Quantum Physics for Total Amateurs

The Secrets You Never Learned in Physics Class: A Brief yet Forgotten History of the Revolution

Slowly, almost unobserved, that spark of ancient Indian wisdom, which the marvelous Rabbi had kindled to new flame beside the Jordan, flickered out; the light faded from the re-born sun of Greece, whose rays had ripened the fruits we now enjoy. The people no longer know anything of these things. Erwin Schrdinger

Those general notions about human understandingwhich are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of, or new. Even in our own culture they have a history, and in the Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. J. Robert Oppenheimer

I do not believe in the possible future of mysticism in the old form. However, I do believe that the natural sciences will out of themselves bring forth a counter pole in their adherents, which connects with the old mystic elements. Wolfgang Pauli

One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Paul Dirac

Dirac disapproves quite particularly of the dishonesty and self-deception that are far too often coupled to religious thought. But in his abhorrence he has become a fanatic defender of rationalism, and I have the feeling that rationalism is not enough. Werner Heisenberg

For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory[we must turn] to those kinds of epistemological problems with which already thinkers like the Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted. Niels Bohr

Only Buddhists and students of Advaita Vedanta (which appears to have been heavily influenced by Buddhism) have been absolutely clear in asserting that spiritual life consists in overcoming the illusion of the selfthe teachings of Buddhism and Advaita are best viewed as lab manuals and explorers logs detailing the results of empirical research on the nature of human consciousness Our common sense seems to be stuck somewhere in the sixteenth century. It has also been generally forgotten that many of the patriarchs of physics in the first half of the twentieth century regularly impugned the physicality of the universe and placed mindor thoughts, or consciousness itselfat the very wellspring of reality. Nonreductive views like those of Arthur Eddington, James Jeans, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrdinger seem to have had no lasting impact. New Atheist, Dr. Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

However, there is speculation, and some evidence, that consciousness, at the most fundamental levels, is a quantum process If, at the quantum level, the flow of time has no meaning, and if consciousness is fundamentally a similar process, and if we can become aware of these processes within ourselves, then it is also conceivable that we can experience timelessness. If we can experience the most fundamental functions of our psyche, and if they are quantum in nature, then it is possible that the ordinary conceptions of space and time might not apply to them at all (as they dont seem to apply in dreams). Such an experience would be hard to describe rationally (Infinity in a grain of sand/And eternity in an hour), but it would be very real, indeed. For this reason, reports of time distortion and timelessness from gurus in the East and psychotropic drug users in the West ought not, perhaps, to be discarded peremptorily. Spiritual Guru, Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters

There must be thousands of young persons whose nervous systems were expanded and opened-up in the 1960s and who have now reached positions of competence in the sciencesWe expect the new wave of turned-on young mathematicians, physicists, and astronomers are more able to use their energized nervous systems as tools to provide new correlations between psychology and science. Harvard Psychedelic Researcher and Spiritual Guru, Dr. Timothy Leary

Preface Political strife and upheaval, environmental disaster, the rise of religious fanaticism and totalitarianism, the failure of modern psychiatry to alleviate the sufferings of the mentally ill, our most afflicted and dejected membersthe modern failings of the human mind are clear. As the spiritual successors of Einstein and Netwon, Kepler and Plato, Spinoza and Schopenhauer, we as a society are presently in grave spiritual danger, a danger largely of our own creation. Quantum physicist and theoretical biologist Erwin Schrdinger observed:

A sort of general atavism has set in; western man is in danger of relapsing to an earlier level of development which he has never properly overcome: crass, unfettered egoism is raising its grinning head, and its fist, drawing irresistible strength from primitive habits, is reaching for the abandoned helm of our ship.

Schrdinger further traced the root of this atavism:

Most of [the people] have nothing to hold on to and no one to follow. They believe neither in God nor gods; to them, the Church is now only a political party, and morality is nothing but a burdensome restriction which, without the support of those no longer credible bugbears on which it leant for so long, is now without any basis whatever.

One of the worlds first biotechnologists, Erwin Schrdinger wrote to his readers that a blood transfusion of thought would shortly be needed to save Western science from spiritual anemia. The world does not have to be this way. The idea that the conclusions of modern science must be branded atheistic or opposed to spirituality is simply incorrect and counterfactual, as unscientific as it is anti-historical. Such assertions run contrary to the practice of science throughout history and are generally founded on an insidious misunderstanding of the philosophy and history of our present day sciences. We must therefore ask the fateful question: what has modern physics to say about its encounter with human consciousness? Former Transcendental Meditation instructor and New Age guru Deepak Chopra smugly assures his large, Western following: The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world. On the other hand, the New Atheists assure us this isnt so, as per the religion-less spirituality advocated by neuroscientist Sam Harris, writing on the advice of his friend, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, a man who works with the quantum theory for a living:

Authors struggling to link spirituality to science generally pin their hopes on misunderstandings of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which they take as proof that consciousness plays a central role in determining the

character of the physical world. If nothing is real until it is observed, consciousness cannot arise from electrochemical events in the brains of animals like ourselves; rather, it must be part of the very fabric of reality. But this simply isnt the position of mainstream physics. It is true that, according to Copenhagen, quantum mechanical systems do not behave classically until they are observed, and before that they may seem to exist in many different states simultaneously. But what counts as observation under the original Copenhagen view was never clearly defined. The notion has been refined since, and it has nothing to do with consciousness.

As neither Chopra, nor Harris, nor Krauss has much (any) experience dealing with the Foundations of Physics, this is quite the misunderstanding indeed. To settle matters, Schrdinger tells us, we must go far back. Throughout the course of mans slow emergence on our planet Earth, both spiritual and scientific approaches to Life have formed and will continue to form a counter-posed but nevertheless complimentary and inseparable approach to our understanding the natural world. This was roughly the worldview of Maxwell Planck, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrdinger, Carl Jung, Timothy Leary, Werner Heisenberg, and Niels Bohr, among other visionaries of 20th century science, to shortly be explored in yet greater detail. It is the position of Cosmic Religion, designated by Albert Einstein as a new sort of religion:

God is a mystery. But a comprehensible mystery. I have nothing but awe when I observe the laws of nature. There are not laws without a lawgiver, but how does this lawgiver look? Certainly not like a man magnified.

As a mere biologist, Richard Dawkins is certainly not qualified to speak so authoritatively about the God of the physicist:

There is every reason to think that famous Einsteinisms like God is subtle but he is not malicious or He does not play dice or Did God have a choice in creating the Universe? are pantheistic, not deistic, and certainly not theistic. God does not play dice should be translated as Randomness does not lie at the heart of all things. Did God have a choice in creating the Universe means Could the universe have begun in any other way? Einstein was using God in a purely metaphorical, poetic sense. So is Stephen Hawking, and so are most of those physicists who occasionally slip into the language of religious metaphor.

All this is simply a truism. Language is by definition contextual; therefore, all language is to some degree metaphor. (Remember, Dawkins authored The Selfish Gene in 1976, based largely on his belief that the deadly blow of Darwins On the Origin of Species, combined with Mendels genetics and the discovery of the Crick-Watson structure of DNA, removed the need for God in biology. Chapter 3 is entitled Immortal Coils.)

Compare the words of Erwin Schrdinger, close personal friend to Albert Einstein, having had his own troubles with the Nazis, writing in 1944 at the height of World War II about the physics of the living organism in the aptly-named What is Life?:

Please do not accuse me of calling the chromosome fibers just the cogs of the organic machineat least not without a reference to the profound physical theories on which the simile is basedIt needs still less rhetoric to recall the fundamental difference between the two and to justify the epithets novel and unprecedented in the biological case

[Among] the most striking features arethe fact that the single cog is not of coarse human make, but is the finest masterpiece ever achieved along the lines of the Lords quantum mechanics.

is [this] not the closest a biologist can get to proving God and immortality at one stroke[?]

If Einstein wanted to write Randomness does not lie at the heart of all things, he would have written so. But Einstein did not write so, instead consistently re-phrasing his problem with Bohrs Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics:

As I have said so many times, God doesnt play dice with the world. Indeed, individual failings undermine neither the truths glimpsed by the sciences nor those by religions. And again, this is not a statement that can be proven; rather, it is the pre-determined belief system of a large majority of theoretical physicists and psychologists that has been largely ignored by the prophets of New Atheism and the materialist domineers of academia. According to particle physicist Fritjof Capras counterculture classic, The Tao of Physics:

Mystics understand the roots of the Tao but not its branches; scientists understand its branches but not its roots. Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science; but man needs both.

Aldous Huxley, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz, completed The Perennial Philosophy, a study of comparative religion and mysticism, in 1945. Huxley tells us that

Rudiments of the Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions. A version of this Highest Common Factor in all preceding and subsequent theologies was first committed to writing more than twenty-five centuries ago, and since that time the inexhaustible theme has been treated again and again, from the standpoint of every religious tradition and in all the principal languages of Asia and Europe.

To understand Huxleys belief in inner divinity, we must recognize that though Man may be God, God may indeed be dead. As Nietzsche phrased it in The Gay Science:

We have killed [God]. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Albert Einstein put the question this way:

I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinozas Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.

One mustnt get too caught up on any single conception or definition of God. As Bohr forewarned, We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. Deist, Renaissance man, and American Revolutionary, Thomas Paine defined the goal of science thusly in The Age of Reason:

That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology. As to the theology that is now studied in its place, it is the study of human opinions and of human fancies concerning God. It is not the study of God himself in the works that he has made, but in the works or writings that man has made.

Nearly two centuries later, Schrdinger would express a deep and profound concern that the naturalism of science had becoming increasingly synonymous with the materialism of atheism:

The scientific picture of the world around me is very deficient. It gives me a lot of factual information, puts all our experiences in a magnificently consistent order, but is ghastly silent about all that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell a word about the sensation of red and blue. Bitter or sweet, feelings of delight and sorrow.

It knows nothing of beauty and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.

Science is reticent too what it is a question of the great Unity of which we somehow form a part, to which we belong. The most popular name for it in our time is God, with a capital G. Science is, very usually, branded as being atheistic. After what we have said this is not astonishing. If its world picture does not even contain beauty, delight, sorrow, if personality is cut out of it by agreement, how should it contain the most sublime idea that presents itself to the human mind?

Quoting Schopenhauer from memory (himself quoting a poem from either the Vedanta or the Bhagavadgita, which is inspired by the same spirit), Schrdinger elaborates:

The one all-highest Godhead Subsiding in each being And living when they perish Who this has seen, is seeing. For he who has that highest God in all things found, That man will of himself upon himself inflict no wound.

Einstein had also read Schopenhauer in his youth, referencing the philosophy espoused by The World as Will and Representation in The World as I See It:

In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauers saying, that a man can do as he will, but not will as he will, has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others. This feeling mercilessly mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralyzing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humor, above all, has its due place.

Einstein continues:

I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavor to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.

It is with regard to the juxtaposition of these two opposites (the eternity of life and an individual who should survive his physical death) that one must consider Schrdingers preference for the immortality of the soul, a belief largely derived from Schopenhauer, Parmenides, and the Vedanta:

Briefly stated, [I advocate] the view that all of us living beings belong together in as much as we are all in reality sides or aspects of one single being, which may perhaps in Western terminology be called God while in the Upanishads its name is Brahman.

This is hardly a different view from that of Spinoza (also a profound intellectual influence on Schrdinger), for [whom] the human body is a modification of the infinite substance (God), in so far as it is expressed in the attribute of extension, and the human mind is that same modification, but expressed in the attribute of thought. Consider Einstein:

I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

Now, as Schrdinger sees it:

The structure of what I call my higher spiritual self is indeed essentially the direct consequence of ancestral events, but not exclusively nor principally within the limits of my physical ancestors. If what follows is to seem anything more than a bold piece of rhetorical trickery, it is necessary to be clear on one point concerning the two factors which determine an individuals course of development, namely (a) the special arrangement of his genes, and (b) the special pattern of the environment which works on him; it is necessary, I say, to realize that these two factors are of quite the same nature, in that the special arrangement of the genes, with all the possibilities of development which it contains, has developed under the influence of and in essential dependence on earlier environments.

Therefore, it ought follow quite naturally that

The Self is not so much linked with what happened to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the SAME THING as all that: the strict, direct continuation of it, just as the Self aged fifty is the continuation of the Self aged forty.

The logical and ultimate conclusion of this train of thought, as Schrdinger sees it, is nothing less than immortality, since the concept of time is ultimately a creation of the Self:

It is rather remarkable that whereas western philosophy has almost universally accepted the idea that the death of the individual does not put an end to anything that is of the essence of life, it has (with the exception of Plato and Schopenhauer)

bestowed hardly a thought on this other idea, much deeper and more intimately joyful, which logically goes hand in hand with it: the idea that the same thing applies to individual birth, at which what happens is not that I am created for the first time but that I slowly awaken as though from a deep sleep. Then I can see my hopes and strivings, my fears and cares as the same as those thousands who have lived before me, and I may hope that future centuries may bring fulfillment to my yearnings of centuries ago. No seed of thought can germinate in me except as the continuation of some forebear; not really a new seed but the predetermined unfolding of a bud on the ancient, sacred tree of life.

Only now can we truly envisage what was at stake in Einsteins qualm to Bohr about whether God can be said to play dice with the universe. If quantum event are truly random, then thought can and does in fact germinate without continuation, and the concept of a predetermined unfolding of a bud on the ancient, sacred tree of life is therefore rendered meaningless and antiquated. Schrdinger and Einstein both thought that Copenhagen was nave with its interjection of quantum jumps and quantum randomness, though neither man was ultimately able to present a more successful theoretical model. We are thus left asking: what do quantum physics, the New Atheists, the psychedelic movement, and Indian poetry have in common? Unfortunately for New Atheism, the process of answering this single question will significantly undermine the worldview of academic materialism. But that is indeed for the collateral benefit of the rest of us. As Lawrence Krauss embarrassingly botches epistemology and metaphysics in his 2012 book, A Universe From Nothing:

If the laws of nature are stochastic and random, then there is no prescribed cause for our universeWhy is there something rather than nothing? Ultimately, this question may be no more significant or profound than asking why flowers are red and some are blue. Something may always come from nothing. It may be required, independent of the underlying nature of reality.

This simply begs the question, however. Required by whomus? If thats the case, why should our collective pseudo-desire to inhabit some cosmos culminate in the existence of such an astral plane? He blunders metaphysics in the epilogue even more embarrassingly:

A God or a Nature that could encompasses a multiverse would be as constrained in the creation of a universe in which Einstein could ask the question as either would be if there is only one choice of a consistent physical reality.

I find oddly satisfying the possibility that, in either scenario, even a seemingly omnipotent God would have no freedom in the creation of our universe. No doubt because it further suggests that God is unnecessaryor at best redundant.

Schrdinger deemed this mere silliness. We can only imagine how Einstein or Planck would have advocated for a similar worldview:

Now we are asked to believe that this special modification in the evolution of the higher mammals [the emergence of the brain as a highly specialized phenomenon] had to happen in order that the world should dawn itself in the light of consciousness; whereas, if it had not emerged, this world would have remained nothing but a drama played to an empty house, not present to anyone and hence not in the real sense present at all. If this is really the ultimate wisdom to which we can attain in this question, then to me it seems the utter bankruptcy of our picture of the world. And we ought at least to acknowledge it, and not act as though it did not matter to us, or jeer, in our rationalistic wisdom, at those who try to find a way out, however desperate.

For Schrdinger, an atomic physicist, the atomic theory postulated a world of mere phantoms or archetypes, reminiscent of Platos Allegory of the Cave:

In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of familiar lifeThe frank realization that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.

Further clarifying that the atomic theory had [its shadowy character] ever since Democritus of Abdera and even before, but we were not aware of it, Schrdinger claims that

The material world has only been constructed at the price of taking the self, that is, mind, out of it, removing it; mind is not part of it; obviously, therefore, it can neither act on it nor be acted on by any of its parts.

And again,

The external world and consciousness are one and the same thing, in so far as both are constituted by the same primitive elements. But we are then hardly even using a different formula whether we express the essential community of these elements in all individuals by saying that there is only one external world or that there is only one consciousness.

We have then forgotten who we are. The Dancing Wu Li Masters defines our conflict succinctly:

Physics has become a branch of psychology, or perhaps the other way round. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, wrote:

The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.

Jungs friend, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, put it this way:

From an inner center the psyche seems to move outward, in the sense of an extraversion, into the physical world

If these men are correct, then physics is the study of the structure of consciousness. Again, we must consider the Ethics of Einsteins favorite philosopher, Spinoza:

The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains which is eternal.

Einsteins pseudo-religious qualms about the inadmissibility of quantum theory as science cannot be logically separated from his statements about God and philosophy since his entire worldview was rested on the premise that human creativity was rationally infinite, each human mind a subset of the infinite Mind of God:

Scientists such as Einstein and Poincare had insisted on the importance of intuition in creative thinking. Logic alone cannot lead to the discovery of scientific theories, they said.

Understood in light of the more recent suggestion that human consciousness is a non-algorithmic or quantum process, this is a telling statement indeed. Wolfgang Pauli saw the issue in yet older light: because [Johannes Kepler] looks at the sun and the planets with this archetypal image in the background he believes with religious fervor in the helio-centric system[It is his religious belief that impels] him to search for the true laws of planetary motion. Kepler himself saw the universe as a triumph of geometry, the discipline which to him ranked highest among the sciences, the helio-centric model an embodiment of the very image of the Holy Trinity (interestingly, the image of both the Christian Trinity and the Indian Brahman will come up together on yet a later day, pertaining also to the lessons of atomic physics): Drawing inspiration from his intellectual progenitor, Pauli quoted Johannes Kepler, jotting:

The Mind of God, whose copy is here [on earth] the human mind, from its archetype retains the imprint of the geometrical data from the very beginnings of mankind.

And again,

Reason is eternal. Therefore the geometrical figures are eternal; and in the Mind of God it has been true from eternity that, for example, the square of the side of a square equals half the square of the diagonal. Therefore, the quantities are the archetype of the world.