Q. If people can foretell the future or move things by thinking about them,
how come physics has never discovered any possible basis for such 'powers'?
A. While physics has not yet discovered an underlying cause that would
explain the anomalous phenomena recorded in the laboratory, physicists have made
a number of important discoveries in recent decades that throw considerable
light on them.
If the new physics has a central idea to sustain it, it is that of wholeness. In
1935 Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen presented their colleagues
in physics with a baffling conundrum. Trying to answer the question of whether
quantum mechanics really tells us anything about the nature of the physical
world, the three physicists proposed a thought experiment with astounding
consequences.
They showed theoretically that atomic events which appear to
us as separate must in fact be connected in some unknown way. And moreover,
that such events can communicate information to each other
instantly -- faster even than the speed of light which is thought to be a
limiting velocity in the physical world.
The three physicists predicted that whatever happened to a nuclear particle
would be reflected in the behavior of its twin particle in a closed system,
regardless of where they were. Even if they were billions of miles apart, a
change in the momentum of one particle would be instantly mirrored in its twin -
as though the particles were able to communicate their experience
instantaneously.
Einstein, who doubted that quantum physics gave a real
description of real events, thought it more likely that the twin particles were
behaving in a way that merely appeared to be coordinated in a cause and effect
manner because they were both obeying some third, hidden factor affecting them
both, a factor known to physics as a local hidden variable. He, and most
physicists, preferred this explanation because they do not like to have to draw
upon any form of inexplicable action-at-a-distance. In any case, it was thought
that even if the extraordinary connectedness of nuclear particles was real, it
was an effect which existed only at the nuclear level -- not in the real world
of tables and chairs and certainly not in the realm of biology.
In recent decades a number of research groups have conducted physical
experiments which have confirmed the unlikely prediction of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen
paradox.
In 1972 Stuart Freedman and John Clauser at Berkeley performed
an experiment which confirmed that photons -- the quanta of light -- really are
mysteriously correlated. It is no mere philosophical contrivance to get
physicists out of a conceptual difficulty; this wholeness or hidden
connectedness is real. Even more significant, its effects can be felt at the
macroscopic level, at the level of the everyday world including that of biology.
The late David Bohm, professor of physics at Birkbeck College
at the University of London, has written of this connectedness in his book Wholeness
and the Implicate Order. Bohm sees the cosmos as a connected whole which he
terms the implicate, or enfolded universe. The fragments of it that we perceive
with our human minds and senses he terms the unfolded or explicate world. We see
and understand only a tiny fraction of the underlying connected whole - the tip
of the cosmic iceberg, as it were.
More recently physics has unwrapped an even more disturbing
package. For more than fifty years, it has been believed in principle
that, at the nuclear level, our solid world dissolves into a cloud of fuzzy
probabilities. Until recently, lip service was paid to the principle of
uncertainty in physics, but no serious scientist would care to admit that he had
designed an experiment taking himself into account. Now a concrete experimental
result has been obtained which clearly shows the influence of the observer at
the quantum level.
Wayne Itano and colleagues at the National Institute for
Standards and Technology in Colorado reported an atomic experiment in Physical
Review in March 1990 in which the result was determined by the observer.
The NIST experiment involved heating with radio waves a
container of beryllium atoms and measuring the ratio of isotopes formed. The
radio pulses convert the atoms from one isotope to another. The researchers used
a laser beam to display the results since it would cause atoms in their original
state to emit light but not atoms in the altered state.
What they found was that the more measurements they made with
their laser beam, the greater the number of atoms that remained unaltered. The
very act of observing the atoms stopped them from changing state, regardless of
the effect of the radio pulses. This is not simply a matter of the laser beam
preventing the experiment from progressing or directly interfering with the
changes in atomic state. The explanation is that observing a particle causes it
to collapse from a fuzzy probabilistic cloud into a definite mass at a definite
point in space and time, as predicted by quantum mechanics.
Schroedinger's cat is alive and well -- and dead, too!.
