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 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 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.

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 fruits of Western mans present spiritual anemia are indeed far too clear. The world does not have to be this way. The idea that science is atheistic or opposed to spirituality is a boldface lie, 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 of science. The premise of this book is that science and spiritually fundamentally cannot be opposed to each other, as the two methods form our complimentary and holistic philosophical approach to the world. Conflicts of science and religion, therefore, are the product of human misconception and misunderstandingwhen scientists and religious teachers cannot come to an accord, both groups have failed and are accountable. But individual failings undermine neither the truths glimpsed by the sciences nor those by religions. 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:

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.

According to Huxley,

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.

Man may be God, but God is indeed dead. As Nietzsche wrote 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 it 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 explains: 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. 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 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 play dice with the universe. If a quantum event is 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 meaningless and antiquated. Schrdinger and Einstein both thought that Copenhagen was nave with its interjection of 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 whom? Us? If thats the case, why should our desire to live in a universe culminate in the existence of such a universe? Dawkins blunders 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.

Schrodinger laughed at this silliness, not believing such fantasies worthy serious intellectual consideration at all (we can only imagine how Einstein or Planck would have advocated for a similar view):

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.

We have forgotten who we are. The Dancing Wu Li Masters defined the 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.