How Quantum Physics could explain Metaphysics

How Quantum Physics could explain Metaphysics

Quantum theory emerged at the start of the twentieth century when scientists began measuring the behaviour of subatomic particles like electrons and protons and were surprised to learn that these particles did not follow the rules of classical physics…

According to classical physics, objective reality comes about according to certain fixed principles. Everything in our world occurs within an unchanging structure of space and time on the basis of unchangeable laws that can be accounted for with unambiguous ideas about reality, causality, continuity, and locality. Classical physics is based on the premise that perceived reality in the physical world equals objective reality…

Quantum physics turned the classical scientific conception of our material, manifest world upside down. New concepts from quantum physics include superposition, complementarity, the uncertainty principle, the measuring problem, and entanglement or nonlocality. All of these concepts relate to the same problem: certain observations cannot be predicted absolutely. Unless a quantum object is observed, it has neither a definitive location in time and space nor any of the fixed properties that classical physics ascribes to objects. Instead, there is a range of possible observations, each with a different possibility. The different possibilities are called probability waves. Light behaves like either a particle or a wave, depending on the experiment design, but never like both at the same time. This phenomenon has been termed complementarity. Particles and waves are complementary aspects of light. What had already been proven for light – that it has both a particle and wave aspect – was found to apply to matter as well. All matter, 99.999 percent of which is emptiness, can ultimately be regarded as a wave function and thus possesses wave – particle complementarity.

Experiments with isolated photons show that a photon sometimes behaves like a wave, which means that it is entangled with itself. Entanglement is a quantum phenomenon whereby spatially separated particles possess properties that are connected beyond time and place. They are linked together so that one object can no longer be adequately described without full mention of its counterpart. This is known as the superposition of wave functions, whereby a wave should no longer be seen as a real wave but as a probability wave, as this quantum phenomenon is called. It means that we can calculate only the probability that a particle will be found in a given location, not where it will actually end up; the range of probable locations is the probability wave. In other words, we can never know a particle’s exact location at the same time as its momentum, which is an indicator of its proper velocity. This is the uncertainty principle of Walter Heisenberg, which posits that observation is impossible without fundamentally altering the observed object. Some quantum physicists champion the radical interpretation that observation itself literally creates physical reality, thereby ascribing consciousness a more fundamental role than matter or energy. I personally support this not-yet-widespread view that consciousness could determine if and how we experience (subjective) reality.

One of the most important principles of quantum physics is that two isolated, remote particles an have an instantaneous effect on one another because these two remote objects can become entangled. This is known as nonlocality and has given rise to the quantum physics concept of nonlocal space: a multidimensional space, with nothing but possibilities, also known as probability waves, and without certainties, without matter, and without a role for time and distance. Everything in this space is uncertain, and physicists can carry out neither measurements nor observations. The nonlocal space represents a hidden reality that, at the quantum level, exerts a continuous influence on our physical world, which is the complement of nonlocal space.

Consciousness Beyond Life,

Pim Van Lommel M.D.