On the Spirituality of Physics: Two

Twentieth century physics represents a profound turning point in the history of science. It marks the time when we as a culture had to leave behind the comfortable world of common sense, where physics agreed with and supported what “we all know” about the world.

Three major ideas birthed during the early part of the century illustrate this profound new conception of the world. These ideas are:

Image by Jackie Ramirez from Pixabay

• Special Relativity

• General Relativity

• Quantum Physics

Special relativity, credited to Albert Einstein, shows us that time and space are not just abstract ideas… they are entities with their own dynamics. That is, they expand and contract according to the relative motion of the observer and the observed.

General relativity, Einstein again, shows us that gravity is not a force. It is rather the interaction between a mass, or massive body, and a field we call the gravitational field. Einstein predicted that this field would support waves, a prediction that was borne out early in this century.

Bohr

Quantum physics, due to Bohr and many others, shows us that the world is not at all as we conceptualize it, and that the externality and persistence of the world we humans perceive is an illusion.

To get at what I call the spirituality of physics, we will consider the story that is called quantum theory.

Quantum theory is a probablistic explanation of the subatomic realm, allowing us to predict with unequaled accuracy the probable results of any experiment to be performed in the future involving the behavior of the physical world at its smallest scale, the scale of atoms and subatomic particles.

Quantum theory does not describe the “external” physical world. It describes the likely result of any experiment performed on the world at this small scale. It is vital to realize that these two things are not the same! Quantum theory explicitly invokes the observer, the one conducting the experiment… and that’s you and me!

Once quantum theory was established as a reliable theory, it was noticed that certain quantum systems remain correlated even when their components are then separated by a great distance. These systems, even when separated by enormous distances, behave as one system. A measurement of one part of that system instantly measures that same aspect of the other, distant part. This phenomenon is called entanglement. Let’s see why quantum entanglement leads us to the spirituality of physics.

One of the foundational principles of modern physics is that the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit in the physical universe. This speed limit applies to objects in relation to an observer, and it applies to the transmission of information between observers. However, at first glance it appears as if this speed limit is violated by entanglement. If an observation of one part of an entangled system instantly determines the results of a measurements of the other, distant part, that would seem to allow information to flow between those two parts at a speed which is essentially infinite.

Either the speed of light is not the ultimate speed limit in the universe, or the idea that those systems are separated in space is somehow untenable.

Quantum entanglement implies that the universe is not “locally real” and its demonstration was the basis of the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics. “Real” means that objects have definite properties independent of observation. And “Local” means objects can only be influenced by  their surroundings and such influence can’t travel faster than light. This is the principle of non-locality.

What does this tell us?

• We think objects have definite properties independent of observation.  This is an illusion.

• We think that objects are separated by distance.  This is an illusion. 

I suggest that the primary lesson we can draw from all this is that our conception of the world we live in is, as a whole, an illusion.

This is why quantum physics is a profoundly spiritual discipline. It demonstrates that the world we experience is dependent on our observation of it and that its independent reality is an illusion. Realizing this truth renders almost all of our strategies for living obsolete. It calls for a whole new approach to the search for who each one of us really is.

More on that next time…