The observer effect

Quan­tum physics’ the observer effect says that there is no real­ity until that real­ity is per­ceived. This pro­found insight tells us that we alter every object in the world sim­ply by pay­ing atten­tion to it.

In pre­vi­ous ages such a state­ment would be con­sid­ered blas­phe­mous, or at least most fan­tas­tic and highly improb­a­ble. The world then was ruled by firm laws of physics for some, and yet for oth­ers the world was ruled by a firm hand of God. Reli­gions and sci­ence have deter­mined the scopes, reaches and bound­aries of the world and every­thing else within — includ­ing human exis­tence and our right to live, breath, see, to hope, even to dream — was inter­preted through the result­ing world­views. Fear­ful, we too have helped cre­ate such a lim­it­ing world around us.

But some­thing strange has hap­pened just over a cen­tury ago. Astound­ing insights by remark­able men in mod­ern physics, con­firmed by numer­ous exper­i­ments, have revealed us a wholly dif­fer­ent stage of the real­ity the­atre we’re all play­ing on. Human­ity has made a gigan­tic leap: from the sim­plis­tic, deter­min­is­tic real­ity of the pre-20th cen­tury world, through the rel­a­tivis­tic world of the early– and mid-20th cen­tury, into the quan­tum world of today. We right­fully call it a quan­tum leap.

Quan­tum leap pro­foundly changes our per­spec­tives, and any­thing we knew (or at least we thought we knew) must now be reval­ued, realigned, repo­si­tioned. Any mod­ern meta­physics that tries to embrace the total­ity of human exis­tence, its pos­si­bil­i­ties and the expe­ri­ence of it, must as well embrace the quan­tum view of real­ity. Any­thing falling short of that is not even worth con­sid­er­ing as a can­di­date for a seri­ous, com­pre­hen­sive worldview.

How this con­sid­ers you, or me? To para­phrase a mod­ern physi­cist, our knowl­edge of a sit­u­a­tion changes the sit­u­a­tion instantly. By becom­ing aware, we alter the out­come of the sit­u­a­tion. In fol­low­ing para­graphs I’ll con­tinue my pre­vi­ous arti­cle (Stub­bornly per­sis­tent illu­sion) and scat­ter some remark­able insights of mod­ern physi­cists and philoso­phers of sci­ence. I’ll use them as ref­er­ence points in my forth­com­ing essays as well, where I’ll reflect upon them in fur­ther explo­ration of dif­fer­ent subjects.

To express the scope of quan­tum physic in one page is impos­si­ble, of course, hence I encour­age you to explore books and online mate­r­ial to your best abil­ity. Now you know it, you’ve been warned, and let’s see how it will change your reality.

The observer and observer’s universe

Atom?
When it comes to atoms, lan­guage can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so con­cerned with describ­ing facts as with cre­at­ing images.
– Niels Bohr, physi­cist, Nobel prize lau­re­ate and one of the pio­neers of quan­tum physics

Physi­cist?
A physi­cist is just an atom’s way of look­ing at itself.
– Niels Bohr

A ten­dency to exist
The prob­a­bil­ity wave meant a ten­dency for some­thing. It was a quan­ti­ta­tive ver­sion of the old con­cept of “poten­tia” in Aris­totelian phi­los­o­phy. It intro­duces some­thing stand­ing in the mid­dle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of phys­i­cal real­ity in the mid­dle of pos­si­bil­ity and real­ity.
– Werner Heisen­berg, physi­cist, author of the uncer­tainty prin­ci­ple in quan­tum physics

Fold, unfold, fold again .. unfold again
Clas­si­cal physics says that real­ity is actu­ally lit­tle par­ti­cles that sep­a­rate the world into its inde­pen­dent ele­ments. Now I’m propos­ing the reverse, that the fun­da­men­tal real­ity is the enfold­ment and unfold­ment, and these par­ti­cles are abstrac­tions from that. We could pic­ture the elec­tron not as a par­ti­cle that exists con­tin­u­ously but as some­thing com­ing in and going out and then com­ing in again. If these var­i­ous con­den­sa­tions are close together, they approx­i­mate a track. The elec­tron itself can never be sep­a­rated from the whole of space, which is its ground.
– David Bohm, physi­cist, ven­er­a­ble con­trib­u­tor to phi­los­o­phy and neu­ropsy­chol­ogy too

State of flux
The quan­tum the­ory shows that the attempt to describe and fol­low an atomic par­ti­cle in pre­cise detail has lit­tle mean­ing. The notion of an atomic path has only a lim­ited domain of applic­a­bil­ity. In a more detailed descrip­tion the atom is, in many ways, seen to behave as much like a wave as a par­ti­cle. It can per­haps best be regarded as a poorly defined cloud, depen­dent for its par­tic­u­lar form on the par­tic­u­lar envi­ron­ment, includ­ing the observ­ing instru­ment. Thus, one can no longer main­tain the divi­sion between the observer and the observed (which is implicit in the atom­istic view that regards each of these as sep­a­rate aggre­gates of atoms). Rather, both observer and observed are merg­ing and inter­pen­e­trat­ing aspects of one whole real­ity, which is indi­vis­i­ble and unanalysable.

In this total­ity, the atom­istic form of insight is a sim­pli­fi­ca­tion and an abstrac­tion, valid only in some lim­ited con­text. The new form of insight can per­haps best be called Undi­vided Whole­ness in Flow­ing Move­ment.
– David Bohm

When you look at it, and when you don’t look at it

In quan­tum physics there is some­thing called a “wave”, an intan­gi­ble, irre­ducible field of prob­a­bil­ity, from which all phys­i­cal mat­ter and energy arise. The “waves” of quan­tum physics are ways of think­ing. They’re not what’s going on in the phys­i­cal world. Par­ti­cles — that’s real in the real world. Waves are con­ve­nience; they’re a way of think­ing. Waves of pos­si­bil­ity. Waves of prob­a­bil­ity. When you aren’t look­ing it’s like a wave. When you are look­ing, it’s like a par­ti­cle.
– Fred Alan Wolf, physi­cist and author of many books on nature of con­scious­ness and quan­tum theory

Real­ity
Real­ity is not just the phys­i­cal world; it’s the rela­tion­ship of the mind with the phys­i­cal world that cre­ates the per­cep­tion of real­ity. There is no real­ity with­out a per­cep­tion of real­ity. Would you be here, exist in a phys­i­cal form, if no one observed you? In a real sense, the answer is no.
– Fred Alan Wolf

Observer
Mere obser­va­tion is enough to alter the his­tory of any­thing or any­one, even a whole coun­try. By observ­ing, each observer sep­a­rates into a self and a thing. Often that thing is one’s own face, body, or personality/belief struc­ture.
– Fred Alan Wolf

The observer effect
The observer effect says that there is no real­ity until that real­ity is per­ceived. This pro­found insight tells us that we alter every object in the world sim­ply by pay­ing atten­tion to it. In this alter­ation, both the object of our atten­tion and the mind of the observer change. Because we usu­ally don’t pay atten­tion to our­selves in the per­cep­tion process, our imme­di­ate expe­ri­ence usu­ally won’t seem to indi­cate that our actions of per­cep­tion changed any­thing. How­ever, if we con­struct a care­ful his­tory of our per­cep­tions, they often show us that our way of per­ceiv­ing indeed changes the course of our per­sonal histories.

Thus the world is really not as it seems. It cer­tainly seems to be “out there” inde­pen­dent of us, inde­pen­dent of the choices we might make. Yet quan­tum physics destroys that idea. What is “out there” depends on what we choose to look for.
– Fred Alan Wolf

Observ­ables and obser­va­tion
Observ­ables are the con­se­quences of our actions. We “do” to observe. We must bring out or cause some­thing to occur in order to observe any­thing at all. Obser­va­tion or mea­sure­ment implies an observer with intel­li­gence, a mind capa­ble of dis­cern­ing and thereby get­ting an impres­sion or a per­cep­tion of things. And that is what makes some­thing go from any­thing pos­si­ble to some­thing actual. In other words, obser­va­tion must be the cre­ator of real­ity. This pop­u­larised the idea “you cre­ate your own real­ity” and that quan­tum physics and con­scious­ness are related. This gets spir­i­tual when you con­sider who or what the ulti­mate observer can be.
– Fred Alan Wolf

Recorded see­ing
We don’t see what we see; we see what we remem­ber we see. And you can replace this phrase with “smell”, “taste”, “hear”, “sense”, and per­haps even think. When we see objects “out there”, we not only see them, we replay all the pre­vi­ous infor­ma­tion con­nected to them through past infor­ma­tion “record­ings”.
– Fred Alan Wolf

Con­scious­ness can alter real­ity
With all the new med­i­cines com­ing out, and the new insights we’re gath­er­ing about what con­sti­tutes health, quan­tum physics may just be what we need to really grasp how ancient spir­i­tual views of the body and mod­ern sci­en­tific views prove that con­scious­ness can alter the real­ity, and so all ill­ness (both phys­i­cal and social we can add) may become as out­dated as small­pox is today.
– Fred Alan Wolf

The power of illu­sion
The notion that all these frag­ments are sep­a­rately exis­tent is evi­dently an illu­sion, and this illu­sion can­not do other than lead to end­less con­flict and con­fu­sion. Indeed, the attempt to live accord­ing to the notion that the frag­ments are really sep­a­rate is, in essence, what has led to the grow­ing series of extremely urgent crises that is con­fronting us today. Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has brought about pol­lu­tion, destruc­tion of the bal­ance of nature, over-population, world-wide eco­nomic and polit­i­cal dis­or­der and the cre­ation of an over­all envi­ron­ment that is nei­ther phys­i­cally nor men­tally healthy for most of the peo­ple who live in it. Indi­vid­u­ally there has devel­oped a wide­spread feel­ing of help­less­ness and despair, in the face of what seems to be an over­whelm­ing mass of dis­parate social forces, going beyond the con­trol and even the com­pre­hen­sion of the human beings who are caught up in it.
– David Bohm

Both past and future are not cer­tain
Physi­cists Albert Ein­stein and Richard Tol­man showed that if quan­tum mechan­ics describes events, then even the past is as uncer­tain as the future.
– Fred Alan Wolf

After­thoughts

We cre­ate past, and change past, same as we cre­ate future and change future. Sounds impos­si­ble, because we ‘know’ that past is gone, and is, well, behind us. How­ever, the log­i­cal proof of this notion above is quite sim­ple: if the past is gone, and deter­mined, how can such a deter­min­is­tic set called ‘past’ be a cause for the inde­ter­min­is­tic future? Or to put it in para­ble: if we had apples only in our kitchen yes­ter­day, how we can make an apple, cherry and pear pie today? How we can have more pos­si­bil­i­ties now than we had them in the past? That past is gone and deter­mined is thus an illu­sion, but we choose to believe it because our mem­ory is selec­tive and atten­tion span usu­ally short. We obvi­ously didn’t see we have cher­ries and pears on the shelf some­where and believed there were none.

To para­phrase Fred Alan Wolf, the past is within vast fields and wind­mills of our mind. Every day we dis­cover some­thing new about our past, and that in effect changes the course of our future. Thus past indeed is unde­ter­mined because it will appear dif­fer­ently as we observe it dif­fer­ently. And vice versa — we imag­ine some future pos­si­bil­i­ties that reflect in us some mem­o­ries from the past, which then cast a new light on a thought, “Ah, I should have done it this way …”. And we do it. We do it now. In one go we change both past and change the course of future.

Noth­ing is determined.

– Zvon­imir Tosic

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 20th, 2009 at 06:04 and is filed under Cursum perficio and tagged with david bohm, Einstein, fred alan wolf, heisenberg, Niels Bohr, observer effect, quantum physics, reality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.