Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics

by Nick Herbert

that in spite of its obvious partitions and boundaries, the world in actuality is a seamless and inseparable whole—

“The observer appears, as a necessary part of the whole structure, and in his full capacity as a conscious being. The separation of the world into an ‘objective outside reality’ and ‘us,’ the self-conscious onlookers, can no longer be maintained. Object and subject have become inseparable from each other.”

David Bohm

“One is led to a new notion of unbroken wholeness which denies the classical analyzability of the world into separately and independently existing parts … The inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality.”

Quantum wholeness, on the other hand, is a fundamentally new kind of togetherness, undiminished by spatial and temporal separation.

Everett’s many-worlds picture has gained considerable support among quantum theorists. Everett’s proposal is particularly attractive to theorists because it resolves, as we shall see, the major unsolved puzzle in quantum theory—the notorious quantum measurement problem.

Quantum Reality #5: Quantum logic

George Boole, an Irish schoolteacher, reduced logical statements to simple arithmetic by inventing an artificial symbolic language which laid bare the logical bones of ordinary language.

The question of the world’s true geometry is not settled by common sense but by experiment. Likewise with logic. For the rules of right reason, look not inside your own head but get thee to a laboratory.

Quantum Reality #6: Neorealism

“I still believe in the possibility of a model of reality—that is, of a theory which represents things themselves and not merely the probability of their occurrence.”

Quantum Reality #7 (Consciousness creates reality.)

Denis Postle examines reality-creating consciousness in Fabric of the Universe.

John von Neumann.

quantum theory into an elegant mathematical home called “Hilbert space”

Die Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik.

Von Neumann posed, but did not solve to everyone’s satisfaction, the famous quantum measurement problem which is the central issue of the quantum reality question.

The quantum world, on the other hand, is not a world of actual events like our own but a world full of numerous unrealized tendencies for action. These tendencies are continually on the move, growing, merging, and dying according to exact laws of motion discovered by Schrödinger and his colleagues. But despite all this activity nothing ever actually happens there. Everything remains strictly in the realm of possibility.

“There may be no such thing as the ‘glittering central mechanism of the universe’ to be seen behind a glass wall at the end of the trail. Not machinery but magic may be the better description of the treasure that is waiting.”

Field laws describe how each field depends on its material source and how it spreads itself through space.

Newton discovered physics’ first field law—the inverse square behavior of the gravity field.

Maxwell’s laws were full of surprises. For instance, electricity and magnetism turned out to be not two separate fields but different aspects of a single electromagnetic field. Maxwell’s field laws also unexpectedly solved one of physics’ long-standing mysteries: the intrinsic nature of light.

How fast these waves move depends entirely on two electromagnetic facts: the force between two magnets and the force between two electric charges.

Maxwell figured how fast a wave of electromagnetism must travel. His calculated speed was identical to the measured speed of light. Maxwell conjectured that light was actually an electromagnetic wave of extremely high frequency.

Light is a wave motion in the electromagnetic field.

Planck’s constant h would later be called the “quantum of action” because it has the dimensions of energy times time, a quantity known as “action” in classical physics.

Einstein’s first paper explained the photoelectric effect—light’s ability to knock electrons out of metal—using Max Planck’s new quantum of action.

Einstein’s theory does not challenge classical physics but completes it.

Einstein explained these strange facts about light “waves” by a single assumption. Light behaves like a shower of particles, he said, each with energy E given by Planck’s expression: E = hf where f is the light’s frequency and h is Planck’s constant of action—the particular value Planck had to insert to calculate black-body glow correctly.

Einstein nonetheless demonstrated that when light interacts with metals it resembles a shower of particles divided into “coins of energy.” Taken together these experiments indicate that, in some manner not easy to visualize, light acts in certain situations as a wave, in others as particles.

1. A wave can spread out over an enormous area, while a particle is confined to a tiny region.

2. A wave is easily split in an infinite variety of ways, some parts going in one direction, some another, while a particle’s travel is confined to a single direction.

3. Two waves can interpenetrate like ghosts and emerge unchanged where particl...

His experiment showed that light behaves precisely like a little particle bouncing off the electron, provided that you assign this light particle a momentum p according to the quantum rule: p = hk where k is the light’s spatial frequency—the number of wavelengths that fit into one centimeter—and h is Planck’s constant of action.

de Broglie contended that each particle of matter was associated with a wave whose temporal and spatial frequencies f and k were given by the Planck-Einstein recipe E = hf and the Compton relation p = hk where E and p are the particle’s energy and momentum.

Classical physics built its world out of two kinds of entity: matter and field (also known as particle and wave).

Planck, Einstein, and Compton showed that waves (at least light waves) were also particles. Now de Broglie was saying that particles are also waves. New quantum facts destroy the once sharp distinction between matter and field.

With two magic quantum phrases we can translate at will between the particle quantities energy and momentum (E and p) and the wave quantities temporal and spatial frequency (f and k), turning matter into field and vice versa. It’s beginning to look as if everything is made of one substance—call it “quantumstuff”...

We now believe the world to be All Quantumstuff.

For if quantumstuff is all there is and you don’t understand quantumstuff, your ignorance is complete.

French physicist Oliver Costa de Beauregard calls the quarter century from Planck’s discovery of the quantum of action (1900) to Heisenberg’s formulation of matrix mechanics (1925) the Era Paléoquantique or Quantum Stone Age.

Heisenberg in his island retreat suddenly put it all together and came up with matrix mechanics—the world’s first quantum theory.

1. some mathematical quantity that stands for quantumstuff;

2. a law that describes how this quantity goes through its changes;

3. a rule of correspondence that tells how to translate the theory’s symbols into...

Quantum Theo...

Quantum Theory #2:

Schrödinger represented quantumstuff as a wave form and wrote the quantum laws of motion (Schrödinger’s equation) such a wave form must obey. At first Schrödinger believed his waves to be classical waves

Dirac symbolized quantumstuff as an arrow (or vector) pointing in a certain direction in an abstract space of many dimensions. Motion of quantumstuff corresponds to rotation of that arrow.

In my opinion Bohr was more than a pragmatist. He made definite statements about the absence of a reality beneath quantum theory based not on a distaste for philosophy but using arguments drawn from the particular structure of quantum theory itself. All theories are pragmatic; some theories have a reality underneath. However, quantum theory is not a theory of this type, Bohr contends. As long as it keeps the form discovered by Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Dirac, quantum theory will never be susceptible of reinterpretation in terms of a deeper reality.