Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe (8 page)

In our double-slit experiment, it is easy to insist that each photon or electron—because both these objects are indivisible—must
go through one slit or the other and ask, which way does a particular photon really go? Many brilliant physicists have devised experiments that proposed to measure the “which-way” information of a particle’s path on its route to contributing to an interference pattern. They all arrived at the astonishing conclusion, however, that it is not possible to observe both which-way information
and
the interference pattern. One can set up a measurement to watch which slit a photon goes through, and find that the photon goes through one slit and not the other. However, once this is kind of measurement is set up, the photons instead strike the screen in one spot, and totally lack the ripple-interference design; in short, they will demonstrate themselves to be particles, not waves. The entire double-slit experiment and all its true amazing weirdness will be laid out with illustrations in the next chapter.

Apparently, watching it go through the barrier makes the wave-function collapse then and there, and the particle loses its freedom to probabilistically take both choices available to it instead of having to choose one or the other.

And it
still
gets screwier. Once we accept that it is not possible to gain both the which-way information and the interference pattern, we might take it even further. Let’s say we now work with sets of photons that are entangled. They can travel far from each other, but their behavior will never lose their correlation.

So now we let the two photons, call them
y
and
z
, go off in two different directions, and we’ll set up the double-slit experiment again. We already know that photon
y
will mysteriously pass through both slits and create an interference pattern if we measure nothing about it before it reaches the detection screen. Except, in our new setup, we’ve created an apparatus that lets us measure the which-way path of its twin, photon
z
, miles away. Bingo: As soon as we activate this apparatus for measuring its twin, photon
y
instantly “knows” that we can
deduce
its own path (because it will always do the opposite or complementary thing as its twin). Photon
y
suddenly stops showing an interference pattern the instant we turn on the measuring apparatus for far-away photon
z
, even though we didn’t
bother
y
in the least. And this would be true—instantly, in real time—even if
y
and
z
lay on opposite sides of the galaxy.

And, though it doesn’t seem possible, it gets spookier still. If we now let photon
y
hit the slits and the measuring screen
first
, and a split second later measure its twin far away, we should have fooled the quantum laws. The first photon already ran its course before we troubled its distant twin. We should therefore be able to learn both photons’ polarization
and
been treated to an interference pattern. Right? Wrong. When this experiment is performed, we get a non-interference pattern. The
y
-photon stops taking paths through both slits
retroactively
; the interference is gone. Apparently, photon
y
somehow knew that we would
eventually
find out its polarization, even though its twin had not yet encountered our polarization-detection apparatus.

What gives? What does this say about time, about any real existence of sequence, about present and future? What does it say about space and separation? What must we conclude about our own roles and how our knowledge influences actual events miles away, without any passage of time? How can these bits of light know what will happen in their future? How can they communicate instantaneously, faster than light? Obviously, the twins are connected in a special way that doesn’t break no matter how far apart they are, and in a way that is independent of time, space, or even causality. And, more to our point, what does this say about observation and the “field of mind” in which all these experiments occur?

The Copenhagen interpretation, born in the 1920s in the feverish minds of Heisenberg and Bohr, bravely set out to explain the bizarre results of the quantum theory experiments, sort of. But, for most, it was too unsettling a shift in worldview to accept in full. In a nutshell, the Copenhagen interpretation was the first to claim what John Bell and others substantiated some forty years later: that before a measurement is made, a subatomic particle doesn’t really
exist in a definite place or have an actual motion. Instead, it dwells in a strange nether realm without actually being anywhere in particular. This blurry indeterminate existence ends only when its wave-function collapses. It took only a few years before Copenhagen adherents were realizing that
nothing
is real unless it’s perceived. Copenhagen makes perfect sense if biocentrism is reality; otherwise, it’s a total enigma.

If we want some sort of alternative to the idea of an object’s wave-function collapsing just because someone looked at it, and avoid that kind of spooky action at a distance, we might jump aboard Copenhagen’s competitor, the “Many Worlds Interpretation” (MWI), which says that everything that
can
happen, does happen. The universe continually branches out like budding yeast into an infinitude of universes that contain every possibility, no matter how remote. You now occupy one of the universes. But there are innumerable other universes in which another “you,” who once studied photography instead of accounting, did indeed move to Paris and marry that girl you once met while hitchhiking. According to this view, embraced by such modern theorists as Stephen Hawking, our universe has no superpositions or contradictions at all, no spooky action, and no non-locality: seemingly contradictory quantum phenomena, along with all the personal choices you think you didn’t make, exist today in countless parallel universes.

Which is true? All the entangled experiments of the past decades point increasingly toward confirming Copenhagen more than anything else. And this, as we’ve said, strongly supports biocentrism.

Some physicists, like Einstein, have suggested that “hidden variables” (that is, things not yet discovered or understood) might ultimately explain the strange counterlogical quantum behavior. Maybe the experimental apparatus itself contaminates the behavior of the objects being observed, in ways no one has yet conceived. Obviously, there’s no possible rebuttal to a suggestion that an unknown variable is producing some result because the phrase itself is as unhelpful as a politician’s election promise.

At present, the implications of these experiments are conveniently downplayed in the public mind because, until recently, quantum behavior was limited to the microscopic world. However, this has no basis in reason, and more importantly, it is starting to be challenged in laboratories around the world. New experiments carried out with huge molecules called buckyballs show that quantum reality extends into the macroscopic world we live in. In 2005, KHCO
₃
crystals exhibited quantum entanglement ridges one-half inch high—visible signs of behavior nudging into everyday levels of discernment. In fact, an exciting new experiment has just been proposed (so-called
scaled-up superposition
) that would furnish the most powerful evidence to date that the biocentric view of the world is correct at the level of living organisms.

To which we would say—of course.

And so we add a third principle of Biocentrism:

First Principle of Biocentrism: What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness.

Second Principle of Biocentrism: Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be separated.

Q
uantum theory has unfortunately become a catch-all phrase for trying to prove various kinds of New Age nonsense. It’s unlikely that the authors of the many books making wacky claims of time travel or mind control, and who use quantum theory as “proof ” have the slightest knowledge of physics or could explain even the rudiments of quantum theory. The popular 2004 film,
What the Bleep Do We Know?
is a good case in point. The movie starts out claiming quantum theory has revolutionized our thinking—which is true enough—but then, without explanation or elaboration, goes on to say that it proves people can travel into the past or “choose which reality you want.”

Quantum theory says no such thing. Quantum theory deals with probabilities, and the likely places particles may appear, and likely actions they will take. And while, as we shall see, bits of light and matter do indeed change behavior depending on whether they are being observed, and measured particles do indeed amazingly appear to influence the past behavior of other particles, this does not in any
way mean that humans can travel into their past or influence their own history.

Given the widespread generic use of the term
quantum theory
, plus the paradigm-changing tenets of biocentrism, using quantum theory as evidence might raise eyebrows among the skeptical. For this reason, it’s important that readers have some genuine understanding of quantum theory’s actual experiments—and can grasp the real results rather than the preposterous claims so often associated with it. For those with a little patience, this chapter can provide a life-altering understanding of the latest version of one of the most famous and amazing experiments in the history of physics.

The astonishing “double-slit” experiment, which has changed our view of the universe—and serves to support biocentrism—has been performed repeatedly for many decades. This specific version summarizes an experiment published in
Physical Review A
(
65
, 033818) in 2002. But it’s really merely another variation, a tweak to a demonstration that has been performed again and again for three-quarters of a century.

It all really started early in the twentieth century when physicists were still struggling with a very old question—whether light is made of particles called photons or whether instead they are waves of energy. Isaac Newton believed it was made of particles. But by the late nineteenth century, waves seemed more reasonable. In those early days, some physicists presciently and correctly thought that even solid objects might have a wave nature as well.

To find out, we use a source of either light or particles. In the classic double-slit experiment, the particles are usually electrons, because they are small, fundamental (they can’t be divided into anything else), and easy to beam at a distant target. A classic television set, for example, directs electrons at the screen.

We start by aiming light at a detector wall. First, however, the light must pass through an initial barrier with two holes. We can
shoot a flood of light or just a single indivisible photon at a time—the results remain the same. Each bit of light has a 50-50 chance of going through the right or the left slit.

After a while, all these photon-bullets will logically create a pattern—falling preferentially in the middle of the detector with fewer on the fringes, because most paths from the light source go more or less straight ahead. The laws of probability say that we should see a cluster of hits like this:

When plotted on a graph (in which the number of hits is vertical, and their position on the detector screen is horizontal) the expected result for a barrage of particles is indeed to have more hits in the middle and fewer near the edges, which produces a curve like this:

But that’s not the result we actually get. When experiments like this are performed—and they have been done thousands of times during the past century—we find that the bits of light instead create a curious pattern: