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For every star you can spot out there, there exists about ten times more mass in nonluminous matter, such as gas clouds billowing around in interstellar space. Even more so, for all ordinary matter there exists five times as much mass in “dark matter,” expected to be made of exotic, unknown particles floating across the universe. And finally, there exists three times more “dark energy,” the puzzling fuel that drives the fabric of space-time to expand faster and faster.
It seems bizarre to believe all of this could be connected. It sounds like a fairy tale fabricated by mystics or madmen. Yet the conviction that the universe is all “one” and the experience that it is comprised of many things have been an enduring conflict for humanity since its earliest days. “From all things One and from One all things”: twenty-five hundred years ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus had expressed the thought of an all-encompassing universe in its most radical way.
The One has had such an influence on the world of ideas, on the arts and humanities, that its importance as a scientific concept is often overlooked. Taken at face value though, the hypothesis that “all is One” isn’t a statement about God, spirits, or subjective mental states; it is a statement about nature, about the particles, planets, and stars out there.
But if we take quantum mechanics seriously, this implies that, on the most fundamental level, nature cannot be composed of constituents. The most fundamental description of the universe has to start with the universe itself.
As I will argue in this book, once quantum mechanics is applied to the entire cosmos, it uncovers a three-thousand-year-old idea: that underlying everything we experience there is only one single, all-encompassing thing—that everything else we see around us is some kind of illusion.
Quantum cosmology implies that the fundamental layer of reality is made neither of particles nor of tiny, vibrating, one-dimensional objects known as “strings,” but the universe itself—understood not as the sum of things making it up but rather as an all-encompassing unity.
we will have to work out how such a notion changes our perspective on philosophy’s deepest questions—“What is matter?” “What is space?” “What is time?” “How did the universe come into being?”—and even on what religious people call “God” (since for centuries, the concept of an all-encompassing unity was identified with God).
the American philosopher David Albert accurately summarized, “Everything that has always struck everybody as strange about quantum mechanics can be explained by supposing that the concrete fundamental physical stuff of the world is floating around in something other, and larger, and different, than the familiar 3-dimensional space of our everyday experience.”52 Today we know, for example, that the quantum waves describing elementary particles such as neutrinos oscillate not between different locations but between the different types of neutrinos, a process known as “neutrino oscillations,” the
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The Hollywood movie plot interpretation of cosmic history that we have been using to understand quantum reality has a famous philosophical ancestor. In Republic, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato introduced an allegory describing a group of prisoners who live their entire lives in a cave where they are chained to a wall. All they ever see are the shadows of things created by a fire behind them. For these prisoners, the shadows on the wall seem to constitute reality. Then, one of the prisoners escapes and climbs up to the sunlight. He sees the real nature of things and realizes that
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While it could make sense to assign the projector reality to a divine realm and see cinema operators as godlike creatures for the audience, following von Neumann, the on-screen reality resulting from a measurement is again a vector in Hilbert space that evolves according to Schrödinger’s equation and can—just like the original projector reality itself—again be projected in another measurement. At least the vector representing the projector reality of a specific object is not special when compared to the collapsed object on-screen. What makes the projector reality special then? As we will see,
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Most of the time, Wheeler’s U is understood as an illustration of his credo, “It from Bit”:57 the idea that matter originates from information, that “every particle, every field or force, even the spacetime continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes or no questions, binary choices, bits.”58
If everything we experience is information, what is the “film roll,” the “hardware,” the fundamental fabric of the universe this information is stored on?
In a different place, though, Wheeler provided some clues: “The point is that the universe is a grand synthesis, putting itself together all the time as a whole… It is a totality.”60 He also speculated whether “a comprehensive view of the physical world [would] come not from the bottom up—from an endless tower of turtles standing one on the other—but from a grand pattern linking all of its parts.”61 The Hollywood movie plot interpretation can help to illustrate this point: On-screen, Susan, the paleontologist, and the leopard appear as distinct, individual characters. On the film roll, though,
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In quantum mechanics, all individual objects and all their properties result from the perspective of the observer—as, at least potentially, do matter, time, and space: they don’t really exist on the film but are part of the story experienced as unfolding on-screen. In fact, this view again is strikingly similar to Plato’s philosophy, which assumed that hidden on the most fundamental level there exists only one single object in the universe: the universe itself. Or, in the words of Plato, “The One.”
Wait until this physiciat learns about hypostases.
Quantum weirdness can be boiled down to three concepts utterly alien to our everyday experience: superposition, complementarity, and entanglement.
entanglement is much more than just another weird quantum phenomenon. It is the acting principle behind both why quantum mechanics merges the world into one and why we experience this fundamental unity as many separate objects.
“At the heart of the problem is not so much the question of causality but the question of realism,”
This is from-the-parts realism and not formal realism
Weizsäcker writes, eventually arriving at a radical conclusion: “If there could exist something which can be understood accurately as a quantum mechanical object, it would be the entire Universe.”
As a consequence, “it seems necessary… to give up the idea that the world can correctly be analyzed into distinct parts, and to replace it with the assumption that the entire universe is basically a single, indivisible unit,” as David Bohm wrote in his 1951 textbook Quantum Theory.
Michael York includes “pantheism,” the monistic belief that the universe is one and identical with god, as one of the main characteristic features of pagan theologies, next to “animism” (the belief that nature is animated), polytheism (the worship of many deities), and shamanism.
Little known is that on February 16, 1923, almost exactly four years before Heisenberg discovered the uncertainty principle in Copenhagen, when the British archaeologist Howard Carter opened the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Egyptian Valley of the Kings, thunderstruck by the riches he found, he also encountered one of the earliest manifestations of monism. Next to mummies, the solid-gold coffin, the famous face mask, thrones, chariots, and more than five thousand other artifacts—“everywhere the glint of gold,” as Carter described it30—there was a statue of “Neith,” protecting the pharaoh’s
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As startling as it is, as long as fifty centuries ago the ancient Egyptians knew something very similar to entanglement and actually adhered to the bold belief that everything that ever existed is amalgamated into a hidden One, a single, inaccessible being, symbolized by the veiled goddess Neith, later often identified with her better-known companion in protecting Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus: the mother goddess Isis. According to this view, what we experience as nature is just the cover under which a hidden but looming unified fundamental reality can be surmised.
Such ancient testimonies are usually understood as mythological, with little relevance for modern science, if any at all. Yet, on a closer look, they address the very same problem that occupied John Wheeler: “How is the world, at the deepest level, put together?” What is the ultimate reality? On what foundation should the scientific endeavor be based?
the ancient myths distinguished between an experienced reality, described as “illusion,” “veil,” or “maya,” and a fundamental inaccessible reality referred to as “Brahma,” “Tao,” or “One.”
Why does the Copenhagen interpretation insistently “undervalue the role that the mathematical structure of an empirically successful theory can play in accessing the modal, physical, and metaphysical nature of the universe,” as the American philosopher Nora Berenstain determines?45 Where did this self-restriction of the Copenhagen physicists come from? And how did it transform into a dogma?
When Fritjof Capra interviewed Heisenberg in 1972 for his book The Tao of Physics and inquired about the famous physicist’s thoughts on Eastern philosophy, Heisenberg told Capra, to his great surprise, “not only that he had been well aware of the parallels between quantum physics and Eastern thought, but also that his own scientific work had been influenced, at least at the subconscious level, by Indian philosophy.”
On closer inspection it appears quite likely that the motivation of the Copenhagen physicists for discarding the quantum realm as “unreal” was triggered not exclusively by the fact that it wasn’t observable and at least as much by what it was: an all-encompassing unity, a concept that historically had been associated with religion and often had been identified with God. Even more so, it was one of the core concerns of Christian theology for two thousand years to make absolutely sure that such a concept wouldn’t be considered part of nature, that there existed a sharp distinction between God
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it is revealing that in many conversations in which Heisenberg recollects discussing with Bohr the deeper meaning of complementarity, the conversation soon digressed into an argument about the relationship of science and religion.
Heisenberg’s friend Wolfgang Pauli considered rational scientific thinking and irrational mystical experience as “complementary” approaches to insight,
Instead of realizing that the monism embraced in ancient philosophies is indeed a crucial concept for modern physics, the Copenhagen physicists reclassified the foundation of physics as religion.
young mathematician and philosopher Grete Hermann. Hermann was an early critic of the Copenhagen gospel who anticipated much of what would later become integral parts of a more justified and coherent interpretation of the reality quantum mechanics entails. But she was disadvantaged as a woman, a scientific outsider, and a conscientious person in savage times.
In a move that would never have occurred to Bohr, she decided to take the film-roll reality seriously and even adopted it as “nature,” as more fundamental than the daily-life, on-screen reality. In doing so, Hermann made an important observation. She realized that the apparent causality violation experienced in quantum processes was nothing but an artifact of the on-screen reality: “Quantum mechanics has therefore not contradicted the law of causality at all, but has clarified it and has removed from it other principles which are not necessarily connected to it.”68 As von Neumann had already
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if quantum observations are relative to the specific outcome of the measurement, and if there are many such possible outcomes, this implies that there are many possible observations and observers.
Misner, who used this occasion to introduce the term “quantum cosmology” into the physics lexicon.
What is typically overlooked in this picture is that Everett’s multiverse is not fundamental but rather apparent or “emergent,” as philosopher David Wallace at the University of Southern California insists.68 From a fundamental perspective, rather than splitting the universe apart, Everett’s formalism allows application of quantum mechanics to the entire universe and thereby enables entanglement to merge the universe into an all-encompassing “One.” Everett put this point straight, when asked about it in 1977 by the young French physicist Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond: “The question is one of
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“To me, the deep meaning of Everett’s ideas is not the coexistence of many worlds, but on the contrary, the existence of a single quantum one,” Lévy-Leblond writes in summarizing his criticism of how Everett’s interpretation is usually characterized.
the fundamental single quantum universe not only alleviates the purported problem of Everett’s interpretation featuring a “heavy load of metaphysical baggage” (as Wheeler complained) but totally invalidates this criticism as such a fundamental reality isn’t only a single universe but a single unique entity comprising matter, space, and time as well as all potentially possible events and situations. Not only is there just a single world, but this single world is all there is! Little known as it is, this consequence of his theory may turn out to be Everett’s paramount legacy. As Wojciech Zurek
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It was this conception of the universe as a gargantuan atomic nucleus that inspired Zeh to ask a pivotal question: What would such a nucleus look like from the perspective of the protons and neutrons, the particles comprising it? How, in other words, would the quantum universe be experienced by the observer within? Eventually, these questions led Zeh to discover the solution to the measurement problem and the phenomenon that would later be called decoherence.
Zeh titled a 1993 paper “There Are No Quantum Jumps, nor Are There Particles!”88 In his review “The Strange (Hi)story of Particles and Waves,” which he constantly updated, with twenty-three versions between 2013 and his death in 2018, he further affirmed, “The particle concept was recognized as a delusion.”
basic idea behind this notion is that matter—or, more specifically, particles—is not fundamental; it is “emergent,” as philosophers describe the nature of concepts that are useful for practical purposes but do not exist on a closer look, such as, for example, “temperature,” which boils down to the average energy of atoms or molecules from a microscopic perspective.
According to Zeh and Joos, what looks like matter emerges via decoherence from the quantum mechanical wave.
Zeh emphasized that for him “the most important fruit of decoherence (that is, of a universal entanglement) is the fact that no classical concepts are required any more on a fundamental level.”94 Zeh further demonstrated why Everett’s universal wave function could look as though there actually were particles. In other words, Zeh explained how, if all is One, One still can appear as many things.
decoherence allows the observer to experience things that are not really existent, as a consequence of his limited information about the whole.
The characters, objects, and stories we experience by watching the screen are a consequence of us not seeing all the light emitted from the lightbulb.
Just like decoherence, a colored lens, a shadow puppet, a painted slide, or a film roll seemingly creates information by actually filtering out information. In all these cases, it is our ignorance that constitutes our experience.
“The only object that can truly exist is the quantum state of the entire universe,” Zeh concluded as early as 1967.97
