Read Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience Online
Authors: Pim van Lommel
The revolutionary message of quantum physics is that while there is a certain order in the universe (waves or particles), there is more to it than the physical aspect alone. Matter can be measured, but the mind determines what we know. Our thoughts and feelings play a part in determining how the universe functions and how we perceive the universe. The way we think has a physical effect on what we perceive, and this has brought about a revolution in physics as well as in philosophy and in consciousness research. Nobel laureate and quantum physicist Max Born said, “I am now convinced that
theoretical physics is
actually
philosophy.
”
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The slow and reluctant acceptance of the new insights from quantum physics can be ascribed in part to the materialist worldview with which most of us were raised. In this view the objective, material world functions only according to the unchangeable laws of classical physics outlined in the previous section.
Entanglement
In the double-slit experiment, if so little light is emitted that only a single photon passes through the two slits at a time, and no other measurements are carried out to determine the position of this photon, the photosensitive plate will eventually exhibit an interference pattern again, showing light behaving like a wave. Even when it consists of isolated photons, the light behaves like a wave, which can mean only that each photon passes through both slits at the same time. The photon becomes entangled with itself, as it were. This is known as a
superposition
of wave functions, whereby a wave should no longer be seen as a real wave but, in Born’s term, as a
probability wave.
A probability wave is an equation that describes the probability with which a particle can be found in a certain position; it is also known as the wave function of a particle. When the intensity of the light dwindles from a massive bombardment to an isolated photon emission, the light is no longer described as an electromagnetic wave but as a probability wave. Light is normally defined as an electromagnetic field that behaves like a disturbance in an empty space or a vacuum. In large numbers, photons behave like an electromagnetic wave packet. But when a single photon passes and no electromagnetic wave can be measured, the immeasurable probability wave is used to statistically predict where the photon will hit the photographic plate. At that moment an isolated photon behaves like a probability wave. Unobserved, the photon has no location because it has an infinite number of possible locations. Quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger formulated the equation for these quantum-mechanical waves.
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An atom’s electrons occupy a probability field around the nucleus, and each time they are observed they occupy a different position in this field. But matters are complicated by the fact that the position and the momentum of an electron cannot be measured at the same time. As a result, we never really know where the electron is. This is the
uncertainty principle
of Nobel Prize–winning quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg: when we try to measure the momentum of an electron, we become unable to locate its position at the same time. Observation is impossible without fundamentally altering the observed object. An observation reduces the countless possibilities (probability waves) to a single fact, the particle’s position at that moment in time. Mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose calls this
objective reduction.
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Scientists have come to the conclusion that the observer determines where and how a particle will be perceived. Observing the process affects the results because everything is connected to everything else. This rules out any chance of objective observation. And this applies to both experiments and everyday life. All (observation of) reality is subjective because the observer’s mind determines what will be observed. And if two or more observers are in agreement, we ought to speak of the intersubjectivity rather than the objectivity of perceived reality.
Some prominent quantum physicists, including Eugene Wigner, Brian Josephson, and John Wheeler, as well as mathematician John von Neumann support the radical interpretation that observation itself literally creates physical reality, a position that regards consciousness as more fundamental than matter or energy. Von Neumann writes, “The world is built not out of bits of matter, but out of bits of knowledge—subjective, conscious knowings.”
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Quantum physicist Henry Stapp writes that including human consciousness in the basic structure of physical theories is one of the most crucial developments in quantum physics. He regards the idea in classical physics that our thoughts are completely irrelevant as a serious problem. Quantum physics allows us to view ourselves as people who seek and use knowledge and who, thanks to our investigative activities, are able to exert some influence over our environment and therefore cannot be reduced to automatons. This is why Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner claims that quantum physics is concerned with observations and not with the observable. Books such as
The Non-Local Universe: The New Physics and Matters of the Mind; The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World;
and
The Spiritual Universe
also elaborate the key role of consciousness in relation to quantum physics and the consequences for our worldview. Many physicists and philosophers struggle to accept this interpretation of quantum physics.
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Nonlocality
How can two separate particles have a remote and instantaneous influence on one another? How do we explain the entanglement of two (or more) remote objects? This constitutes one of the key principles of quantum physics and one of the most profound and astonishing discoveries in the history of physics. It is based on Bell’s theorem, which was proven by physicist Alain Aspect and his colleagues in 1982.
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In their experiment they measured the change in spin of two particles.
But what exactly is spin? Spin is a fundamental property of nature, akin to electric charge or mass. All the smallest particles, such as protons, neutrons, and electrons, have a spin that is either positive or negative and that is always a multiple of one-half. Individual, unpaired particles have a spin of one-half.
If a local measurement is performed on the spin or rotation of a particle, classical physicists assume that the measurement has a local effect. But if the experiment is performed with two particles emanating from the same source but fired in two different directions, and measurements are then conducted in two separate places, what scientists found is that measuring the first particle also gives us the results of measuring the second particle. In other words, there is a correlation, an entanglement of the two particles, which allows us to predict the outcome; there is no local, or direct, influence between the two particles that would cause the outcome of the measurement of the second particle to match that of the first. This was a revolutionary finding because up until that point the consensus had been that only local, or direct, causes could determine the outcome of a measurement. Not so, according to quantum mechanics.
Initially, many struggled to accept such an instantaneous, remote effect; even Einstein had tremendous difficulty with nonlocal effects in quantum physics. However, experiments in 1982 produced definitive proof that entanglement between two particles creates a nonlocal relationship. The physicist Nicolas Gisin repeated these experiments with photons eleven kilometers apart via a fiber-optic cable at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland. The same nonlocal entanglement was later demonstrated across a distance of fifty kilometers. Nonlocality has even been proved in three entangled systems (the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger paradox).
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The New Worldview Based on Quantum Physics
According to quantum theory, everything is interconnected, there is no local cause for an event, and when an event takes place it instantly changes the entire universe. As early as 1923, Nobel laureate Louis de Broglie wrote that ultimately all matter in the universe can also be seen as a wave function.
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This means that matter too has a wave-particle complementarity. What had already been proven for light—that it exhibits both particle and wavelike properties—was found to apply to matter as well.
In 1930 Einstein wrote, “We have now come to the conclusion that space is the primary thing and matter only secondary.” And a few years later Schrödinger claimed, “What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space.” Physicist Steven Weinberg recently expressed the current position in quantum physics quite succinctly: “Matter thus loses its central role in physics.”
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But what is matter? Does matter actually exist? What can materialist-minded scientists still believe in?
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the new and revolutionary concepts from quantum physics include superposition, complementarity, the uncertainty principle, the measuring problem, and entanglement. All of these concepts revolve around the same problem: when it is not observed, the quantum object has neither a definitive location in time and space nor the kind of fixed properties that classical physics ascribes to objects. This is known as the “quantum measurement problem.” It is difficult to gauge the consequences for our worldview if we accept that something can exist without a location in space, a place in time, or any properties. If fundamental properties can be established only after an observation has taken place, the big question becomes: What kind of reality could exist without observation? “Does the moon exist when nobody is looking?”
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Before you continue reading, I would like you to stop and close your eyes for a moment. Now open them again and ask yourself: What did the world look like while you had your eyes closed and you were unable to see the world around you? How can you know what the world looked like at that moment? And what reality existed last night while you were asleep? Where was the world when you were sleeping? How can you be sure that the world exists while you are asleep? It may seem implausible, but some renowned quantum physicists maintain, on theoretical grounds, that the world does not exist when nobody is looking because without observation we cannot be certain that it really exists. These quantum physicists claim that an observation creates a personal subjective world from an infinite number of unlimited possibilities.
We can build on this thought experiment by manipulating a person’s consciousness: if a person is hypnotized and told that everybody present is bald, he or she will actually see people without hair on their heads. Or if somebody under hypnosis is told that he will be touched with an extremely hot object but is really touched with, say, a pencil, his skin will still blister.
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The mind is primed by hypnosis to perceive its surroundings in a particular way. The expectations imposed by the mind even trigger a visible reaction in the body. The mind, thus primed, determines how reality will be experienced.
In other words: expectations shape our reality. So what about people with prejudices or materialist views? Will these people have a different view of reality because of their expectations? I will come back to this intriguing question later in the book.
Unobserved objects are instantaneously connected or entangled in a timeless, nonlocal way. The concept of nonlocality is now a commonly accepted aspect of quantum physics, but about a hundred years ago Einstein still spoke of “spooky action at a distance.” Actually, Newton’s laws of gravitation were viewed in a similar light by his contemporaries. The following remark encapsulates the unimaginable consequences of quantum theory: “Quantum mechanics is magic.”
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Quantum mechanics also exposes the concept of causality, the fixed relationship between cause and effect, as an illusion. Events happen only in the presence of an observer. In classical physics, by contrast, reality consists of separate elements that can be individually examined and measured. But since the advent of quantum physics we know that everything is interconnected, that everything operates like a holistic system and not in isolation, and that analysis of these separate elements will never uncover a so-called objective reality. In fact, the conclusion goes one step further: there is no such thing as objective reality, only intersubjective reality. As Schrödinger put it in his influential book
What Is Life,
“The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, and memories.”
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Based on the empirical data produced by scientific research into NDE and on the purely theoretical assumptions of quantum physics, as formulated by aforementioned scientists such as von Neumann, Wigner, Josephson, Wheeler, and Stapp, I support the not yet commonly accepted interpretation that consciousness determines if and how we experience reality.
The Nonlocal Space of Probability Waves
Most contemporary quantum physicists believe that the nonlocal space of Schrödinger’s probability waves is a purely mathematical concept and cannot be ascribed any reality. In other words, it is purely hypothetical. It cannot be measured because it is only a series of probability waves that have not collapsed, through observation, into measurable results. The velocity of the probability waves ranges from the speed of light to infinity (or instantaneous).
In 1901 the American physicist Josiah W. Gibbs was probably the first to call this nonlocal space of probability waves the
phase space.
In 1924 the German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld described the phase space as a six-dimensional space with only wave aspects, which, for readers familiar with modern string theory, is somewhat comparable to the many dimensions called for by certain recent versions of that theory. The waves of phase space have measure but no direction because they occupy a nonlocal dimension. This phase space is difficult to visualize, but such a multidimensional space can be constructed with the help of mathematical formulas.
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