The
UNEXPLAINED
Mysteries of Mind Space and Time
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The
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Subatomic particles that are separated in space and time behave as if they 'know' about each other. ARCHIE ROY describes the attempts of physicist David Bohm to account for this profound unity of the world - a unity that might explain the paranormal MOST OF US have had the experience of standing on a bridge, watching a rain-swollen river slip by beneath, its surface deceptively calm. Only the occasional eddy reveals the vicious undertow of unseen currents. On the Sun's surface, 'eddies' immensely greater, often as large as the Earth itself, are often visible. These sunspots, regions of swirling gas thousands of degrees cooler than the rest of the Sun's surface, move with the Sun's rotation. They travel in pairs, the members of a pair being termed the 'leader' and the 'follower'. Study of their light shows that each spot has a magnetic field. And even though they may be thousands of miles apart, if the leader has north magnetic polarity, the follower invariably has south magnetic plarity, and vice versa. How does the follower 'know' the polarity of the leader so that it can 'decide' to be of opposite polarity?
This question is extremely easy to answer. If we could delve deep into the Sun - that is, add a third dimension to our appreciation of the problem - wc would discover that each member of a sunspot pair is a 'broken end' formed when a twisting, rope-like vortex of gas is forced upwards from the Sun's depths and 'snaps' at the surface. The two sunspots therefore rotate, in opposite directions. Since this rotation causes thc magnetic field, the spots display opposite magnetic polarities. The connection between the sunspots is easily explained. But quantum mechanics suggests a large-scale interconnection among particles in the Universe that is not so easy to understand. The problem is shown in an acute form in a famous paradox presented by Albert Einstein with two collaborators, Nathan Rosen and Boris Podoisky, in 1935. It states an inescapable conclusion of quantum mechanics that seems outrageously incompatible with the theory of relativity and the belief that the velocity of light is a maximum limiting velocity for everything. Suppose an electron and its anti-particle, a positron (see page 854), collide with each other. They vanish and are converted into pure energy - two photons, which fly apart like shrapnel from an exploding grenade. In subsequent measurements the two photons are found to have opposite 'polarisations'. To understand polarisation, it is necessary to use the wave 'picture' of light. Light is said to be polarised when its waves all lie in one plane: thus a light beam travelling horizontally could be polarised so that its vibrations were all vertical. Alternatively, it could be polarised so that its vibrations were all horizontal, or at any orientation between these. (Ordinarily, light is unpolarised: its vibrations can lie at any orientation around the beam.) Each photon travelling away from the mutual annihilation of the electron and positron can have any polarisation at all - but the other photon is then certain to be polarised at right angles to it. So by measuring the polarisation of one, we can predict the result of a measurement on the other. The question asked by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen can be put in these terms: why do polarisation measurements always produce corresponding results? Does some unknown influence - a 'signal' - travel from one to the other to produce agreement? Such a question may seem as naive as the question asked earlier about the magnetic polarities of the sunspot pair. Surely, it may be said, the polarisations of the two photons are fixed at the moment of the electron-positron annihilation, and remain the same thereafter. There is no need for a 'signal': the measuring instruments are merely discovering a pre-existing correlation. But according to the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, this is precisely what is not happening. The photons cannot be said to be in a definite state of polarisation before the measurement. The polarisation is 'potential' rather than actual: this is related to the fact that the results of quantum-mechanical measurements are not fixed in advance - there is only a certain probability of a given result occurring. Yet if each photon cannot be said to have a given state of polarisation before the measurement, how can the measurements at different places give correlated results? An argument similar to this was used by Einstein and his collaborators as a weapon against the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics. They argued that quantum mechanics was fundamentally incomplete. Behind the properties physicists measure, such as polarisation, lie further, unknown properties, called 'hidden variables'. Variations in these 'hidden' properties would explain the variable results obtained in the polarisation measurements. But Einstein's arguments were not accepted by the majority of physicists. And subsequent work by theorists has shown that, if the experimental results predicted by quantum mechanics are correct - and experiments are continuing to yield evidence of their correctness - and if hidden variables exist, then they behave very curiously indeed. In the electron-positron annihilation experiment, we could imagine a measurement on one of the photons sending some unknown kind of 'signal' that would influence the other photon - just as our 'naive' questioner supposed. These 'signals' would travel faster than light in some cases.
It is more likely that, as Niels Bohr argued in 1935, our common-sense way of viewing such experiments is at fault. Our tendency to split the experimental situation into independent quantities, such as the measuring instruments and the photons, and thinking of them as being localised in space and time, is a legacy from classical physics. Such a way of thinking is inadequate. Bohr went so far as to say: 'There are fundamental limitations met with in atomic physics, on the objective existence of phenomena independent of their means of observation.' This view seems to imply that the observer and his decisions play an integral part in actualising, or at least influencing, the Universe he observes; that in some deeper way the observer's measurements, the particles and the apparatus are all related and indivisible. In Wholeness and the implicate order, published in 1980, David Bohm, professor of theoretical physics at Birkbeck College, London, describes a theory of quantum physics that treats such matters in an illuminatingly fresh, if controversial, way. The book is not easy to read, for it is dense with technical terms, often inadequately defined. But it should certainly be studied by anyone interested in theoretical physics and the nature of the connection between matter and consciousness. Bohm argues that, although our separation of the world into a large number of seemingly autonomous objects has worked admirably in the development of our understanding and control of our environment, such a division is seen on a deeper level to be false. He puts forward reasons for believing that the level of reality manifesting itself, the level that we study, is produced by the creative, flowing processes of a subworld. Objects and patterns are briefly thrown up, like the forms fleetingly seen in clouds. They seem to have a certain stability, exist for longer and shorter durations, and can be described by laws based on observation. But because they are manifested, or projected, from a deeper, more fundamental world of dynamic processes, certain anomalies or paradoxes occur. They reveal that, however deeply we believe we have come to grips with ultimate reality, the artefacts we are studying are, as it were, projections into a lower number of dimensions from a higher-dimensional realm (see page 541). Bohm gives the rough analogy of a man watching two television sets, each showing the view transmitted from one of two cameras focused on a fish-tank. If the cameras focus through different walls of the tank, the two scenes watched by the man will be completely different. Nevertheless he will in time see a certain relationship between the images, a decided correlation of behaviour of the fish on one screen with that of the fish on the other. If he did not understand that the screens show two-dimensional aspects of an overriding three-dimensional reality, he might find the correlation puzzling and paradoxical. Bohm looks upon the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox and other aspects of quantum mechanics as hinting at this deeper, 'implicit' world.
He also points out that we should expect non-local, non-causal relationships between observed elements if these are projections of a higher-dimensional reality. One is reminded forcibly of the principle of acausal synchronicity formulated by Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli to describe the seemingly meaningful coincidences that occur in people's lives from time to time with such arresting force (see page 594). By no stretch of the imagination are their elements connected by cause and effect and so, however striking an effect they produce on their observers, they are dismissed glibly as 'mere coincidences'.' It may be that, like paradoxes, they should spur our minds to take fresh and original views of reality. Bohm makes a courageous attempt to include mental events in his theory. The sequence of notes that we hear when listening to music is the 'explicit' aspect of the piece. When we understand the music sufficiently to grasp it 'in its wholeness', we are grasping its 'implicit' order. Mozart said that his compositions came to him as a whole, and he simply had to write them out. Bohm regards this as showing an intuitive grasp of an implicit order that could only be conveyed to others through the explicit ordering of the music. Similarly he contrasts a thinker's understanding of a logical or mathematical problem to the sequence of steps by which he conveys his understanding to others. The field of mental phenomena, however, is made explicit to us in a manner so different from that in which material entities are made manifest that we have traditionally held them to be completely separate, displaying such completely different natures that we have puzzled for millennia over such problems as how mind and matter could ever interact. [They can if they are the SAME thing - LB] It is thought-provoking to apply Bohm' s ideas concerning the transience of objects and the relationships among them to the world of human personality, of the conscious and unconscious minds. Does his theory make more comprehensible the interaction between individual minds and the deeper, more permanent world of the archetypes and the collective unconscious itself? Bohm is noncommittal, but believes that such problems, and the problems of the paranormal, are more likely to find a solution within the framework of his ideas than they ever could in classical science. Paranormal phenomena abound with paradoxes, those painful spurs to human thought. Telepathy and clairvoyance treat space with contempt. Precognitions seem to make nonsense of our most cherished conviction that cause always precedeseffect, undermining our belief in time's orderliness. Such seeming paradoxes, like the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, may be messages to us, drawing our attention to hidden realities. Careful study of the paranormal will guide us in uncovering, mapping and partially understanding such realms.
We have achieved the simple things, such as mastering flight, tapping and controlling atomic energy and sending members of our species to the Moon. In the paranormal we are facing the greatest challenge yet to our intellects. We should not expect to make fast progress, for we are entering areas yet more alien than quantum mechanics to everyday common-sense concepts. But we have plenty of time, if only we do not let our own stupidity wipe us from the face of our planet. In our uncertain world, the elusive phenomena of the paranormal are whispers of encouragement, glimpses of human personality beyond the physical and ephemeral. |
Reproduced from THE UNEXPLAINED p938
