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 Schrödinger

Those general notions about human understanding…which 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 self…the 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 mind—or thoughts, or consciousness itself—at the very wellspring of reality. Nonreductive views like those of Arthur Eddington, James Jeans, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger 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 don’t 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 sciences…We 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 largely of our own creation. Quantum physicist and theoretical biologist Erwin Schrödinger 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.

Schrödinger 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 members—the failings of the human mind are clear. One of the world’s first biotechnologists, Erwin Schrödinger 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. Throughout the course of man’s 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 Schrödinger, Carl Jung, Timothy Leary, Werner Heisenberg, and Niels Bohr, among other visionaries of 20th century science, to shortly be explored in yet greater detail. This is the position of Cosmic Religion ( theoretical physicist Albert Einstein as “a new sort of religion,” and misappropriated by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 2006 book The God Delusion: “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 biologist, 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.

This is simply a truism. All language is 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 Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, combined with Mendel’s 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 Erwin Schrödinger, 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 his aptly-named What is Life?:

Please do not accuse me of calling the chromosome fibers just the ‘cogs of the organic machine’—at least not without a reference to the profound physical theories on which the simile is based…It 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 are…the fact that the single cog is not of coarse human make, but is the finest masterpiece ever achieved along the lines of the Lord’s 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 Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics:

As I have said so many times, God doesn’t play dice with the world. Conflicts of science and religion, therefore, are the product of human misconception and misunderstanding—when 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 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. It was roughly the worldview of Maxwell Planck, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, 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.

To understand Huxley’s belief in inner divinity, we must recognize that though 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 Spinoza’s 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 mustn’t 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, Schrödinger 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”),  Schrödinger  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.  Schopenhauer’s  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  Schrödinger’s  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  Schrödinger),  “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  Schrödinger  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  individual’s  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  Schrödinger  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  Einstein’s  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  rendered  meaningless  and  antiquated.  Schrödinger  and  Einstein  both  thought  that  Copenhagen  was  naïve  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 universe…Why 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 that’s 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 unnecessary—or at best redundant.

Schrödinger 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 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.

Jung’s 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.