Reality & Quantum Mysticism

by William B. Lindley




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A War of Ideas
There is a war going on — a very quiet war. It is not like the wars going on in Bosnia, Chechnya, the Middle East, and so on. You won't see it in the headlines of the daily newspapers, although it appears here and there in Scientific American, Atlantic, Omni, etc. It is a war of ideas.

On one side are those who believe that the world exists independently of our awareness of it. These include Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Paine, Samuel Johnson, Einstein, Ayn Rand, most working scientists and engineers, and the author of this article. On the other side are those who believe that our awareness creates reality. These include Plato (to some extent), Bishop George Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Paul Watzlawick, Deepak Chopra, Amit Goswami, numerous mystics, a few physicists in our day, and a good fraction of the New Age movement. The first view is called realism or materialism; the second view is called idealism. There are other labels for both views. Interestingly, Descartes and most Christians do a straddle on this issue; their view is called dualism. There are also many noncombatants: those who have never heard of the issues and those who feel they can't take the time to explore and understand the issues. They live their lives, mainly using common sense, which itself draws mainly on the realistic view. Ayn Rand has put a concise label on the two views; she calls them the "primacy of existence" and the "primacy of consciousness."

Some call idealism as currently expressed "the new paradigm." This is a mistake. Idealism is a very old worldview. Some will run across it for the first time in a New Age book, but the ideas in that book go right back to Hinduism or a variation on Plato's philosophy. The same is true of realism.

What is new its that quantum phenomena, mainly subatomic hut also apparent at ordinary size levels in superconductivity, superfluidity, and lasers, have led to interpretations that appear to favor idealism. A new collection of 'gurus" has arisen among the physicists; people with strong physics backgrounds are promoting idealism; among these are John Wheeler, Frijtof Capra, and Fred Alan Wolf (he and I were in the same group at General Atomic way back when). This viewpoint, that the facts of quantum mechanics have rendered objective reality obsolete, I label quantum mysticism. For this reason, those of us who have taken realism for granted need to take a close look at the quantum world. Part One of this article, published here, tries to do that. Part Two, to be published next issue, describes an alternative interpretation of quantum mechanics that is fully compatible with the realist position, and provides critical commentary on a book that expresses the idealist view, namely, Amit Goswami's The Self-Aware Universe: how consciousness creates the material world. I am informed that a rebuttal article will also appear.


The Quantum World
The place to start is the two-slit experiment. Electrons (units of electricity) and photons (units of light) are both subatomic particles that, in some experiments, show the character of waves. The wave character of light is well known, while its discreteness was not accepted until this century. (Light as particles was hypothesized back in the 1600's, but that idea lost out to the clear evidence of wave behavior, being resuscitated with Einstein's 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect.) Electrons were first conceived as particles, and their wave behavior came as quite a surprise.

The two-slit experiment shows this wave-particle duality at its strangest. You have a source of electrons, the emitter. You have a target, a sensitive wall where they impinge and are counted, one by one. Between them you put a blocking screen. With no slits in the screen, there are no electrons arriving at the wall. With one (up-and-down) slit in the screen, you have a sideways distribution of electrons, showing roughly a bell-curve-shaped (random) pattern. Now put up a screen with two parallel slits. You would expect two distributions rather like the case of one slit, an overlapping double hump. But that's not what you get. You get a wavy pattern, well known to people in optics as an interference pattern. Remember, you're counting the electrons one by one as they arrive at the target. Now put another instrument at the slits to count the electrons going through each slit. No change in the number of electrons arriving at the target, but the wavy pattern disappears and you get the double hump instead. Turn the instrument at the slits off, and the wavy pattern comes back.

R. P. Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, has anticipated your next thought. He says: "I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics.... Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that." Amit Goswami, author of The Self-Aware Universe: how consciousness creates the material world, thinks he knows how it can be like that, and he tells us. But I'm getting ahead of the game.

Albert Einstein's primary concern, despite his famous saying, "God does not play dice," was with objective reality. Abraham Pais reports a discussion on this with Einstein, where Einstein "asked whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I look at it." In 1935, together with Podolsky and Rosen, Einstein "published an argument that quantum mechanics fails to provide a complete description of physical reality." This "EPR paper," Einstein's "more powerful attack on the quantum theory, focuses on... the doctrine that physical properties have in general no objective reality independent of the act of observation." It is a challenge to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, a positivistic view that "includes declining to discuss 'meaning' or 'reality' and focusing interpretive discussions exclusively on observables."

Let's look at the different ways the moon question is answered. "Is the moon there when nobody is looking?" The realist (believer in objective reality) says yes. The working physicist says "probably" (with many, many 9's after the decimal point). A Copenhagen advocate such as Bohr or Heisenberg will answer the question with a question: "Who's to say?" Bishop Berkeley, author of the dictum "esse est percipi" (to be is to be perceived), would say "Yes, but only because God watches everything." Amit Goswami, as we shall see, replies: "we must say no."

Progress has been made. The EPR challenge was reviewed by John Bell, a particle physicist, and, to his surprise, he came up in 1964 with a theorem that showed that the well-established formalism of quantum mechanics was incompatible with "local realistic theories." That is, if standard quantum mechanics is right, a theory has to be either nonlocal or incompatible with the philosophical position of objective reality. Something like the thought experiment" he suggested was carried out in the late 1970's, and it supported the standard quantum mechanics as against Einstein's challenge.

In an excellent article in the April 1985 issue of Physics Today, N. David Mermin gives a simplified model of the thought experiment: Consider a source — something that emits stuff — and consider two detectors placed some distance away at opposite directions from the source. If you put something between the source and a detector, there is no signal. There is a slight delay between pushing the button at the source and getting the signal at the detectors. and this delay is longer the farther away the detectors are. So the detectors are indeed responding to something the source puts out. They're not making it up. There are no connections between the source and the detectors other than the stuff the source emits, and there are no connections between the detectors at all. (No private lines of communication.)

Each detector has a switch with three settings 1, 2, and 3. Each detector has two lights, a red one and a green one. When a detector detects what the source emits, one light goes on. An experimental run consists of (1) setting the switches of the two detectors, independently and at random; (2) pushing the button at the source; and (3) noting which color light goes on at each detector. There are lots and lots of experimental runs. What are the results? Mermin says: "There are just two relevant features: (1) If one examines only those runs in which the switches have the same setting, then one finds that the lights always flash the same colors. (2) if one examines all runs, without any regard to how the switches are set, then one finds that the pattern of flashing is completely random. In particular, half the time the lights flash the same colors, and half the time different colors.

If you think about this long enough, you will see that the results are odd — very odd, even odder than the wave pattern generated by the two slits. However, it is just what standard quantum mechanics predicts, as Einstein knew and complained of. To the mystics, this strangeness of the quantum world is a way of knocking down the (to them) 'oppressive stone wall" of material monism or objective reality, especially if the confusion level can be kept high enough. To those of us who take objective reality as an axiomatic foundation for our worldview, it is, quite frankly, a challenge. We have to give up either objective reality, locality, or both. Can we give up locality alone and thereby meet the challenge? The answer is yes.




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