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QUANTUM GUYS WRECK

THE POOL TABLE

5

“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee,

“if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be;

but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)

Most people believe that there’s an independent physical universe “out there” that has nothing to do with our awareness of it. This seeming truth persisted without much dissent until the birth of quantum mechanics. Only then did a credible science voice appear, which resonated with those who claimed that the universe does not seem to exist without a perceiver of that universe.

Until then, this whole business was deemed a murky issue more appropriate to philosophy than to science. Yet the relationship between the physical world and consciousness, so redolent with the subjective aromas of cultural norms, has actually vexed and fascinated science for centuries.

On the face of it, consciousness or perception seems wholly different from the atoms, forces, and cause-and-effect machinations of the cosmos. If today one tried to unite them all, one’s initial tendency would be to give primacy to the material universe and then to try to find a way in which consciousness sprang from it. For example, the brain is made of atoms, which are made of subatomic particles—all known entities—and it operates by an electrochemical process whose nature is no longer mysterious. If our awareness is merely some sort of subjectively felt spin-off of all this, then it could indeed be incidental and secondary to the modern world’s self-operating model of reality, in which case you wasted your money purchasing this book. Science would have gotten away with exactly that model, had it not been for a little niggling matter that arose just over a century ago: quantum mechanics.

Basically—and this goes back more than two millennia to the days of Aristotle—an early issue was whether consciousness fundamentally belongs to a realm separate from the physical world. It wasn’t a preposterous idea. Believing so allowed those who wanted to explore things like free will, morality, spirituality, and (later) psychology to have one arena to themselves, whereas those dealing with the hows and whys of the physical cosmos had another. The two didn’t need to muddy the same waters.

If there was any connection or commonality between the two realms—of consciousness and the physical world—it was that the gods or the one God was universally assumed to have created both. This is why treatises on individual behavior, as well as the discoveries by “Natural Philosophers” like Newton, who successfully uncovered the logic and consistency for all physical motion, routinely cited the Creator. The practice only vanished during the past century. These days, neither your therapist nor your physics teacher is likely to bring up the Deity.

Even as late as the seventeenth century, René Descartes declared that two totally different realms inhabited the cosmos: mind and matter. He had his own good logic for saying so, because in order for mind and matter to interact, there must be an energy exchange. And no one had ever observed any object’s energy either shrink or grow simply because it was being observed. Naturally, if our minds do not affect matter, the reverse must also be true. And if the universe’s total energy never changes (which is true), then it seems to leave no room for one or more separate consciousnesses to have any energy at all, which implies that consciousness doesn’t even exist.

But it does, as Descartes illustrated with his most famous maxim. So from that point forward, scientists pretty much left consciousness alone. When halfhearted efforts to unite everything occasionally arose, they were always based on the primacy of the random and inert material world that presumably gave birth to awareness somehow. (This was sometimes called physical monism.) No one tried traveling the obverse route by attempting to argue that the material universe might arise from consciousness. This absence couldn’t be faulted. Consciousness was and still is perceived as almost ghostly— how could mere perception move a rock, let alone create a planet?

Thus the choice was clear among thinking people. The verdict in modern science was, and still is, stick with the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter. For centuries they’ve been regarded as inherently separate—or, in the view of a growing majority, consciousness somehow arises from an as-yet-undiscovered mechanism within material bodies, such as the structure or chemistry of the brain.

The motive behind asserting a duality between mind and matter was both noble and logical. Aristotle, desperately wanting to figure out how things work and desiring to uncover the physical rules of the cosmos, felt that removing the error-prone opinions of individual observers could only improve things. In short, he fought for objectivity. This essentially maintains that everything in the world is separate and independent from our minds. Isaac Newton very much liked this idea, too, and by the middle of the seventeenth century, his three laws of motion helped cement what we now call classical physics.

In France at around the same time, René Descartes was fully on board with this assumption of material realism, or causal determinism. (Those fancy terms merely refer to our standard model of the universe as provided by Newtonian physics. It’s simply the idea that all objects have mass and influence upon each other. Without the “pull” of all these myriad moving objects, everything else would remain at rest, or else continue traveling undisturbed, and we’d see no changes unfolding.) Remembering the harrowing travails of the likes of Galileo just a few decades earlier, Descartes figured that this assumption of material realism would let science proceed with the greatest safety and minimal interference from the Church. Let the Church have that other realm—of mind, consciousness, individual spirit, morality, societal rules, religious rituals, and whatever else they wanted—when it came to regulating personal behavior.

It worked. Science and the Church now had their own fiefdoms. The Newtonian–Cartesian view was that the cosmos is essentially a giant machine. Originally scientists paid a bit of lip service to the Deity, but essentially they viewed the universe as a giant, self-sustaining, three-dimensional game of billiards. If you knew the masses and speeds of each object, you could perfectly predict future positions and behavior, or even extrapolate in reverse and know where everything had been.

Similarly, in the next century, French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace surmised that if someone had sufficient intelligence and information, they could know everything about the universe just by observing the current positions and trajectories of all objects. Everything was determined by previous conditions. No mystery remained except, perhaps, for the small matter of ultimate origins. Not even God was necessary; indeed, Laplace omitted any mention of a deity in his writings on celestial mechanics.³

Such was the view of reality in the closing moments of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth. Each side pretty much kept its bargain. Science left religion alone and ignored consciousness as well. And religion considered science to be okay—after all, it explained how things moved and didn’t trespass into trying to figure out why or how the cosmos came to be.

As the Western world gained in living standards and concomitantly grew less religious, the scientific deterministic model became the new gospel. It was often called scientific realism, and who could argue with such a label? You’d have to be a nutcase to be antiscience or antirealism.

In sum, the universe was widely regarded as objective (existing independent of the observer), made of matter (which included energy and fields), ruled by causal determinism, and limited by locality. When it was even considered at all, consciousness or the observer was assumed merely to be part of the physical matter-based cosmos, having somehow arisen from it. That its origins or actual nature couldn’t be explained seemed to bother no one. A few lingering mysteries were deemed perfectly compatible with the material universe.

And this is where we’d still be if it weren’t for quantum mechanics.

That new branch of physics started quietly enough. Not much couldn’t be explained by classical physics until the closing years of the nineteenth century, but puzzles were starting to grow. Some were just plain odd. For example, a bonfire and the Sun were both deemed to be blazing fires. (The Sun’s true energy-releasing process of nuclear fusion wasn’t explained until Arthur Eddington did so in 1920.) If you stood too close to a bonfire while holding out a hot dog or a marshmallow on a stick, you’d jump back because your skin could grow painfully hot—certainly more uncomfortable than solar rays ever make you feel, even at midday. And yet despite the ample heat, a bonfire can never deliver a tan or “sunburn.” But why? This was unexplainable.

We’d known about ultraviolet (UV) rays since their discovery by Johann Ritter in 1801, and that such UV photons (bits of light) coming from the Sun are what produce suntans and sunburns. But why didn’t we ever get any from a campfire? Classical physics said that UV should be present, and hanging out long enough around a campfire should deliver a tan. But it never did.

The answer had to do with electrons, which were discovered in 1897. They were immediately assumed to orbit around an atom’s nucleus like planets around the Sun. But here’s the thing: In 1900 Max Planck surmised that electrons can absorb energy from a hot environment, and then radiate it back in the form of bits of light, which ought to include some ultraviolet light. But if electrons—unlike planets, which can orbit the Sun at any distance at all—could only orbit their atom at specific, discrete locations, then they would only be able to absorb or emit specific quantities of energy, called quanta because it takes a precise amount or quantum of energy to move an electron a specific distance. If the environment wasn’t energetic enough, electrons would only be able to make easy jumps, like those in the atom’s outer fringes. They’d never be able to make a powerful jump from the innermost orbit to the next highest, which is what’s required to create a UV photon when the electron fell back down again.

Planck’s idea, soon called the Planck postulate, was that electromagnetic energy could be emitted only in specific quanta. It wasn’t long before Niels Bohr, the brilliant Danish physicist, confirmed that all atoms indeed behave like that. Only by falling back inward from one allowable, higher orbit to another one closer to the nucleus do atoms emit packets of light, called photons. This is the only way in which light is born. If an atom is not stimulated, its electrons remain in stable orbits, and it produces no light at all.

That high-energy drop from the second orbit to the innermost one—needed to create a sunburn-producing UV photon— requires a more powerful initial energy boost than a campfire can provide. Quantum theory—the idea that electrons can make only specific moves between allowable orbits and thus absorb or emit only specific quanta of energy—explained previously enigmatic facets of nature. So far, so good. But weirdness was already lurking in the closet. According to Bohr, an electron cannot exist in any intermediary position outside a precise, allowable orbit; anytime it changes position it must go from one specific orbit to another, and never be anywhere between them. So here’s what’s odd: As an electron changes orbits, it does not pass through the intervening space!

Imagine if the Moon behaved like that. It used to be much closer to us, and is still moving farther away at the rate of almost two inches a year. It’s spiraling away like a bent skyrocket. Also, physics allows the Moon to be any distance from us. Now imagine if the Moon didn’t budge in its separation from us for millions of years, but then, in an instant, suddenly vanished and rematerialized in a new location fifty thousand miles farther away. And imagine, too, that it accomplished that jump in zero time without passing through any of the intervening space.

Well, that’s what electrons do. Needless to say, this opened bizarre new implications and set the stage for earthquakes that rocked classical physics forever. Even Planck unsuccessfully struggled to understand the meaning of energy quanta. “My unavailing attempts to somehow reintegrate the action quantum into classical theory . . . caused me much trouble,” he wrote with exasperation many years later. Ultimately he gave up trying to make logical sense of it, or even trying to convince his most stubborn doubters. “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light,” he said presciently, “but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

But it was hard for anyone to get too familiar with quantum mechanics because strange new revelations kept arriving. Physicists learned that light, as well as bits of matter, are not just particles but also are waves, and how they exist depends on who’s asking—meaning, the method of observation determines how these objects appear! Actually it’s worse than that. These entities can also exist in two or more places at once, in a kind of blurry probabilistic fashion. We might say that electrons acting as waves are really wave packets, and where the packet is densest is where an individual electron is most likely to materialize as a particle. But it may also, upon observation, pop into existence in an unlikely place, on the almost totally empty fringes of that packet. Over time, a series of observations will show electrons or bits of light materializing according to probability laws.

This means the electron or photon doesn’t enjoy any independent existence as an actual object in a real place, with a real motion. Instead, it exists only probabilistically. Which is to say it doesn’t exist at all—until it’s observed. And who observes it? We do. With our consciousness.

Suddenly, consciousness and the cosmos—which had parted paths way back with Aristotle, and whose divorce seemingly was made more permanent by Cartesian and Newtonian credos—might not be such totally separate entities after all.

Slowly, in the opening decades of the twentieth century, classical physics and the common-sense gospel of locality were eroding. After all, some “motion” unfolded without the object penetrating through any space or requiring the slightest bit of time.

Objectivity was melting, too, because the observer alone made these tiny objects materialize. Causal determinism was vanishing as well, because nothing palpable or visible caused the entities to assume one position instead of another. And as for the “physical monism” that made consciousness a random offspring of the material cosmos, it now gained interest and was reexamined. It suddenly seemed like consciousness might enjoy some central importance in the universe’s overall reality. After all, the observer’s awareness was now seen to determine what physically occurs.

And yet despite these profound oddities being increasingly perceived in the 1920s, the real quantum strangeness was just beginning.

³ It didn’t have to be stated, but another element to this classical physics model was what Einstein later called locality. Nothing budges unless acted upon by a nearby object or force. Einstein famously showed that the ultimate speed, that of light at 186,282.4 miles per second, imposes a limit of how quickly anything could affect anything else.

Einstein explained that nothing with any mass (i.e., that weighs anything) can quite attain lightspeed, because its mass would grow until, for instance, even a feather at just below lightspeed would outweigh a galaxy. And the amount of force needed to accelerate such a huge mass further would be impossible to obtain—it would exceed all the energy in the universe. Indeed, at the speed of light, a zooming mustard seed would outweigh the entire cosmos. (This change of “weight” that automatically accompanies speed was part of Einstein’s first, special relativity theory of 1905. It happens because motion always involves energy, and energy and mass, he said, are two sides of the same coin. They’re equivalent, as per his famous E = mc², where the E is energy and the m is the object’s mass. So if you increase an object’s inherent energy by increasing its speed, you’re also increasing its equivalent mass.) See chapter 7 for a wider discussion on the implications of locality.