In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

by Sebastian Junger

Nothing in the observable world could be in two places at once—it made no sense—and yet at the subatomic level, that’s exactly what seemed to be happening. It was as if you could prove a schizophrenic delusion with math. Then, over the course of one day and one night, while on vacation at a seaside resort, Werner Heisenberg discovered matrix quantum mechanics. He was twenty-three years old. Heisenberg’s theory proposed that an electron is not a particle that exists at one place at one time the way a person or a chair does; rather, it occupies all positions at once as a statistical probability. When you pin it down by observing it with a detector, the electron freezes in place, and you lose all information about its momentum. When you stop observing it, you regain information about its momentum but lose its location. There was no way to have both. That paradox famously came to be known as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and forced physicists to come to the impossible conclusion that the subatomic world was brought into existence by observation. The act of observing something created the very thing that was being observed—which, until then, had existed only as a set of probabilities called a wave function. Theoretically, Schrödinger’s cat was a massive wave function—both alive and dead—until the box was opened, at which point its wave function collapsed into one outcome or the other. That was happening to all matter all the time, creating the world we live in.