattern of interference on the backdrop - but what happens when there’s only one photon being emitted from the lamp? What happens in that situation? It is that situation that opens up the strange world of quantum physics.

Let’s examine what happens in the double-slit experiment when the lamp only emits one photon. The single photon of light leaves the lamp and heads towards the

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backdrop. On the way, it passes through the first slit - so far, so good - but what happens when it reaches the pair of parallel slits? Does it go through one slit but not the other? Does it go through neither slit?

Someone might say that the single photon of light chooses one slit or the other, but actually this is impossible, as the photon is a packet of energy; it can’t choose anything. Others might say that the photon goes through neither slit but that can’t be true either, because that particular photon can also act as a wave, because light is both wave and particle, and a wave of light would get through those slits.

This is the point where the whole field of twentieth-century physics entered the realms of the strange. How could that photon of light behave in a way that fitted with the experimental evidence? Once again, just as with the photo-electric effect, science needed someone to think outside the box, to make a bold leap of understanding and not mind if their solution sounded completely barmy. Fortunately, a brilliant and bold physicists answered the call; his name was Niels Bohr.

Niels Bohr was a warm, amiable, engaging Danish man who combined physical athleticism (he was a skilled footballer) with an analytical brilliance. He and his colleagues at the Copenhagen Institute - an institute he helped found - developed a brilliant and challenging new view of reality that did solve the paradox of the single photon and the double slit.

Bohr and his colleagues realised that the

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only way to understand what happened when that single photon reached the double slit was to throw out the idea that things in reality either exist or don’t exist. Bohr realised that the only way we’re sure an object is here or there is when we measure it, when we observe its location. In between observations, we assume that the item concerned is still where we last saw it, but that’s an assumption. In fact, everything that happens between measurements isn’t scientific because science is about measurement. Bohr realised that if we accept the fact that only our measurements are real and that we can’t say anything about what happens between our measurements, then there is an answer to the strange problem of the single photon and the two slits.

Bohr’s idea, developed with his colleagues at the Institute he founded in Copenhagen, became known as the Copenhagen Interpretation. In a nutshell the Copenhagen Interpretation is as follows:

“Until we observe or measure the results of an experiment, all possible outcomes for that experiment exist as possibilities. These are known as quantum superpositions. When we make a measurement, those multitude of possibilities collapse to leave one real event.”

In other words, until someone actually checks on what’s going on, nothing really exists; only a collection of possibilities. Physicists can work out how likely these possible situation are, but none of them actually exist until someone makes a measurement.

In the case of the single photon, the photon doesn't go through one or the other of the slits. Instead, until someone measures which path the photon took, nothing has actually,

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really happened. All that can be said to exist is the possibility of the photon going through one slit and the possibility of the photon going through the other slit. When someone does measure where the photon went, then this quantum superposition collapses and the photon is found to have taken a particular path.

Not surprisingly, a lot of scientists thought the Copenhagen Interpretation was barking mad, but it fitted the evidence. In fact, decades later, when equipment became sensitive enough to pick up single photons hitting a backdrop, scientists observed that these photon ‘hits’ accumulate until they create the pattern of light and dark patches that are the hallmarks of light’s wave-like property. Somehow, these individual photons ‘know’ how to behave in order to produce the right, wave-like pattern when enough of them hit the backdrop.

The fact that the Copenhagen Interpretation fitted the evidence didn’t lessen its controversy. It was a very unpopular theory because it killed the idea that the universe was a real and solid thing even when no one was observing it; a belief central to the Classical Physics view of reality. According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, nothing at all was real until an observation or measurement was made. If it was correct, then

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if no one at all measured the universe, the universe would stop existing in any real way.

Albert Einstein hated the Copenhagen Interpretation. Although he had bravely put forward the idea that light could be both wave and particle, he refused to accept that everything in the entire universe didn’t truly exist until it was observed. For the rest of his life, he fought against the Copenhagen Interpretation, arguing the matter endlessly with his good friend Niels Bohr. It must be noted that although Einstein argued a lot with Bohr on this matter, he had nothing but the highest regard for his fellow scientist, as shown in this quote:

“[Niels Bohr], not often in life has a human being caused me such joy by his mere presence as you did.”

Einstein’s disbelief in the Copenhagen Interpretation may be partly due to the era in which he grew up. Einstein was a youngster at the end of the nineteenth century, a time when scientists were still very much under the sway of Classical Physics, developed by Isaac Newton centuries before. Classical Physics viewed the universe as a huge, clockwork-like mechanism whose functioning was not affected at all by measurement or observation. In other words, in Classical Physics it didn’t matter a tinker’s cuss what people did, the physical universe would carry on doing its thing regardless. This idea, that our observations of the universe have no effect on the behaviour of the universe, is known as Objectivism and it’s been regarded as

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a cornerstone of science from its very beginning. Einstein was born into this Classical Physics world and grew up with its view of the universe as an impersonal, inviolable mechanism. It may be that such a view was a comforting, appealing idea that Einstein did not want to give up. During his decades of ongoing arguments with Bohr, Einstein once famously remarked to his biographer Pais:

“do you honestly believe that the moon exists only when you look at it?”

Einstein’s disbelief became increasingly un-scientific. Further experiments, carried out after the development of the Copenhagen Interpretation, only increased its strength as the correct way to view reality. During that time, Einstein wasn’t the only physicist who rejected the Copenhagen Interpretation and in many ways, an intellectual war had begun between those physicists who believed that the universe was the result of acts of observation, and those physicists who insisted that the universe existed outside of observation. A famous philosopher, Bishop Berkeley, once asked:

“if a tree in a forest is not seen by anyone, is it really there?”

Einstein would have said an emphatic ‘yes!’ Bohr, by comparison, wouldn’t have been so sure.

In some ways, it is strange that Einstein was so against the Copenhagen

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Interpretation. He himself had broken new ground with two controversial theories; Relativity and the quantum nature of light. At the time, both were very hard to believe and described a universe quite alien to the current accepted model. Of all the people in physics at the time, Einstein would seem to have been the sort of guy that would have eagerly embraced Bohr’s radical new view of reality, but he didn’t; he fought it to his dying day.

Einstein’s attitude shows that most scientists are not the cold, analytical people portrayed in the popular media; they are emotional individuals with aspirations, dreams and personal beliefs. The challenge for many scientists is to use that emotional motivation to spur them on but at the same time, stop that emotional side from obscuring the actual truth they are searching for.

Another Nobel Prize winning physicist made this point elegantly. He knew Niels Bohr and their friendship developed partly out of his own irascible desire to do good science. He was Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize Winner, bongo player, safe-cracker and engaging lecturer and educator. The story goes that Feynman was in the middle of his time working on the Manhattan Project in the United States, developing the first atomic bomb, when Niels Bohr visited to give a lecture. By this time, Bohr was a giant in the field of physics and the physicists at Los Alamos all revered him. Bohr gave his lecture and afterwards, he asked if there were any questions. A young, skinny Feynman, still a relative unknown in physics, hanging around at the back of the crowd, proceeded to criticise and find fault with several aspects of Bohr’s theories, a behaviour which annoyed and embarrassed everybody else in the room no end.

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Six months later, Bohr and his son Aage came again to to the site to give a new lecture on their latest work. The day before the lecture, Aage phoned Feynman and asked him if he’d like to pop over in the morning and say ‘hello’ to Aage and his Dad. Feynman was shocked; why would a giant of physics such as Niels Bohr want to spend the morning with him? He duly accepted the invite and spent several hours discussing the great man latest theories, in which Feynman, as ever, did not hold back and made it clear whenever he thought Bohr’s ideas were wrong. At the end of the morning, Bohr smiled, put the papers away and said ‘good, we’re ready’. Feynman said ‘ready for what?’ Aage smiled and said to Feynman; ‘Ready to give the lecture, Dick. Dad said that you’re clearly the only son-of-a-bitch in this place who’ll tell him whether he’s right or wrong. If you’re happy, he’s happy.’ To which they all laughed heartily.

The story shows Feynman’s brilliance as a physicist but also how humble and generous Bohr was as a person. Bohr was perfectly happy for some young, relatively unknown physicist to point out that he was wrong, as long as that got both of them further towards being right.

Richard Feynman went on to develop Quantum Electro-Dynamics or Q.E.D., which hugely increased our understanding of how light, the carrier of electromagnetism, enabled the atom to function as a stable system. For this, Feynman and the two colleagues who worked on the theory with him won the Nobel Prize in 1965. Feynman went on to develop other new theories as well as becoming famous for his witty and insightful lectures. In one series of filmed lectures he gave on physics, that are still available now, Feynman made this telling point:

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Which brings us right back to Albert Einstein’s rejection of the Copenhagen Interpretation. Einstein followed Feynman’s dictum above to the letter when he developed Relativity and the theory of the photo-electric effect, but failed badly when he insisted on his idea of Hidden Variables (more on that in a bit). He wanted the world to be the way he wanted it to be, not the way it was and in pursuit of preserving his preferred view, he ignored the evidence.

Einstein’s bias is a type of problem that was elegantly described by another famous physicist nearly a century before the time of quantum physics. In 1854, Michael Faraday, who had made huge strides in our understanding of electricity, gave a speech at the Royal Institution in London. In his speech, he made a very important point about a psychological trait that we now call ‘confirmation bias’. Faraday had realised that scientific rigour was important, but the biases within the scientist’s own mind could sabotage all the work he or she had done. He said:

“Among those points of self-education which take up the form of mental discipline, there is one of

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great importance, and, moreover, difficult to deal with, because it involves an internal conflict, and equally touches our vanity and our ease. It consists in the tendency to deceive ourselves regarding all we wish for, and the necessity of resistance to these desires.”

“The force of the temptation which urges us to seek for such evidence and appearances as are in favour of our desires, and to disregard those which oppose them, is wonderfully great. In this respect we are all, more or less, active promoters of error.”

“The inclination we exhibit in respect of any report or opinion that harmonises with our preconceived notions, can only be compared in degree with the incredulity we entertain towards everything that opposes them…”

“That point of self-education which consists in teaching the mind to resist its desires and inclinations, until they are proved to be right, is the most important of all, not only in things of natural philosophy, but in every department of daily life.”

Einstein, to give him his due, didn’t just stubbornly refuse to accept the Copenhagen Interpretation and thereby become a slave to his own ‘desires and inclinations’. He did try very hard to find a hole in the Copenhagen Interpretation and discover a

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flaw, and he also developed the ‘Hidden Variables’ idea as an alternative, comprehensive theory.

The idea of the Hidden Variables theory is that it says that reality isn’t undetermined when we aren’t observing it (which is the view of the Copenhagen Interpretation). Instead, reality does have an established state, it’s just that we aren’t aware of this state. In the case of the double-slit experiment, the single photon did go through one slit even before we measured it, because reality contains rules and properties that decide which slit it goes through; we just don’t have evidence for the existence of those rules. In truth, Einstein had no experimental evidence to support his Hidden Variables idea but it was a possible scenario. Since no one could refute his idea, he could use it to take a stand against the Copenhagen Interpretation.

For a long time, physicists didn’t know how to work out if Einstein’s Hidden Variables idea was correct; was he really right or was he just being stubborn? After the Second World War, most scientists had adopted the approach of ignoring the philosophical consequences of quantum physics, as it didn’t seem very scientific and they could look like eccentric oddballs. Instead, they focussed on the practical applications, which was a hugely productive area, including the inventions of the transistor, computers, the laser and other marvels. This strategy became known as the ‘shut up

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and do the maths’ approach. But one physicist was intrigued whether Einstein’s Hidden

Variables idea was correct or not. He personally wished it was but he wanted to be sure, to find a way to prove it was correct. In 1964, he quietly developed a theoretical way that could prove definitely if it was correct or not. His name was John Stewart Bell and his theory became known as ‘Bell’s Inequality’.

Bell had found a way to definitely work out experimentally if Einstein’s Hidden Variables was correct or whether the Copenhagen Interpretation was correct, and like many ground-breaking and brilliant scientific papers, Bell’s Inequality Theorem was almost entirely ignored. This may have been partly due to the difficulty of proving Bell’s Inequality in an experiment, or partly that scientists didn’t actually care about it very much.

Fortunately, Bell’s scientific paper wasn’t forgotten. Years later, several physicists did find a way to test it in the lab. After several attempts, fifteen years after his paper was published, a very thorough and comprehensive series of experiments were carried out. They showed definitively that Einstein’s Hidden Variables idea was false. Einstein was wrong and the Copenhagen Interpretation was right.

It’s interesting to note that John Stewart Bell wanted Einstein to be right, as he preferred the hidden variables idea to the Copenhagen Interpretation, but the experimental results of his theorem showed the opposite.

It’s also interesting to wonder how Einstein would have reacted to the results of the Bell’s Inequality experiments. Would he have humbly accepted that he was wrong or would

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he still have refused to believe that the Copenhagen Interpretation was correct? We’ll never know.

Although it is now clear that there are no Hidden Variables and that the Copenhagen Interpretation is sound, we’re still left with some very odd consequences. One of these odd consequences was highlighted by another giant in the world of quantum physics, one with a very unusual marital arrangement; that’s the subject of the next section.

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Is the cat out of the box?

Albert Einstein wasn’t the only leading physicist in the early twentieth century to be concerned about the Copenhagen Interpretation. For example, a fellow Nobel-Prize-winning physicist wrote a letter to Albert in 1935 in which he described a thought experiment (in other words, an experiment you wouldn’t actually try to carry out, but one that helps you think about a topic) that showed the crazy consequences of the Copenhagen Interpretation in a engaging and memorable way. Einstein hugely enjoyed his friend’s idea and congratulated him on its creation.

The physicist concerned was Erwin Schrödinger. Erwin Schrödinger was another Nobel-Prize-Winning

wunderkind. He had contributed hugely to physics with his wave equation approach to modelling events at the quantum level. This method had increased physicists’ understanding of the entire atomic and subatomic world. Erwin was a lively character with an unconventional personal life. When he migrated to Ireland in 1938, he requested visas for himself, his wife and his girlfriend, who was the wife of an Austrian colleague with whom Schrödinger had fathered a daughter in 1934. It isn’t clear how the Irish authorities responded, but it must have been an interesting conversation.

The thought experiment that Schrödinger had explained to Einstein in the letter is now known as ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’. It consists of the following setup. Firstly, take a box that contains some radioactive material and a detector. Wire that detector

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up to a hammer. Now place a flask of poison gas next to the hammer. Next to that hammer place a cat. Now place the whole lot inside a bigger box so that all those items are shielded from the outside and can’t be affected by outside events.

At some point, an atom of the radioactive material is going to decay and release particles that the detector will pick up. According to the rules of quantum physics, whether or not the material will decay in a certain period of time is unknowable and according to the Copenhagen Interpretation, until someone measures whether or not the material decayed, that material is in a state of quantum indeterminacy, in which multiple outcomes exist simultaneously. The situation is just like the experiment described earlier, in which a single photon leaves a lamp and heads towards parallel slits. Until someone measures where the photon went, all possible states exist at the same time as potentials.

Here’s the twist; in Schrödinger’s experiment, the detector is connected to a hammer that will break a poison flask and kill a cat. It’s just like the photon ‘choosing’ slit B, but by doing so, triggering the death of a cat. Normally, we’d just think that one or the other event will occur; that the photon or the decay particle will kit the cat or it won’t kill the cat. But Schrödinger’s thought experiment wasn’t about the everyday world. According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, if everything in the box, including the cat, is

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sealed from the outside environment, then until someone opens the box and finds out what’s happened, all possible outcomes are present at the same time. But if that’s the case, the outcome where the cat dies and the outcome where the cat lives (i.e. the outcome if nothing triggered the detector) are existing at the same time. Until someone opens the box and makes a measurement, the cat is somehow both alive and dead.

Erwin Schrödinger made a very clear and important point with this thought experiment. He effectively said; ’It’s all right talking about a photon being in two states at once, but what if that photon’s location decided whether a cat lived or died? Would the cat therefore be in two states at once too? Would it be alive and dead until someone measured its condition?’ By bringing in something as everyday and tangible as a cat, Schrödinger had taken the consequences of the Copenhagen Interpretation out of the world of dry theory and into the realms of meaningful reality.

Schrödinger’s Cat elegantly shows how Quantum Physics had become something utterly different to the solid, dependable world of Classical Physics. Reality was no longer an intricate mechanism, as imagined by the generation of Isaac Newton. Instead, reality was elusive, something that only existed if scientists pinned it down. If they took their eyes off reality, reality didn’t stay the same, it became both nothing and everything possible.

But there is another twist to the strange tale of Schrödinger’s Cat. Erwin Schrödinger seems to have missed a further logical consequence to his ‘quantum cat’ enigma that also has profound, head-scratching consequences. Fortunately, two

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other brilliant scientists, including a Nobel Prize Winning physicist, did notice this extra, strange consequence and its enormous implications.

In the tumultuous decade before the Second World War, many scientists were forced to flee Europe for Britain and America in order to escape the Nazis. Amongst these scientists were several Hungarians, all of whom went on to distinguished careers in science in the United States. They included Leo Szilard, who worked out the mechanics of the nuclear chain reaction, the critical process in the atomic bomb, while spending a lot of time in a bath in a London hotel. Szilard admitted that he spent so much time in that bath that on one morning, the maid broke into the room because she was convinced he’d died.

After leaving London, Leo went to the United States and worked on the Manhattan Project - the U.S. project to develop the first atomic bomb - because he wanted the United States to defeat Nazi Germany. He wasn’t keen on atomic weapons, but he was very afraid that the Nazis would develop the bomb first and so he felt he had to help the Allies build one. Szilard hoped that the U.S. would not kill civilians with their new bomb but simply publicly detonate one to show its power. To this end, he petitioned the U.S. government, asking that an atomic bomb be publicly detonated first, without killing anyone, in order to demonstrate to Japan and Germany that they had to surrender as they were now clearly out-gunned. Sadly, for an enormous number of innocent children and other civilians, his request was rejected and atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war, Szilard continued to work tirelessly for

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a non-nuclear, safer world, even in the face of the mounting cold war around him.

Szilard wasn’t the only Hungarian emigré physicist that signed the petition not to use the A-bomb on civilians. Another man who was keen to minimise the destructive power of the atom was Eugene Wigner, who also went on to win a Nobel Prize in physics.

But not all the Hungarian emigré physicists in America strove for peace. One Hungarian scientist was quite the opposite. The mathematician John Von Neumann definitely didn’t sign Szilard’s petition. Although Von Neumann seems to have been an amiable, friendly bloke who liked limericks, he had a passionate hatred for communism. Von Neumann was quite willing to kill an awful lot of people if it meant that communism was eradicated. For example, he was the scientist who came up with the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction, the idea that if both sides had so many weapons that they would kill each other however the conflict started, no one would attempt to attack the other. During a Senate committee hearing, Von Neumann described his political ideology as "violently anti-communist, and much more militaristic than the norm". He was quoted in 1950 as saying, "If you say why not bomb [the Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?" Near the end of Von Neumann’s life, due to illness, he became confined to a wheelchair. It is

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said that in this state, he became the part-inspiration for Dr Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s film ‘How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.’

Von Neumann was a rabidly militaristic man, but he was also a genius. His fellow Hungarians, Eugene Wigner and Leo Szilard were extremely bright guys but they themselves were candid about how their brains stacked up against Von Neumann’s. As far as they, and many other physicists were concerned, Von Neumann was in a different league. According to his colleagues, Von Neumann had absolute recall and was able to quote back, in its entirety, any book he had ever read. Hans Bethe, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1967, said:

"I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like Von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man."

In his lifetime, Von Neumann did an enormous amount of ground-breaking work in the field of mathematics, computing and physics. If there had been a Nobel Prize for Mathematics, Von Neumann would have won at least one.

It was in 1937 that Von Neumann spotted a profound and important consequence of the Copenhagen Interpretation. He didn’t give his insight a lot of fanfare and it sat, under the radar, for a quarter of a century, until Eugene Wigner brought it back into the limelight. In the 1960’s, Wigner wrote a long article called “Remarks on the Mind-Body question’. In the article, Wigner explained what Von Neumann had spotted and how important it was to the

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whole matter of the relationship between ourselves and reality.

To explain what they’d noticed, let’s look again at the thought experiment of Schrödinger’s Cat. As mentioned already, we have a radiation source, a detector, a hammer, a poison flask and a cat, all sitting inside a sealed box. Since the contents of the box is shielded from outside interference, its contents can’t be measured. According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, that means that everything inside the box isn’t in any real state. Instead, it’s a strange collection of all possible states existing as potentialities. Until someone opens the box and measures what state it’s in, the contents isn’t real in any normal sense.

Let’s now extend the experiment. Let’s put the box, containing the cat, detector etc, in a shed. We can call it Schrödinger’s Shed. We place all the kit on a table in the shed and then we ask for a volunteer to act as our observer. Zoë volunteers to do the job of observing whether the cat is alive or not. We instruct her to go in the shed, seal the door closed behind her, turn on the detector, seal up the box, wait sixty seconds and then open the box again to see if the cat lived or died. It sounds quite straightforward and we watch Zoë go in the shed and seal the door behind her.

But here’s the catch. If the entire contents of the shed is shielded from outside interference, then once Zoë enters that shed, we can’t observe or measure how she’s getting on. According to the Copenhagen

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Interpretation, until someone opens up that shed door and observes what Zoë’s doing, everything inside that shed is in an indeterminate state. This means that Zoë and everything inside the Schrödinger’s cat box is uncertain. Since Zoë was supposed to be waiting sixty seconds and then opening the box containing the cat, both situations - Zoë opening up the box to find a dead cat and Zoë opening the box to find a live cat - are existing at the same time as quantum possibilities.

According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, this bizarre superposition of different possible outcomes only breaks down to one ‘real’ result when someone opens the shed door and observes or measures what happened inside.

Eugene Wigner explained this very problem in his article ‘Remarks on the Mind-Body Question’, published in 1961. His version has become known as ‘Wigner’s Friend’. ‘Wigner’s Friend’ extends Schrödinger’s Cat in a very important way because it effectively says; ‘why do you think that a person measuring the outcome of an experiment is somehow fundamentally different to a cat observing the outcome of an experiment?’ Some people might reply to this comment and say that Zoë can think but a cat can’t, or that Zoë is a conscious, intelligent observer and therefore she can’t become a quantum superposition. This idea is tempting but it has no logical basis. Zoë might be able to talk, read a book and ride a bike, unlike a cat, but deep down, fundamentally, you, me, her, the cat and every other living thing in existence is a biological

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organism made up of cells that are made up of molecules. From a physical point of view, we’re all just bags of organic molecules, no different from the fertiliser you might buy to help the plants in your garden grow.

Why should we be above quantum strangeness but not a humble cat? Why should any large mass of molecules somehow be able to influence the location of a photon? Schrödinger was right to think that a cat wasn’t going to be much good as an

experimental observer but there’s no scientific reason to believe that a cat can’t observe or measure. Cats catch birds and that requires highly skilled observation and measurement.

John Von Neumann and Eugene Wigner weren’t just trying to be difficult or contrary with their points about Schrödinger’s Cat; they also had an answer that solved that paradox. They both stated that there was a simple way to resolve ‘the observation problem’ and thereby prevent the cat and Zoë become ghostly-multiple-possible-potentials. The solution was to conclude that the mind of the observer, or measurer, collapses the quantum superposition and thereby creates an actual, real event. This is needed because something outside of the system is required to actually cause the system to become a single state. If that external, causal influence isn’t present, then nothing ever gets resolved, nothing ever turns from a

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collection of quantum possibilities into a real thing. If one simply extends the system (for example, by saying that the cat will become alive or dead if Zoë opens the box), this will not change the system’s root problem, since Zoë is just as much a bag of organic molecules as the cat. Unless something external to the physical system acts on the experiment and affects the quantum superpositions so that they collapse into a single, real ‘thing’, nothing is ever resolved. Physical cats won’t help, physical Zoë’s won’t help, physical anything won’t help, because they’re all part of the system. If nothing fundamentally external gets involved, the whole system is doomed to an unresolved state and the cat stays alive and dead until the end of time, along with everything in the shed, including poor Zoë, whose parents might have a bone to pick with the organisers of the experiment.

This idea, that the observer’s mind must be what turns the quantum netherworld into our reality, is known as the ‘Neumann-Wigner Hypothesis’. Considering how profoundly important it is, it is surprising that it’s almost never mentioned in the scientific media. When it is mentioned, it’s usually dismissed out of hand. Readers might assume that this is because later physicists spotted flaws in it. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Von Neumann-Wigner Hypothesis still matches the maths and the experimental results and provides a sound logical answer to a seemingly intractable problem.

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When the Neumann / Wigner Hypothesis is mentioned in the literature, it is often portrayed as an anomaly, a quirky, isolated side-event in the history of quantum physics. This is also untrue. In fact, many of the famous physicists of the twentieth century did accept that the act of measurement by an observer created a result, rather than simply discovering something that was already there. Schrödinger himself stated in a seminar:

"You have not found a particle at a measured location, you have produced one there! Before that measurement occurs, the particle is ubiquitous in the cloud.”

Many of the leading physicists at that time had realised that the mathematical quantum theories, by themselves, actually describe a reality where nothing ever truly exists. The maths, by itself, only describes a quantum non-reality. Wolfgang Pauli stated it thus:

"If one wants to assert that the description of a physical system by the wave function is complete, one has to rely on the fact that in principle the natural laws only refer to the ensemble-description, which Einstein does not believe. The natural laws only say something about the statistics of these acts of observation.”

In other words, Pauli was saying ‘there’s got to be something extra happening for real events to occur, because the

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mathematical-quantum-system, according to all we know, describes a non-reality where nothing actually exists!’

Others physicists agreed with Pauli and concluded that the conscious mind had to be an active element in making reality appear out of the quantum netherworld. Their views varied; some physicists concluded that reality itself was entirely a mental creation. Others concluded that reality was an independent world, but that it changed through mental influence. For example, Werner Heisenberg stated in his book ‘Across the Frontiers’:

"The physicist Wolfgang Pauli once spoke of two limiting conceptions. At one extreme is the idea of an objective world, pursuing its regular course in space and time, independently of any kind of observing subject. This has been the guiding image of modern science. At the other extreme is the idea of a subject, mystically experiencing the unity of the world and no longer confronted by an object or by any objective world. This has been the guiding image of Asian mysticism. Our thinking moves somewhere in the middle, between these two limiting conceptions; we should maintain the tension resulting from these two opposites."

Other leading scientists were more forthright in their view of the role of the

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mind. Arthur Eddington, the astrophysicist, whose expedition to record the eclipse of 1919 helped prove Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, says in his book 'The nature of the physical world’:

"To put the conclusion crudely, the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. Matter and fields of force of former physical theory are altogether irrelevant— except in so far as the mind-stuff has itself spun these imaginings."

According to Eddington, the mind wasn’t just influencing the quantum-superpositions to create a real event, it was creating real events simply through its existence. This view sounds extreme, but it is logically sound. Many leading physicists had accepted at that time that the universe, outside observation, had little reality. Eddington had simply taken the next logical step.

Another famous physicist made a similar comment. Max Planck, the very scientist that had sown the first seeds of the quantum revolution, said this in a speech in 1944:

"As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most

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minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

The above quotes show how much quantum physics had transformed what we know about reality. The idea that reality was a truly solid thing that exists outside of mental influence had fallen apart. Einstein clung on to that idea, but he was surrounded by many brilliant physicists and mathematicians who had concluded the opposite, that quantum physics showed that reality was a mental creation, sculpted out of mental influence. The Great Ship Classical Physics was already sinking and those physicists knew that they had to leave it and find another ship.

The facts revealed in their experiments had forced physicists to change their views irrevocably, whether they like it or not. To continue the maritime metaphor, those leading physicists had to abandon ’S.S. Classical Physics’ and climb aboard a ‘mind first’ lifeboat because it was seaworthy and could take them to a new understanding of reality.

But not everyone wanted to climb into a lifeboat called ‘mind first’. Albert Einstein, for one, refused. He wanted to find another boat, similar to the one that had sunk, that possessed only a few, minor changes, one with a traditional design.

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Until that happened, Einstein preferred to float in the water with his ‘hidden variables’ lifebelt. In the end, he floated in that sea for the rest of his life.

Einstein’s displeasure at the idea that ‘the mind creates reality from the quantum sea of potentiality’ did not die with him. Since the 1960’s, any talk of the mind’s involvement in creating reality has withered away to become little more than a historical oddity. It is now hard to believe that all those famous, Nobel Prize-winning physicists even made such bold and controversial statements during the first half of the twentieth century. Nowadays, the very idea that our minds could influence any physical event isn’t even discussed in any meaningful way. And yet nothing has changed in our understanding of the universe.

In some ways, the Neumann-Wigner hypothesis has ended up in a Kafka-like situation. Franz Kafka was a writer who grew up at the beginning of the twentieth century and became famous for his stories about unfortunate, ordinary people who end up being punished by cold, impersonal authorities without even knowing what they had done wrong. In Kafka’s novel ‘The Trial’, the protagonist Josef K. is told that he has committed a crime and must answer for it in court. Unfortunately for K., he isn’t actually told what he's

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done wrong, but he must defend himself regardless. K tries to find out what crime he is accused of, but his efforts are met with cold indifference and the view that his lack of awareness of the nature of his misdemeanour only makes him look even more guilty.

The Neumann-Wigner hypothesis has suffered a similar fate to Josef K. in ‘the Trial’. There’s nothing scientifically wrong with it as a hypothesis and it solves an important paradox in quantum physics, and yet no one in the scientific establishment will support it or even openly debate its merits. The Neumann-Wigner hypothesis has been found guilty of being un-scientific and has been sentenced to permanent obscurity, but no one will actually explain exactly how it went wrong.

In the latter half of the twentieth-century, while the Neumann-Wigner hypothesis was slowly being killed off, physicists began to flock to a new theory that seemed to solve the paradox of Schrödinger’s Cat. This idea is now known as the Many Worlds Hypothesis.

The Many Worlds Hypothesis was developed by Hugh Everett in the 1950’s. Everett came up with this solution to the problem of Schrödinger’s Cat while doing his PhD. His idea was strange, exotic and, for a long time, ignored by nearly everyone because they thought it was daft. The Many Worlds Hypothesis states that instead of one’s mind causing the quantum superposition to break down and the photon to go through one slit or another, an entirely new universe spontaneously appears for all the other possible outcomes of the event. This way, Everett believed, there was no need for an observer to influence the experiment’s result and bring about

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any particular outcome, since all possible outcomes existed in their own universes.

Such a theory does requires an absolutely astonishing number of universes to exist - one for every possible outcome of any event. There is also no experimental evidence supporting the existence of any of these other universes, which is why the Many Worlds Hypothesis was dismissed for a long time. Nowadays, in our ultra-materialistic era, it is no longer dismissed. Instead, its purely materialistic solution to the problems of Schrödinger’s Cat has made it the darling of the current generation of physicists. For supporters of the Many World’s Hypothesis, Schrödinger’s Cat isn’t alive and dead, there’s simply an entirely new universe for every possible cat-state, containing its own cat.

The Many Worlds Hypothesis might be popular at the moment, but it has a major and most damning consequence which, not surprisingly, is rarely mentioned. The nature of this consequence is the subject of the next section and involves a tree, billiard balls and someone of such brilliant genius that he stared at the sun until he went nearly blind and poked a sharp implement into his own head in order to test his focussing ability.

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The price of free will Isaac Newton is a giant of science.

In his lifetime, he single-handedly transformed Western science through his work on light and gravity. He didn’t actually spend all his time on science. He actually spent more time trying to achieve alchemy and find hidden codes in the Bible, along with various hobbies including reading accounts of nuns being tortured, than carrying out the scientific work that has immortalised him, but when he did do the science, he did it extremely well.

Newton was also a very hands-on scientist and his experiments often involved much personal suffering, including the aforementioned experiment to see what the sun would do to his eyes if he looked at it for a long time - which did nearly drive him blind - and an experiment to see if a human eye contained a lens, which he tested by sticking a needle in his head, under his eyeball, so he could press on the eyeball and see if the resulting compression changed how he perceived the world. It did, thus showing that our eyes do contain a lens.

In 1687, Newton put aside his alchemical gear, various sharp tools and dubious reading materials long enough to publish his masterwork 'Principia Mathematica', which is Latin for 'principles of mathematics'. In it, he describes his Universal Law of Gravity and states his Three Laws of Motion. Principia Mathematica is a scientific landmark and is probably still the most important scientific document ever created. Along with the brilliant work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and others, Principia Mathematica paved the way for a great leap in our

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understanding of reality and the universe; thus began the era of Classical Physics.

The era of Classical Physics may have had its flaws, but it was a crucial, positive movement away from superstition and dogma and into a new era in which people could be scientists.

The word ‘science’ has an interesting background. It is from the root word ‘scire’ meaning ‘separation’, the same root word from which we get ‘scissors’, ‘sceptic’ and ‘shit’, because the three words just mentioned literally mean ‘a tool for separation’, ‘someone who separates fact from fiction’ and ‘someone’s separation’. In this way, ’scientists’ were people who looked at the world with a clear eye and separated truth from superstition or hearsay. A ‘sceptic’ is now seen as someone who disbelieves or actively works to de-bunk something, but this is a distortion of its meaning. ‘Sceptic’ is actually someone who simply works rationally to separate out true facts.

Science isn’t about someone being knowledgeable or clever, although that certainly helps. Instead, science is based on a method of investigation, now known as the scientific method. When a scientist wants to find out what is really going on in a particular process, he or she conducts an experiment in order to gather factual data about that process. The scientist can then conclude a general principle about what is going on in that process. He or she then writes out his or her experiment, which is then distributed to other interested parties. These

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interested parties are then free to conduct the same experiment themselves. If they also produce the same results and can see no flaws in the conclusions, then the theory can be said to be true, at least until something else comes along with new results that disprove it.

One wonderful example of someone using the scientific method as a way to find out what really is true comes from Flemish Belgium. About 400 years ago Jan Baptista Van Helmont looked at a fully grown tree and wondered ‘where did all that wood come from?’ The popular view at the time was that trees must suck up all their matter out of the ground. This idea seemed self-evident, since the ground beneath our feet is full of matter. The air, by comparison, seems to have no matter so, everyone surmised, the trees must have obtained all the material from the ground to make their trunks, branches and leaves.

Instead of sticking with the common sense answer, Van Helmont conducted a scientific experiment. He planted a small tree in 200 pounds of soil, carefully separated from the ground. He watered it regularly, made sure it had enough sun and left it to grow. Six months later, he weighed the tree and its soil again. The tree had gained 164 pounds but the soil had only lost two ounces! The result of the experiment was clear; the tree hadn’t obtained its matter from the soil. It must have obtained all that material from the air. This is now a well-known fact; trees and plants build themselves primarily from

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water, oxygen and carbon dioxide. The only materials they take from the soil to construct themselves, apart from water, are trace amounts of phosphorus, nitrogen in molecular form and a few other elements. Van Helmont had shown that the ‘obvious’ way to explain a process could easily be the wrong one. Science had succeeded where intuitive thinking had failed.

Isaac Newton and others spent the seventeenth century following this approach. By doing so, they worked out how the universe worked in greater and greater detail. It was an exciting time. It seemed, according to their theories, that the universe functioned like an enormous, detailed mechanism in which every action had an equal and opposite reaction, like some kind of cosmic grandfather clock. With their new laws and insights, this generation of scientists seemed to be cracking the code of the universe and understanding exactly how it worked.

But as Bob Dylan once wrote, ‘don’t ask me nothing about nothing or I might just tell you the truth’. Some leading lights of that era realised that there was a dark consequence to knowing exactly how the universe worked.

In 1814, a famous French Mathematician called Pierre Simon Laplace pointed out that it sounded wonderful to know exactly how the universe worked, but if the universe was that deterministic (in other words, that it was possible to determine every outcome), then it would be possible to know how everything was moving in the universe at a certain point. But if one knew exactly how everything was currently moving and exactly how these components

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would interact, then one could calculate exactly what will happen from now on, in the entire universe, until the end of time.

That also sounded pretty cool, at least to some scientists. It gave them the heady thrill of absolute prescience and knowledge. But, continued Laplace, if that was the case, where did that leave free will? If everything was determined, then how could anyone believe that they were able to change anything?

This philosophical problem (‘philosophical’ literally means ‘likes to talk intelligently about things’) became known as Laplace's Demon. It was named this way because commentators felt that only a supernatural creature could ever find out the exact physical state of the entire universe. Laplace’s Demon was the dark side of determinism. It was the monstrous consequence of the Classical Physics view, because if the universe could be entirely determined, then no one could have any control over their actions. Everyone might think they were choosing apples rather than pears, or where to take their holiday, but they were deluded. All they were experiencing was just the feeling that they’d decided to do something.

Not surprisingly, many scientists and philosophers at the time decided not to believe that the universe was entirely deterministic. The alternative was to accept that no one had any free will at all. Instead, they searched for a way to explain how the universe wasn’t completely deterministic and that one’s mind did influence the world.

One famous philosopher who pursued this idea was René Descartes. René

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Descartes lived nearly a century before Isaac Newton and he thought that the mind, which was non-physical, influenced the body, which was physical. This view is known as Dualism, because two distinctly different elements are involved; the spiritual and the material. Descartes liked this idea because it allowed the mind to cause things to happen and so allow free will.

But Descartes also knew that this idea only created another problem: How could something non-physical affect something physical? Descartes guessed that perhaps the spirit or soul influenced the physical brain through the pineal gland, but his idea was only speculative. With only primitive tools to gather evidence about the world, he was floundering in the dark.

If Descartes had lived in the twentieth century, things might have been very different. If Descartes had found out about quantum physics, he might have shouted ‘eureka!’, for quantum physics shows us that our so-called physical world isn’t physical at all at its lowest level. ‘Ahah,’ Descartes might have thought, ‘if our physical world isn’t actually, fundamentally physical, perhaps the problem of a non-physical thing affecting a physical thing isn’t actually an issue at all?’ But the timing was wrong and without strong evidence to support Dualism at that time, the scientific world travelled down the Materialist path, a path that has lead all the way to the twenty-first century.

On the way, that scientific path has produced enormous benefits to human-kind. During the Renaissance, brave and insightful thinkers like Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei overturned the Church’s dogmatic and

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false view of the universe and introduced a factually correct, true understanding. Many paid with their lives for their efforts and others suffered multiple privations, including house arrest in the case of Galileo Galilei and being burned at the stake in the case of Giordani Bruno. Fortunately for us all, science survived and flourished and we now have an extraordinarily deep understanding of how the universe works. The era of superstition and falsehood seems to have been banished forever.

Those scientists had to fight for their lives to establish scientific facts and in that way, it’s understandable that they wanted very much to focus on the physical world and leave behind ghosts, spirits, demons and suchlike. For them, putting the ethereal into their theories would have been a massive step backwards, even if it was something as innocuous as accepting that the mind existed. They wanted to be committed Materialists, in other words people who believed that only physical things existed.

But as Michael Faraday pointed out, it’s when scientists get emotional and biased that they can fall into a terrible trap, one where how they want things to be stops them seeing how things actually are. Einstein fought huge resistance when he insisted that light had to be both a particle and a wave. Bohr fought huge resistance from Einstein when he insisted that nothing real existed outside of

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observation. The characters and times may have changed, but the challenges remained the same.

This problem leads us right back to the current day and the Many Worlds Hypothesis. Everett’s theory is currently the dominant answer in the scientific world to the problems of Schrödinger’s Cat, but just as with every other Materialist solution, it has an unavoidable consequence. Laplace pointed out, centuries ago, that if we exist in a universe where the mind cannot influence physical events then we are in a universe where there is no free will. The Many Worlds Hypothesis may sound neat and useful when it declares that for every event, a whole new universe is created, thereby avoiding the need for a mind to create a result. But if that’s the case, who is deciding which universe we end up in? If I observe the result of a double-slit experiment with a single photon, will I be left in the universe where the photon went through slit A, or the universe where the photo went through slit B? According to the Many Worlds Hypothesis, I will end up in one of them and it’ll be completely beyond my control. But if that’s the case, if I can’t control the outcome of even a single photon’s path, then I have no free will and the world is the world of Laplace’s Demon; one that is entirely deterministic!

The Many Worlds Hypothesis therefore may please Materialists, but it condemns all of us to a universe bereft of free will, a universe where none of us choose, decide and forge our futures. Instead, reality is just a film that we’re all watching, one that just gives us the delusion that we’re affecting events. We’re just bags of organic molecules that are being fooled into thinking we’re affecting events, when all we’re actually experiencing is just the feeling that we’re affecting events. Not surprisingly, supporters of the Many Worlds Hypothesis don’t focus much on this unavoidable consequence of their theory, but it’s there all the same.

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It would seem that we’re all faced with a choice. We can either conclude that our minds do create or influence reality, an idea put forward by many famous physicists in the twentieth century, or we can conclude that our minds don’t affect reality but that we also have no free will. Which is it? Are we just helpless, deluded bags of organic molecules or are we minds experiencing and influencing a phantasmagorical reality?

Fortunately, there is a way to find out which is true by studying the behaviour of the universe. If we study the behaviour of the universe and find that, according to the laws of physics, everything functions logically without any odd behaviour, then Materialism is correct, as there’s no need for an external influence like a mind. In other words, if the observable universe makes sense by itself, then Materialism is correct and we’re bags of organic molecules watching a film that is at least logical.

Alternatively, if the universe does include elements whose behaviour cannot be explained by the laws of physics, and the behaviour of these elements can be explained by the influence on matter by minds that don’t originate in the physical world, then we can conclude that our minds do influence reality. In that scenario, the universe is barmy without external minds, so minds are needed and Dualism is correct.

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You’ll be excited to hear that the next section of this book will describe exactly how Materialism has to be wrong and a form of Dualism has to be right! Yes, right here in this book and nowhere else! You lucky things. The explanation will be fun, engaging and will involve a steam train, sandcastles, dice, Sherlock Holmes and a man with a bird for a head.

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