Quantum Physics: The Discovery That Scientifically Demolished Materialism

- By: Harun Yahya, 2008-03-15


The quantum model of universe is an attempt to purge the Big Bang of its creationist implications. Supporters of this model base it on the observations of quantum (subatomic) physics. In quantum physics, it is to be observed that subatomic particles appear and disappear spontaneously in a vacuum. Interpreting this observation as matter can originate at quantum level, this is a property pertaining to matter, some physicists try to explain the origination of matter from non-existence during the creation of the universe as a property pertaining to matter and present it as a part of laws of nature. In this model, our universe is interpreted as a subatomic particle in a bigger one.

However this syllogism is definitely out of question and in any case cannot explain how the universe came into being. William Lane Craig, the author of The Big Bang: Theism and Atheism explains why:

A quantum mechanical vacuum spawning material particles is far from the ordinary idea of a "vacuum" (meaning nothing). Rather, a quantum vacuum is a sea of continually forming and dissolving particles, which borrow energy from the vacuum for their brief existence. This is not "nothing," and hence, material particles do not come into being out of nothing. (William Lane Craig, Cosmos and Creator, Origins & Design, Spring 1996, vol. 17, p. 20)

So in quantum physics, matter does not exist when it was not before. What happens is that ambient energy suddenly becomes matter and just as suddenly disappears becoming energy again. In short, there is no condition of existence from nothingness as is claimed.

According to Isaac Newton, light was a flow of a substance known as corpuscles. The basis of the traditional Newtonian physics—which was accepted until the discovery of quantum physics—was that light consisted entirely of a collection of particles. However, James Clerk Maxwell, a 19th century physicist, suggested that light demonstrated wave action. Quantum theory reconciled this greatest debate in physics.

In 1905, Albert Einstein claimed that light possessed quanta, or small packets of energy. These energy packets were given the name photons. Although described as particles, photons could be observed to behave in the wave motion proposed by Maxwell in the 1860s. Therefore, light was a transitional phenomenon between wave and particle (George Gilder) a state of affairs that displayed a major contradiction in terms of Newtonian physics.

Immediately after Einstein, Max Planck, a German physicist, investigated light and astonished the entire scientific world by determining that it was both a wave and a particle. According to this idea, which he proposed under the name of quantum theory, energy was disseminated in the form of interrupted and discrete packets, rather than being straight and constant.

In a quantum event, light exhibited both particle-like and wave-like properties. The particle known as the photon was accompanied by a wave in space. In other words, light moved like a wave through space, but behaved as an active particle when it encountered an obstacle. To express it another way, it adopted the form of energy until encountering an obstacle, at which time it assumed the form of particles, as if it were composed of tiny material bodies reminiscent of grains of sand.
After Planck, this theory was further expanded by scientists such as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Adrian Maurice Dirac and Wolfgang Pauli. Each was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discoveries.

About this new discovery regarding the nature of light, Amit Goswami says this:
When light is seen as a wave, it seems capable of being in two (or more) places at the same time, as when it passes through the slits of an umbrella and produces a diffraction pattern; when we catch it on a photographic film, however, it shows up discretely, spot by spot, like a beam of particles. So light must be both a wave and a particle. Paradoxical, isn’t it? At stake is one of the bulwarks of the old physics: unambiguous description in language. Also at stake is the idea of objectivity: Does the nature of light—what light is—depend on how we observe it? (Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe, p. 31)

Scientists now no longer believed that matter consists of inanimate, random particles. Quantum physics had no materialist significance, because there were non-material things at the essence of matter. While Einstein, Philipp Lenard and Arthur Holly Compton investigated the particle structure of light, Louis de Broglie began looking at its wave structure.

De Broglie’s discovery was an extraordinary one: In his research, he observed that sub-atomic particles also displayed wave-like properties. Particles such as the electron and proton also had wavelengths. In other words, inside the atom—which materialism described as absolute matter—there were non-material energy waves, contrary to materialist belief. Just like light, these minute particles inside the atom behaved like waves at times, and exhibited the properties of particles at others. Contrary to materialist expectations, the absolute matter in the atom could be detected at certain times, but disappeared at others.

This major discovery showed that what we imagine to be the real world were in fact shadows. Matter had completely departed from the realm of physics and was headed in the direction of metaphysics. (David Pratt)

The physicist Richard Feynman described this interesting fact about sub-atomic particles and light:
Now we know how the electrons and light behave. But what can I call it? If I say they behave like particles I give the wrong impression; also if I say they behave like waves. They behave in their own inimitable way, which technically could be called a quantum mechanical way. They behave in a way that is like nothing that you have ever seen before. . . . An atom does not behave like a weight hanging on a spring and oscillating. Nor does it behave like a miniature representation of the solar system with little planets going around in orbits. Nor does it appear to be somewhat like a cloud or fog of some sort surrounding the nucleus. It behaves like nothing you have ever seen before.
There is one simplification at least. Electrons behave in this respect in exactly the same way as photons; they are both screwy, but in exactly the same way.

How they behave, therefore, takes a great deal of imagination to appreciate, because we are going to describe something which is different from anything you know about. . . . Nobody knows how it can be like that. (Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, Modern Library Edition, New York, 1994, pp. 122-123.)

To sum up, quantum physicists say that the objective world is an illusion.(Thomas J. McFarlane, “The Illusion of Materialism) Professor Hans-Peter Dürr, head of the Max Planck Institute of Physics, summarizes this fact:
Whatever matter is, it is not made of matter. (Peter Russell, “The Primacy of Consciousness)

All the most celebrated physicists of the 1920s, everyone from Paul Dirac to Niles Bohr, and from Albert Einstein to Werner Heisenberg, sought to explain these results from quantum experiments. Eventually, one group of physicists at the Fifth Solvay Conference on Physics held in Brussels in 1927—Bohr, Max Born, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli—reached an agreement known as the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. It took this name from the place of work of the leader of the group, Bohr, who suggested that the physical reality proposed by quantum theory was the information we have regarding a system and the estimates we make on the basis of that information. In his view, these guesses made in our brains had nothing to do with the outside reality.

In short, our internal world had nothing to do with the outside real world that had been the main subject of interest of physicists from Aristotle to the present day. Physicists abandoned their old ideas regarding this view and agreed that quantum understanding represented only our knowledge of the physical system. (Jeffrey M. Schwartz, Sharon Begley, The Mind and The Brain:Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force, Regan Books, 2003, pp. 272-273) The material world we can perceive exists solely as information in our brains. In other words, we can never obtain direct experience of matter in the outside world.

Jeffrey M. Schwartz, a neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry from University of California, described this conclusion emerging from the Copenhagen Interpretation:
As John Archibald cracked, “No phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” (Jeffrey M. Schwartz, Sharon Begley, The Mind and The Brain:Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force, Regan Books, 2003, p. 274)
In summary, quantum mechanics’ all conventional interpretations depend on the existence of a perceiving being. ( Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, p. 1031)

Amit Goswami expanded on this insight:
Suppose we ask, Is the moon there when we are not looking at it? To the extent that the moon is ultimately a quantum object (being composed entirely of quantum objects), we must say no—so says physicist David Mermin. . . .

Perhaps the most important, and the most insidious, assumption that we absorb in our childhoods is that of the material world of objects existing out there—independent of subjects, who are the observers. There is circumstantial evidence in favor of such an assumption. Whenever we look at the moon, for example, we find the moon where we expect it along its classically calculated trajectory. Naturally we project that the moon is always there in space-time, even when we are not looking. Quantum physics says no. When we are not looking, the moon’s possibility wave spreads, albeit by a minuscule amount. When we look, the wave collapses instantly; thus the wave could not be in space-time. It makes more sense to adapt an idealist metaphysic assumption: There is no object in space-time without a conscious subject looking at it. (Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe, pp. 59-60.)

This, of course, applies to our perceptual world. The existence of the Moon is of course obvious in the outside world. But when we look at it, all we actually encounter is our own perception of the Moon.

Jeffrey M. Schwartz included these lines regarding the fact demonstrated by quantum physics in his book The Mind and the Brain:
The role of observation in quantum physics cannot be emphasized too strongly. In classical physics [Newtonian physics], observed systems have an existence independent of the mind that observes and probes them. In quantum physics, however, only through an act of observation does a physical quantity come to have an actual value. (Schwartz & Begley, The Mind and The Brain, p. 264)

Schwartz also summarized the views of various physicists on the subject:
As Jacob Bronowski wrote in The Ascent of Man,
“One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.” . . . Heisenberg said the concept of objective reality “has thus evaporated.“ Writing in 1958, he admitted that “the laws of nature which we formulate mathematically in quantum theory deal no longer with the particles themselves but with our knowledge of the elementary particles.” “It is wrong,” Bohr once said, “to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.” (Schwartz & Begley, The Mind and The Brain, p. 274)

Fred Alan Wolf, one of the guest physicists in the documentary film “What the Bleep Do We Know?” described this same fact:
What makes up things are not more things. But what makes up things are ideas, concepts, information. . . . (What the Bleep Do We Know?,” Documentary film directed by: William Arntz and Betsy Chasse, mns: 0.22.19-0.22.28)

Following the most fascinating and sensitive experiments that the human mind could devise over the course of 80 years, there are now no views opposed to quantum physics, which has been decisively and scientifically proven. No objections can even be suggested against the conclusions reached by the experiments performed. Quantum theory has been tested in hundreds of possible different ways devised by scientists. It has earned the Nobel Prize for a number of scientists, and is continuing to do so.

Matter, the most fundamental concept of Newtonian physics and once regarded unconditionally as the absolute truth, has been eliminated. Materialists, supporters of the old belief that matter was the sole and definitive building block of existence, were really confused by the fact of the lack of matter suggested by quantum physics. They now have to explain all the laws of physics within the sphere of metaphysics.

The shock that this inflicted on materialists in the early 20th century was far greater than can be expressed in these lines. But the quantum physicists Bryce DeWitt and Neill Graham describe it:
No development of modern science has had a more profound impact on human thinking than the advent of quantum theory. Wrenched out of centuries-old thought patterns, physicists of a generation ago found themselves compelled to embrace a new metaphysics. The distress which this reorientation caused continues to the present day. Basically physicists have suffered a severe loss; their hold on reality. (Nick Herbert, Elemental Mind: Human Consciousness and the New Physics)

In conclusion, the truth disclosed by science is this: Matter and time have been brought into being by an independent possessor of immense power, by a Creator, Allah.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR, HARUN YAHYA Born in Ankara in 1956, Adnan Oktar writes his books under the pen name of Harun Yahya. The works of Harun Yahya have been translated into 41 languages. To date, his books have been purchased by 8 million people, and an equal number have been provided free to readers by various newspapers and magazines. You can read, free of charge, 250 books Adnan Oktar has written under the pen name Harun Yahya, watch 180 documentary films and visit 56 web pages on this websites: HarunYahya http://www.Allahexists.com http://www.secretbeyondmatter.com