New theories in physics
suggest that “no man is an island” and “the greatest is within the smallest”
By Robert Anton Wilson
In
1964 Dr. John Stewart Bell, an Irishman working at CERN nuclear research centre
(
Since so much dispute rages
about Bell’s demonstration, we should use careful language in discussing it.
What Bell’s math showed was
that 1) if we accept an objective universe separate from our ideas, and 2) if
the equations of quantum (sub-atomic) physics accurately describe that
universe, then 3) any two particles that once contacted each other continue to
“influence” each other, or remain “parts of a unified system,” no matter how
far apart they subsequently move in space or in time-even if they move to
opposite ends of the universe.
Bell’s math thus suggests
that space and time only exist on some levels of the universe-or only in our minds-or
that we must assume a level of reality where space and time don’t exist at all.
“Here is there,” says physicist Dr. Nick Herbert, when explaining Bell’s
Theorem.” There is no difference between anything,” he adds with a twinkle in
his eye.
To
visualize what this means, and how it differs from all previous science, imagine
an ordinary billiard table.
In Newtonian physics, if a ball (let’s call it B), moves,
it’s because it is hit by another ball (which we can call A).This accords with
the standard mechanical picture of the universe, which most people still
identify with “science” with a capital S.
However, in field physics
(pioneered in the 19th century by James Clerk Maxwell), ball B might
move and ball A along with it, not because of mechanical collisions, but
because a magnet below the table has created an electromagnetic field, which
causes the balls to jump in a certain direction. Field theories, while in a
sense less “materialistic” than mechanical collision theories, still involve
connection, interaction and causality. They still live in “the same ball park” as
mechanical theories.
In Einstein’s General Relativity,
we find a third kind of causality. The balls might move because of the seeming
flatness of the table, which we see, only appears on the small scale. On a
larger scale the table actually curves. (In the Einstein universe the planets
orbit the sun because space itself curves, even though we can’t see the
curvature directly and have to deduce it mathematically.) This moves us even
further from collision models than the field theories do, but Einstein remains
in a ball park we can visualize-with a little extra effort. Einsteinian
space-time involves connections, interaction and a kind of
determinism-geometric determinism. The mass of matter determines the curvature
of space, and the curvature of space determines the movement of matter.
In all these kinds of
scientific explanations-the mechanical, the field theory and the geometric
(curvature) Theory-the cause of the movement of the billiard balls can be
pictured in a mental image and, once we understand the theory, it makes sense
to us.
In Bell’s universe, however,
ball A and ball B might moves without any of these three types of causes (the
only types of causes science recognizes) -and perhaps without any cause at all! In other words, A moves because B moves
or B moves because A moves and we seemingly cannot say anything more about the
movements. Maybe we can’t even say the much since the word “because” doesn’t
really seem to fit this case.
Imagine yourself in a room
with such a billiard table. Ball A at one end of the table suddenly turns
clockwise and exactly at that moment ball B at the other end turns
counter-clockwise. You observe carefully that nobody pushed the balls or fired
another ball at them. You check under the table and find no hidden magnets to
create field effects. You then think of Einstein and geometry, but when you
check, the table has no curvature of any sort. You look at the table again and
ball A turns counter-clockwise while ball B turns clockwise. That sort of thing
usually only happen in movies about haunted house.
SPOOKS,FLIM-FLAM OR...
At
this point you would probably say, “spooks!” or something similar. James Randi
would shout “Fraud!” or “Flim-flam!”
That’s just about what most
physicists said when Bell’s Theorem was published. The math was absolutely
irrefutable, but the conclusion seemed impossible to believe.
Several experiments, however
– most notably, those by Dr. Clauser of the University of California at
Berkeley and Dr Aspect at the optical institute in Orsay, France – have shown
that atomic particles behave exactly as Bell said they should. For instance, in
Aspect’s most recent experiment two photons (particles of light) ejected from a
common source (a mercury atom) acted just as Bell predicted, or just like the
billiard balls in our illustration. Whenever the photon manifested the
mathematical state called “spin up,” the other photon measured “spin down.”
This happened despite the total absence of any form of connection or cause known
to science.
To
be even clear about how “mystical” this seems, let me paraphrase a life – size
model once used by Dr. Bell in a lecture.
Imagine
two men who live in Paris and Mexico City. Imagine that we keep them under
observation continually and discover that every time the man in Paris wears red
socks, the man in Mexico City wears Blue socks. Now suppose we check every
possible communication system and prove that no way exists for the two men to
send messages to each other – they can’t get near a phone or shortwave radio or
telegraph or any similar device. Then we take the red socks of the man in Paris
and put blue socks on him. Immediately – with not a fraction of a second of
time delay – the man in Mexico City sits down, takes of his red socks and puts
on blue socks.
Even stranger, this would
happen every single time we tried the experiment if the man behaved like the
atomic particles in Bell’s Theorem and the experiments of Clauser and Aspect.
WHAT IT MEANS
What the deuce can this
mean? Physicists remain in violent disagreement with each other about the question,
but all the answers are equally astounding to ordinary folks.
According to Dr. David Bohm
of the University of London, “It may mean that everything in the universe is in
a kind of total rapport, so that whatever happens is related to everything
else; or it may be that there is some kind of information that can travel
faster than the speed of light: or it may mean that our concepts of space and
time have to be modified in some way that we don’t now understand.” (London
Times, February 20, 1983.)
Consider the first
alternative. If “what happens is related to everything else,” we live in the
kind of holistic Universe described by the mystics of the East, especially the
Hindus and Buddhists. In the humorous metaphor of Charles Fort, a a bear coughs
at the north pole, a bottle of Ketchup will fall out of a wind on in New York
City. In the more grim metaphors of Buddhism, if a single angry or cruel act
(or thought) occurs anywhere, every sentient being in the universe will feel
the effects. In the poetic language of the Englishman, John Donne: No man is an island...if a clod of Spain be
washed away, Europe is the less...Each man’s death diminishes me, for I am
involved in humanity.
This “non-local connection”
(as some call it) may mean that if you have touched a pair of dice your brain
can then exercise some control over them, just as most gamblers think. This
sounds some wild, science-fiction elaboration of Bell, but it has been
seriously proposed by Dr. Evan Harris Walker, an American physicist who
deduced, from Bell’s math and the math of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle*
just how the human brain should be able to affect the dice.
In The Complete Quantum Anthropologist, Dr. Walker demonstrates that
this mathematically theoretical limit of control – “mind over matter” –
corresponds exactly to the degree of control demonstrated by Hakoon Forwald, a
retired electrical engineer, in a long-running series of experiments on
“psychokinesis.” Forwald’s subjects in the years between 1949 and 1970 tried to
influence dice by brain power and score just as far above chance as Walker’s
math says they should have scored.
It does not seem far from
this “psychokinesis” to the traditional belief that if a sorcerer gets a hold
of a strand of your hair, anything he does will eventually affect your hair.
INFORMATION WITHOUT TRANSPORTATION
Before we get spooked too
much by this line of thought, let us look at Dr. Bohm’s second alternative:”
Information that can travel
faster than the speed of light,” Since no energy can travel faster than the
speed of light, this means information without energy. Another physicist, Dr.
Jack Sarfatti, has called it “information without transportation.” Such ghostly
information moving around without energy or transportation to carry it might
explain the kind of things that parapsychologists call telepathy or
precognition or ESP.
This sounds a medieval as
the sorcerer working magic on a lock of hair, doesn’t it? Nonetheless, two
physicists from Stanford Research International (now SRI International), Dr. Harold
Puthoff and Dr. Russell Targ, in their book Mind
Reach, offer it as an explanation of “distant viewing” (telepathy across
thousands of miles.)
Even more bizarre, as Dr. Sarfatti
has pointed out in many lectures, “information
without transportation: could travel into the past. You see, in Relativity
Theory, going faster than the speed of light seems impossible because it means
going backwards in time. Some interpretations of Bell, however, suggest that
information can indeed go backwards in time. This leads to speculations that
have previously only appeared in science fiction, not in science.
For instance, it leads to
the “Grandfather paradox.” Thus: if I had a time machine, went back to the
1890’s, and for some perverse reason murdered my grandfather before he could
marry my grandmother, then when I came back to 1992 I wouldn’t find myself
here, would I? Where would I exist, if I existed at all? It seems from a
theoretical mathematic basis I would dwell in a parallel universe – one in
which I remained sane enough not to go back in time to kill my granddad. But
this universe, where poor old granddad, would still exist – except that my
father and I wouldn’t live in it.
The same logic that governs
such a sci-fi time machine applies to “information that moves faster than
light.” If I could send
If that doesn’t boggle your
mind, consider a further development suggested by Dr. John Archibald Wheeler, often
called the father of the Hydrogen bomb. In the Science Digest of October 1984, Dr. Wheeler suggests that the
current and recent scientific experiments on atomic energy literally created
this universe (or “selected” it out of all possible universes).
In other words, every time
we meddle with an atomic system, according to Dr. Wheeler, the “non-local” effects go every which way into
space and time, and some of them affect the nature of the Big Bang from which
the universe emerged. You see, Dr. Wheeler has often argued that many, many
universes emerged from the Big Bang – more than
10,000-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million
of them, at least – all of them stacked up in parallel to ours in
“super-space,” a geometrical construct he invented to solve some of the
problems with General Relativity. Dr. Wheeler now argues, in the light of
Then we have Dr. Bohm’s
third alternative: “Our concepts of space and time will have to be modified in
some way we do not understand. “Many philosophers have examined this idea in
the past – especially the Buddhists in the East and Bishop Berkeley and
Immanuel Kant in
Dr. Nick Herbert presents a
scientific form of this theory in his book, Quantum
Reality. According to Dr. Herbert, all experience
remains “local” (bound by space and time) but reality itself exists “non-locally” (not bound by space and time,
or “transcendental”) in exactly the sense of all mystic teachings.
Dr. Bohm states the same
idea in a more precise way. As he sees it, the universe may consist of an implicate order much like the software
(programs) of a computer and an explicate
order, much like the hardware – what we can see and experience – has
locality. It remains here, not there, and now, not then. The implicative order or software, however -
which we cannot see or experience but only deduce from our experiments and math
– has total non-locality. It exists both here and there, both now and then.
In this
model we do not need to posit information without transportation or any of the
spook stuff. The information does not travel without a medium because it does
not travel at all; it exists already, always, everywhere. In every electron, in
every atom, in every molecule, every stone, every animal or person, every
planet, every galaxy, however different their locations in space and time, the
basic information, or universal blueprint (Bohm’s implicate order) remains the
same.
This
sounds very much like the Hindu concept of God or the Chinese Tao. In fact
Bohm’s implicate order exactly fits Lao-Tse’s paradox of the Tao: “The greatest
is within the smallest.” It also strikingly resembles the major axiom of
Hermetic mysticism in the West: “That which is above is reflected in that which
is below.”
There remains one way to
avoid all of these shocking and bizarre sounding interpretations of John S. Bell’s
discovery. That way is to deny the first step of the argument – that we can
posit an objective universe separate from our ideas. This path, thus far, has
appeared only in the works of Dr. David Mermin of Columbia University. In two
astounding papers – “Quantum Mysteries for Everyone” and “ Is the Moon There
When Nobody Looks?”- Dr. Mermin argues that quantum physics (the physics of
small particles, from which Bell began) finally makes sense if we assume the universe only exists when we look at it.
If you don’t look at your automobile, and nobody else looks at it, it ceases to
exist until somebody looks at it again. Then it pops back into reality – presto!
This
theory, known as “solipsism,” has never appealed to scientists or philosophers,
although a few cynics have always argued in favor of it, just to annoy the
orthodox. Nobody seems to have ever taken it seriously – until now. Dr. Mermin soberly claims that solipsism
leads to less absurd results than any other way of interpreting Bell’s math.
I
don’t think Dr. Mermin intends to make a joke. He truly fins solipsism less unthinkable
than ghostly information moving every which way in space and time with no
medium to carry it, or parallel universes being created out of nothing whenever
an atomic measurement is made, or the other alternatives that physicists are
considering in trying to understand Bell’s theorem.
In summary, Bell’s theorem
does not prove the truth of the basic ideas of mysticism, but it definitely
makes them seem more plausible than any previous scientific discovery did. Any
alternative explanation of the non-local reality described by Bell does not
bring us safely home to “common sense.”
The other explanations sound even stranger than anything that mystics
have ever claimed. We can only conclude, as the great biologist J.B.S. Haldane
did after experimenting with yoga, that “The universe may be, not only queerer
than we think, but queerer than we can think.”
For
five years(1966-1971) Robert Anton Wilson was Associate Editor of Playboy, Since 1971 he has worked as futurist,
novelist, playwright, poet, lecturer and stand up comic. He has 25 books in
print, including the Illuminatus
trilogy. His latest work, Reality Is What
You Can Get Away With, will be published in May by Dell books. Wilson’s
play Wilhelm Reich in Hell, was performed at the Edmund Burke Theatre in Dublin
in 1986, in Portland, Maine and Long Beach, California, in 1989. The play was
read on WBAI (New York) in March, 1989. Wilson is featured in the video
Borders, which has been shown on many PBS TV stations and won the first prize
in “visions of the future” at the Whole Life Expo IN San Francisco in 1989.
* Editor’s
note: The Uncertainty Principle is that “the accurate measurement of one or
two related, observable quantities, as position and momentum or energy and
time, produce uncertainties in the measurement of the other, such that the
product of the uncertainties of both quantities is equal to or greater than h /
2 pi, where h equals Plank’s constant. “ [ - from The Random House Dictionary
of the Englaih Language]. Simply put, the principle means that you can know
either the position or motion of a particle, but not both.