Chapter 3: The Observer
Contents
II. Quantum Connections: Spirit
III. Quantum Connections: Science
"So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them."
Genesis 1:27; Old Testament, New Revised Standard Version
As Chapter 1 explored in more detail, people often give literal meaning to spiritual texts, when metaphor - for the sake of universalism and timelessness - is the implied standard. A good example is the above quote from Genesis. What does it mean by "created in his image"? Some literalists would say it means that God has a physical appearance similar to ours. This interpretation has given rise to the popular Western view of an anthropomorphic God: the Zeus-like, thunder-thrower sitting judgment from a cosmic throne. It was also one of the arguments brought to bear by Creationists against Darwin's theory of evolution. If the Bible says we were made in God's image, how is it possible for us to be related to apes?
But "image" is an amorphous concept - even in modern times it has many meanings. When someone says, "Her image has been tarnished", few people take it to mean that her face or body has been damaged in some physical way. A tarnished image is rather a metaphor for a tainted reputation. Dictionary.com lists no fewer than 23 definitions for "image", among them "a mental representation; idea; conception," "a description of something in speech or writing," and "a symbol; emblem." Of course, image can also mean a "physical likeness" or even an "optical counterpart", but consider this: If God created humankind in his physical image, both male and female, it begs the question - is God then both male and female? Perhaps. But few Biblical literalists will say as much. In fact, the very notion of an androgenous god is counter to the Biblical representation of God "the Father".
So how else can we interpret this key passage from Genesis? Perhaps by assuming that "image" means something other than man-like. A clue is found immediately in the text - "God created". If God is the Creator, perhaps humans have a similar ability to create? This is hardly a very radical interpretation. Many souls wiser than myself have suggested it. The modern twist, however, is that the idea of man as creator is no longer relegated to the realms of theology, philosophy and art. The very new science of quantum physics is showing experimentally how the mere presence of an observer affects reality so profoundly - it actually creates the reality we observe!
The implications of these findings - and the fact that they are not fringe but mainstream - have the potential to drastically change the way we see the universe and our place in it. I think it is a mistake to rate our status as observer too highly, to believe, somehow, that the universe was made specially for us (a concept termed "anthropocentrism") or even by us. But I do believe in the dynamism between creator and created, a working-relationship of sorts in which the sculptor is as transformed in the process of creation as the lump of clay he sets out to mold.
Excerpt: Cosmogony and the Elements
Jim McKim Malville, as found at www.ignca.nic.in
Our origins are clear: we come from the stars. This planet and the life which its supports resulted from 10-20 billion years of slow cooking in the interiors of stars or explosive fusion in the violence of supernovae. In that expanse of time between the present and our sidereal past lie chemistry and myth, matter and spirit, described variously in images of protons, chemical bonds, bones, blood, and mud.
The overriding insight is the same from astrophysics and the origin myths of cosmogony: because of our heritage we are thoroughly interwoven into the fabric of life on our planet, and ultimately into that ordered and harmonious system which we call cosmos. In same manner as the discovery of common ancestors can establish a feeling of family, the discovery of our common astronomical origins can lead to a recognition of an interconnected and interrelated cosmos.
In the words of Teilhard de Chardin (1959), "It is impossible to cut into this network, to isolate a portion of it without it becoming frayed and unraveled at all of its edges. All around us, as far as the eye can see, the universe holds together, and only one way of considering it is really possible, that is, to take it as a whole, in one piece"....
There is an almost uncanny similarity between the role of Vedic measurement in evoking elements from primordial chaos and that of quantum mechanical measurement in ‘actualizing’ the objects of the world. According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics championed by Niels Bohr (1963), "discrete objects such as electrons do not come into existence until they are measured". Prior to the act of measurement, electrons exist only as probabilities. The Many Worlds Hypothesis, collapsing wave functions, and, even, the death of Schroedinger’s cat are various features of this insight of modern physics that the material world is created by the human act of measurement (Wigner 1961).
Both myth and science are human creations, and it should come as no surprise that they often converge with common insights (Malville 1975). The actors in our cosmogonic drama have had many roles and many costumes ranging from creation mythologies to quantum mechanics. Elements have come to us from all directions of space and time: falling from the sky, emerging out of earth and water, born of the union of Yin and Yang, and evoked in that mysterious yet simple act of making a measurement in this extraordinarily interconnected cosmos which we call home.
Excerpt: Holistic Science and Consciousness
S.C. Malik, as found at www.ignca.nic.in
The recent enunciation by physicists of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle marks a new revolution in the scientific outlook (Harris:1991). The principle states that intelligent life, its existence and observation of its surrounding universe, is essentially involved in what it discovers. This principle has immense philosophical implications, says Harris, as he traces it continuously through physics, biology and psychology. In short, intelligent life is necessarily involved from the very beginning of physical reality and that the entire process of natural evolution comes to consciousness of itself in the human mind. This is what Lester Smith (1975) also stated in his book — as part of the theosophical society’s theme.
The wholeness of the universe is indicated by the intricate and intimate interdependence of physical and biological facts ( e.g., the integral unity of the biosphere), which is widely acknowledged today. New evidence of holism also has been disclosed by the study of turbulence and the development of fractal geometry. A contemporary concept of the universe therefore requires a logico-metaphysical theory of wholes. Harris has also thrown light on the argument for God from the fact of the design, which indicates philosophical implications also of current scientific work.
Article: The Second Quantum Revolution
Michael Brooks, as found in New Scientist Magazine, 20 June 2007
The world used to be a much simpler place. A hundred years or so ago, we lived in a very normal, classical universe where everything made sense, and nothing behaved strangely. Then along came quantum theory.
Suddenly, stuff didn't always behave as any rational person would expect. At the fundamental level of atoms and particles, things could be in two places at once. They could even move in two different directions at once. And it seemed they could also be entangled - engaged in a quantum version of telepathy in which they are somehow able to sense and affect each other instantaneously from a distance.
Adjusting to this new universe was a tall order. Some physicists constructed elaborate philosophies to deal with the implications. Albert Einstein, on the other hand, famously rejected entanglement as "spooky". He was convinced that quantum entanglement couldn't be real because the implications would run too deep: any effort to produce a unified theory, one that tied quantum mechanics together with relativity and other physical theories, would need to reconcile the weirdness of entanglement with relativity's rather more practical grasp of time and space. That just seemed altogether too hard.
Not that he ever gave up on a theory of everything. Einstein spent the latter part of his life trying to construct a unified universe, without success. He also continued to wrestle with quantum spookiness on his own. To most physicists, quantum theory was useful if you wanted to design a laser or transistor, but it didn't do to think about it too deeply.
That attitude prevailed even among those who wanted to understand the intimate workings of the universe. So the "foundations" of quantum theory - the assumptions behind how it describes particles, fields and reality itself - has taken a back seat in the quest for a unified theory. "Einstein's strong belief that the foundational issues in quantum mechanics are a necessary part of solving the problem of unification got suppressed and lost," says Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada.
But what was lost has now been found again. At the core of this renaissance is a growing tally of results showing that entanglement has profound implications for our view of reality. Recent experiments led by a group at the University of Vienna, Austria, provide the most compelling evidence yet that there is no objective reality beyond what we observe. This idea, that our measurements create reality, is controversial and scarcely new, but the mounting evidence for it could have major implications in the search for a theory of everything. Indeed, we are at the "conceptual beginnings of a second quantum revolution", according to Alain Aspect of the Institute of Optics at Palaiseau in France.
The original quantum revolution came in the 1920s. Einstein's big problem with quantum mechanics was that it contradicted the intuition supported by all other theories of physics. In our experience, objects have definite locations in space and a limited range of influence. According to quantum theory, however, a pair of particles would be able to share information about each other's quantum states - and sometimes influence them - even where the distance and timing involved meant that no signal could have passed between them.
This suggested to Einstein that when it came to describing physical reality, quantum theory was lacking something. It is not that the information about the particles' states is shared in a spooky link between them, he thought - it is simply that we don't know where to find all the factors working on a particle to determine its momentum, say. Uncover these "hidden variables", Einstein said, and all the mystical spookiness would melt away. In its place would be a quantum theory that operates by the rules of common sense.
True to form, Einstein didn't leave it at that: he formulated a mathematical argument to bolster his case. Working with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, he threw down the gauntlet to the quantum camp.
In 1935, the three theorists published the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment, known as EPR. It said that if quantum theory was correct and complete, you should be able to perform an experiment in which a measurement on one entangled particle instantaneously affects the quantum state of its distant twin. At the time, this seemed to violate the known laws of physics and cast doubt on whether quantum theory could be considered to be a complete description of reality.
Much gnashing of teeth and triumphalism followed. Erwin Schrödinger, who had also wrestled with the implications of quantum mechanics, gleefully told Einstein the EPR paper had caught quantum theory "by the throat". No one knew how to turn the thought experiment into a real one, however, so the two camps - Einstein's opposition was spearheaded by the fearsome Danish physicist Niels Bohr - spent the next two decades shaking their fists at each other.
In 1964, nine years after Einstein's death, physicist John Bell worked out a scheme to test EPR. He believed, as Einstein did, in the intuitive idea of "local realism": that a particle cannot be instantly influenced by a distant event, and that its properties exist independently of any measurement.
Bell derived a mathematical formula that quantified what you would get if you made measurements on an entangled pair of particles. If local realism was correct, the correlation between measurements made on one of the pair and those made on its partner could not exceed a certain amount, because of each particle's limited influence. The stage was set for a definitive experiment.
Many years passed before Aspect built the necessary equipment in his basement laboratory at the University of Paris, but by 1982 he had a result: Bell's formula did not agree with quantum experiments (New Scientist, 24 November 1990, p 43). The world, Aspect announced, could not be both local and real - Einstein was wrong. But which idea had to go, realism or locality? Do particles only acquire real properties when they are measured? Or are distant, instant influences possible between particles?
The answer would come from another source. In 1976, well before Aspect had carried out his experiment, physicist Anthony Leggett had what he calls "the kernel" of an idea to rework Bell's formula with a twist: he quantified what you would get if you made measurements on entangled particles, assuming that distant, instant influences were in fact possible. Leggett eventually published this formula in 2003, the year he won the Nobel prize in physics for his work on the quantum properties of helium-3.
Enter a team of Austrian and Polish physicists, who have now done experiments on pairs of entangled photons to test Leggett's formula (see "The end of reality"). The team, led by Markus Aspelmeyer of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna, managed to reduce the noise in their set-up by a necessary factor of 10, compared with Aspect's work. They published their results in April (Nature, vol 446, p 871).
What they found is that Leggett's formula is violated as well: even if you allow for instantaneous influences, quantum measurements do not fit with the idea of an objective reality. This is surprising because you might expect that, once any spooky "non-local" action is allowed, you could account for almost any relationship between two particles, and there would be no reason to ditch our concepts of reality. "This is not the case," says Aspelmeyer.
Although some loopholes remain - not all non-local models have been ruled out - we now have to face the possibility that there is nothing inherently real about the properties of an object that we measure. In other words, measuring those properties is what brings them into existence. "Rather than passively observing it, we in fact create reality," says quantum researcher Vlatko Vedral of the University of Leeds, UK.
This idea may not be new, but the evidence for it is, and it could have serious implications for a theory of everything: it tells us that what we think of as real is not necessarily so. "We know from our experience that there is a 'real' world with 'real' physical events, starting from clicks in a detector in the laboratory to experiencing a headache after too many beers," Aspelmeyer says. But that doesn't mean our physical theories ought to slavishly follow that experience, he points out - perhaps they need to dig deeper.
While quantum researchers may find this satisfying, it raises deep concerns for anyone attempting to unify the universe. General relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity, is fully realistic - it relies on things existing independent of measurements. So the search for a theory of everything, which involves uniting quantum physics with general relativity, may be even more difficult than we thought. "It is not at all clear how to construct a theory of gravity that is not real, which is what we need to do if we want to quantise gravity," Vedral says.
Spooky Space-Time
As Einstein suggested decades ago, entanglement could be the key. "Understanding entanglement means understanding a great deal about the principles upon which physical theories are based," Aspelmeyer says. His Vienna colleague ÇCaslav Brukner goes further. For more than two decades, Brukner points out, people have been saying that physics is almost wrapped up, yet if anything we seem to have reached a stalemate. "We need to rethink and radically revise our basic physical concepts before we can make the next big breakthrough in physics," he says.
Some physicists working on unified theories are well aware of this. In terms of "new ideas about quantum gravity", says Smolin, "non-locality is certainly at the core". His particular area, loop quantum gravity, does not presume that space and time behave as Einstein's relativity dictates (New Scientist, 12 August 2006, p 28). As well as allowing for spooky instantaneous signalling across space-time, those working on similar models are revisiting the fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics. A recent paper Smolin wrote with Perimeter colleague Fotini Markopoulou points out, for instance, that loop quantum gravity may conflict with common notions of entanglement (www.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0702044).
Translating these studies into a deeper theory won't be easy. Physicist David Deutsch at the University of Oxford warns that even re-examining entanglement might not help us find the path to a theory of everything. According to Deutsch, we are blocked by something even more fundamental than that.
Entanglement is real, he says, but it tells us more about how information can be extracted from quantum systems than the nature of the physical universe. All the philosophical hand-wringing over entanglement is based on the "delusion" that we have a basic grasp on quantum theory, he adds. Just because we have made one leap away from the classical world doesn't mean we've reached the heart of quantum truth. "This local realism stuff is all to do with whether it is possible to have a classical world view," Deutsch says. "It's a completely pointless controversy that should have ended in the 1950s."
While his world view is clearly quantum, all Deutsch will say about a theory of everything is that it is likely to come from uniting quantum theory and relativity at a more fundamental level than current entanglement experiments allow.
This is, of course, where we are still scrabbling for clues. "The whole underlying problem, ultimately, is that we lack experimental observations in the region where quantum and gravitational effects both matter," Vedral says. "Gravity works well in its own domain and so does quantum physics." What we have to decide, he says, is whether gravity or quantum theory is more fundamental.
So does the universe exist independently of measurements? That is a question we will have to face. Maybe it is time to revisit Einstein's lost quest, if we are serious about uncovering the basic laws of the universe; the money spent on particle smashers such as the Large Hadron Collider certainly suggests we are. Perhaps we need to move quantum entanglement and the nature of reality to the centre of the quest to find a theory of everything. What was once a quirky sideshow may yet prove to be the main event.
Article: The Flexi-Laws of Physics
Paul Davies, as found in New Scientist Magazine, 30 June 2007
Science works because the universe is ordered in an intelligible way. The most refined manifestation of this order is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental mathematical rules that govern all natural phenomena. One of the biggest questions of existence is the origin of those laws: where do they come from, and why do they have the form that they do?
Until recently this problem was considered off-limits to scientists. Their job was to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their form or origin. Now the mood has changed. One reason for this stems from the growing realisation that the laws of physics possess a weird and surprising property: collectively they give the universe the ability to generate life and conscious beings, such as ourselves, who can ponder the big questions.
If the universe came with any old rag-bag of laws, life would almost certainly be ruled out. Indeed, changing the existing laws by even a scintilla could have lethal consequences. For example, if protons were 0.1 per cent heavier than neutrons, rather than the other way about, all the protons coughed out of the big bang would soon have decayed into neutrons. Without protons and their crucial electric charge, atoms could not exist and chemistry would be impossible.
Physicists and cosmologists know many such examples of uncanny bio-friendly "coincidences" and fortuitous fine-tuned properties in the laws of physics. Like Baby Bear's porridge in the story of Goldilocks, our universe seems "just right" for life. It looks, to use astronomer Fred Hoyle's dramatic description, as if "a super-intellect has been monkeying with physics". So what is going on?
A popular way to explain the Goldilocks factor is the multiverse theory. This says that a god's-eye-view of the cosmos would reveal a patchwork quilt of universes, of which ours is but an infinitesimal fragment. Crucially, each patch, or "universe", comes with its own distinctive set of local by-laws. Maybe the by-laws are assigned randomly, as in a vast cosmic lottery. It is then no surprise that we find ourselves living in a patch so well suited to life, for we could hardly inhabit a bio-hostile patch. Our universe has simply hit the cosmic jackpot. Those universes that can't support life - the vast majority in fact - go unobserved.
Goldilocks Enigma
The multiverse theory is a step forward, but it still leaves a lot unexplained. For a start, there has to be a universe-generating mechanism to make all those cosmic patches. There also has to be a process whereby each patch acquires a set of by-laws, perhaps at random, perhaps not. These requirements demand their own laws - which maybe we should refer to as federal laws or meta-laws - to govern the creation of law-driven universes.
In itself that is not an overriding objection. Cosmologists have concocted a way for an endless stream of big bangs to occur spontaneously throughout space and time, each triggering the birth of a "bubble" universe somewhere and somewhen in the boundless multiverse, with each bubble governed internally by its very own by-laws. However, their calculations appeal to quantum mechanics, relativity and a host of other conventional oddments from the standard tool kit of theoretical physics. Accepting such meta-laws as given - true without reason or explanation - merely shifts the mystery of the laws of physics in our universe up a level, to that of the meta-laws in the multiverse.
The basic difficulty can be traced back to the traditional concept of a physical law. Since at least the time of Isaac Newton, the laws of physics have been treated as immutable, universal, eternal relationships - infinitely precise mathematical rules that transcend the physical universe and inhabit an abstract other-worldly realm.
These perfect rules were supposedly imprinted on the universe - somehow - from outside, at the moment of cosmic creation, and haven't changed an iota since. In particular, the laws care nothing for what is actually happening in the universe, however violent the physical processes may be. So the universe depends on the laws, but the laws are strangely independent of the universe.
Four hundred years on, physicists still cling to this model of physical law, even though they have no idea what the external source of the laws might be. So long as science appeals to something outside the universe, we must abandon any hope of ultimately understanding why the universe is as it is. A large element of mystery will lie forever beyond our reach.
There is, however, another possibility: relinquish the notion of immutable, transcendent laws and try to explain the observed behaviour entirely in terms of processes occurring within the universe. As it happens, there is a growing minority of scientists whose concept of physical law departs radically from the orthodox view and whose ideas offer an ideal model for developing this picture. The burgeoning field of computer science has shifted our view of the physical world from that of a collection of interacting material particles to one of a seething network of information. In this way of looking at nature, the laws of physics are a form of software, or algorithm, while the material world - the hardware - plays the role of a gigantic computer.
Perfect Past
The mathematics of the laws may be the same, but the change in perspective leads to profoundly different conclusions, as we discover when we ask just how powerful the cosmic computer may be. Every computer's performance is limited by the finite speed of its processors and the finite storage capacity of its memory. The universe is no exception.
Bits of information, even in the subatomic domain, cannot be flipped faster than a maximum rate permitted by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. Meanwhile the storage capacity depends on the physical size of the observable universe, which is limited to the maximum distance light can have travelled since the big bang 13.7 billion years ago. From this, Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge has calculated that the observable universe can have processed no more than 10120 bits of information since its birth.
Does it matter that the universe commands only finite computational resources? Maybe not to the traditional view of the laws of physics, according to which Mother Nature computes the action of her laws in a transcendent heaven of infinitely precise mathematical relationships. But if we replace this highly idealised view with one in which nature computes in the real universe, then Lloyd's bound has serious implications. In effect, we have no reason to suppose any physical law can be more accurate than 1 part in 10120. Beyond that we can expect the law to break down and become fuzzy.
For most practical purposes Lloyd's number is so big it might as well be infinite. For example, the law of conservation of electric charge has been tested to only about one part in a trillion, still 108 powers of 10 too crude to reveal any possible breakdown arising from the finite information bound.
However, Lloyd's bound isn't fixed: it grows with time, and at the instant of the big bang it was 0. At the time the large-scale structure of the universe was being laid down during the first split second, the bound was still only about 1020 - possibly small enough to have cosmological consequences. So we are led to a picture in which the laws of physics are inherent in the physical universe, and emerge with it. They start out unfocused, but rapidly sharpen and zero in on the form we observe today as the universe grows.
Flexi-laws of this sort are not a new idea. They were proposed 30 years ago by the physicist John Wheeler. The way he expressed it is that the laws of physics were not "cast in tablets of stone, from everlasting to everlasting". Rather, they emerged over time, congealing from the ferment of the big bang.
Can the flexibility in the laws explain the Goldilocks enigma? Is there enough wiggle room for the universe to somehow engineer its bio-friendliness? Freeman Dyson, one of the pioneers in the study of the biological fine-tuning mystery, wrote that the more he learned about the various accidents of physics and cosmology that permit life to arise, "the more it seems that in some sense the universe knew we were coming". Dyson's dramatic assertion raises the obvious question: how? In the first split second, when the laws were in the process of settling down, how could the universe "know about" life and consciousness coming along billions of years later? How can life today be relevant to the physics of the very early universe?
Surprisingly it can, thanks to the weirdness of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says that even if you know the state of an atom at one moment, there is an irreducible uncertainty about what its properties will be when you observe them at a later moment. One way of expressing this is to say that the atom has many possible futures encompassed within the overall fuzziness of quantum uncertainty. What's more, the principle works just as well for the past as for the future, so an atom has many possible histories leading up to its present state. By the rules of quantum physics, all these parallel realities must meld together to yield the present state of the atom.
The same general conclusion holds if we apply quantum mechanics to the entire universe - a subject known as quantum cosmology, made famous by the work of Stephen Hawking. Since we cannot know the quantum state at the start of the universe, we must work backwards in time from our present observations and infer the past.
As Hawking has emphasised, it is a mistake to think there is a single, well-defined cosmic history connecting the big bang to the present state of the universe (New Scientist, 22 April 2006, p 28)). Rather, there will be a multiplicity of possible histories, and which histories are included in the amalgam will depend on what we choose to measure today. "The histories of the universe depend on the precise question asked," Hawking said in a paper last year with Thomas Hertog (www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0602091). In other words, the existence of life and observers today has an effect on the past. "It leads to a profoundly different view of cosmology, and the relation between cause and effect," claims Hawking.
We can illustrate these abstract ideas from quantum physics with the help of a concrete demonstration suggested 25 years ago by Wheeler. His experiment is a variant of Thomas Young's famous 200-year-old double-slit experiment, designed to reveal the wave nature of light. A pinpoint source of light illuminates a screen punctured by a pair of parallel slits, projecting onto a second screen beyond. Light spreading out from each slit overlaps with that from the other. Where the light from both slits arrives at the image screen in phase, the waves reinforce to produce a bright band. Where they arrive out of phase, they interfere destructively, producing a dark band. The series of bright and dark bands are called interference fringes.
Mystery sets in when you turn the brightness right down. According to quantum theory, light may also be considered to consist of photons, which behave like a stream of particles. So what happens if you allow only one photon at a time to traverse the apparatus? Experiments show that although it takes a lot longer, an interference pattern does build up on the photographic screen, one photon at a time. Presumably each photon passes through only one slit, yet somehow it appears to "interfere with itself" and contribute to the pattern.
A wily experimenter might decide to place detectors at the slits to see which one each photon goes through. Nature, however, outmanoeuvres us. Whenever you determine the path of the photons, no interference pattern results. So you have a choice: look to see where the photon is heading and destroy its wavelike behaviour, or choose not to look, and allow the photon to manifest the wave aspect of its character. It essentially boils down to a choice of particle or wave. The photon can be both, but not at the same time. The experimenter gets to decide which.
So far so good. The novel twist that Wheeler added is that you can delay your decision to look at the wave or particle aspect until long after the light has passed through the slits. Using a pair of telescopes placed at the image screen, you can look back at the slits and infer which one any given photon emerged from. Do this and you destroy the interference pattern. In effect, the observation you make affects the nature of the past - specifically, whether the photon behaved as a wave or a particle. Physicists call this strange phenomenon "quantum post-selection".
There is a temptation to assume that the light "really was" either a wave or a particle in the past, but quantum physics denies this. It is simply not possible to ascribe a well-defined past to this system. Rather, your decision to make a particular observation - what Hawking meant by "the precise question asked" - determines the nature of the past. Crucially, however, the delayed-choice experiment cannot be used to change the past, or to send information back in time.
This aspect of quantum weirdness may appear startling, but it has been tested by experiments and found to be correct. In such experiments the quantum reach into the past is only a few nanoseconds, but in principle it could be extended to billions of years. And when it comes to quantum cosmology, it can penetrate right back to the big bang itself.
So how can this backward-in-time feature of quantum mechanics explain the bio-friendliness of the universe? Well, obviously we can rule out from the multiplicity of quantum histories any that don't lead to life, because that would conflict with the basic fact of our own existence. However, in the standard quantum cosmology advocated by Hawking, all of the alternative histories, without exception, conform to exactly the same laws of physics. So while a photon travelling from a source to a screen can take many different paths, the actual laws of motion that govern its path remain the same whichever route it takes.
Wheeler's idea was more radical. He claimed that the existence of life and observers in the universe today can help bring about the very circumstances needed for life to emerge by reaching back to the past through acts of quantum observation. It is an attempt to explain the Goldilocks factor by appealing to cosmic self-consistency: the bio-friendly universe explains life even as life explains the bio-friendly universe.
Flexi-laws
As long as the laws of physics are fixed, as they are in Hawking's cosmology, their enigmatic bio-friendliness is left out of this explanatory loop. But with flexi-laws of the sort advocated by Wheeler, the way lies open for a self-consistent explanation. The fuzzy primordial laws focus in on precisely the form needed to give rise to the living organisms that eventually observe them. Cosmic bio-friendliness is therefore the result of a sort of quantum post-selection effect extended to the very laws of physics themselves.
Wheeler's ideas are far from properly worked out. They remain, as he quaintly referred to them, "an idea for an idea". However several theorists, including Yakir Aharonov, Jeff Tollaksen and others at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and myself are attempting to place the concept of flexi-laws and quantum post-selection on a sound mathematical footing.
How can we test these outlandish ideas? If the fidelity of the laws of physics really is subject to a cosmological bound, then the structure of the universe might betray some remnant of the substantial primordial fuzziness. A more direct test could come from the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, in which the quantum states of a collection of particles are linked in such a manner that an observation performed on one affects all the others simultaneously.
The key point about an entangled state is that it requires many more parameters to define it. For example, 10 atoms may have their spins aligned with or against a magnetic field. In a non-entangled state, you only need 10 bits of information to define the state for each atom. But if the atoms are entangled, you must specify the values of 210, or 1024, parameters.
As the number of particles goes up, so the number of defining parameters escalates. A state with 400 entangled particles blows the Lloyd limit - it requires more bits of information to specify it than exist in the entire observable universe. If one takes seriously the inherent uncertainty in the laws implied by Lloyd's limit, then a noticeable breakdown in fidelity should manifest itself at the level of 400 entangled particles. Such a state is by no means far-fetched. Entangled states of about a dozen particles have already been created, and experimenters have set their sights on 10,000 as part of the effort to build a quantum computer
In the orthodox view, the laws of physics are floating in an explanatory void. Ironically, the essence of the scientific method is rationality and logic: we suppose that things are the way they are for a reason. Yet when it comes to the laws of physics themselves, well, we are asked to accept that they exist "reasonlessly". If that were correct, then the entire edifice of science would ultimately be founded on absurdity. By bringing the laws of physics within the compass of science, and fusing nature and its laws into a mutually self-consistent explanation, we have some hope of understanding why the laws are what they are. In addition, we can begin to glimpse how we, the observers of this remarkable universe, fit into the great cosmic scheme.
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I am by no means promoting, through the arguments advanced above, the "quantum mysticism" disdained by many scientists. And why I believe strongly in the confluence of science and religion, I also believe in skepticism, doubt, and questioning as necessary guards against pseudo-knowledge and New Age fads. The piece below, from Wikipedia, describes this "quantum mysticism" - from the overly-simplistic view that quantum mechanics were fully realized by early mythology (hinted at - not realized); to the misleading notions of telepathy and "quantum healing". Be aware of other points of view, yes, but always balance rigorous, unbiased sources against those whose aims and scrupulousness are less than clear.
"Quantum mysticism" and "quantum quackery" are pejorative terms referring to the practice of selectively borrowing ideas from quantum physics to support New Age and other pseudoscientific beliefs. This trend was once also described by physicist and skeptic Murray Gell-Mann as "quantum flapdoodle".
Science fiction writer Greg Egan, commentator Margaret Wertheim, among others, have complained that quantum physics is being hijacked by people with little understanding of the underlying concepts, and whose claims lack the intellectual rigour intrinsic to scientific inquiry.
Quantum Mysticist Literature
Counterintuitive aspects of quantum physics such as the uncertainty principle have invited metaphysical speculation from the time of their development. New Age "mystical physics" began in earnest in the 1970s, with Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics, in which he asserts that quantum physics confirms Eastern mystical teachings. This was taken up in the 1980s by Hindutva pseudoscience (notably published by Voice of India), which extrapolated on the statements of Vivekananda, who in 1897 claimed that "the conclusions of modern science are the very conclusions the Vedanta reached ages ago", identifying concepts from physics like gravitation, electricity, magnetism and other forces with the mystical Vedantic notion of Prana.
A classic case of "application" of quantum physics to topics outside physics is the case of Deepak Chopra, who was awarded the 1998 Ig Nobel Prize in physics for "his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness."
"Quantum healing is healing the bodymind from a quantum level. That means from a level which is not manifest at a sensory level. Our bodies ultimately are fields of information, intelligence and energy. Quantum healing involves a shift in the fields of energy information, so as to bring about a correction in an idea that has gone wrong. So quantum healing involves healing one mode of consciousness, mind, to bring about changes in another mode of consciousness, body." (Deepak Chopra)
Similarly, the 2004 film What the ♯$*! Do We Know!? (made by the Ramtha School of Enlightenment - a movement allegedly named after the 30,000 year old spirit channelled by the founder JZ Knight) attempts to use ideas about quantum mechanics, among other sciences, to support its New Age thesis.
Theories of Quantum mind, themselves viewed very sceptically by the scientific community, have given rise to concepts like Quantum meditation.
Pseudoscientific references to quantum mechanics are not restricted to New Age gurus, but were likewise common in the postmodernist mainstream of the late 20th century, as was seen in the Sokal Affair of 1996, where Alan Sokal published a tongue-in-cheek paper entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity (in which he went so far as to not merely referring to "quantum" but the more bleeding-edge and esoteric quantum gravity) in the postmodernist journal Social Text. The editors' acceptance of the nonsensical article earned them the 1996 Ig Noble Prize.
Rejection by Mainstream Physics
Most physicists would argue that nothing in quantum mechanics offers proof for such beliefs, such as Heinz Pagels who in his The Cosmic Code writes:
"Some recent popularizers of Bell's work when confronted with Bell's inequality have gone on to claim that telepathy is verified or the mystical notion that all parts of the universe are instantaneously interconnected is vindicated. Others assert that this implies communication faster than the speed of light. That is rubbish; the quantum theory and Bell's inequality imply nothing of this kind. Individuals who make such claims have substituted a wish-fulfilling fantasy for understanding. If we closely examine Bell's experiment we will see a bit of sleight of hand by the God that plays dice which rules out actual nonlocal influences. Just as we think we have captured a really weird beast--like acausal influences--it slips out of our grasp. The slippery property of quantum reality is again manifested."
Parodies
"No-one knows the reason for this, but it's probably quantum" is a quote of the dog Gaspode in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, a sarcastic reference to quantum quackery. The attitude towards the obscurantism of scientific jargon used to avoid genuine debate or hide ignorance has precedents in Orwell's Politics and the English Language, and in the quack of Molière's Le Malade imaginaire.