What Really Happens In Schrödinger's Box

Left to right: Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, Richard Feynman. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In 1909, Ernest Rutherford, Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden took a piece of radium and used it to fire charged particles at a sheet of gold foil. They wanted to test the then-dominant theory that atoms were simply clusters of electrons floating in little seas of positive electrical charge (the so-called ‘plum pudding’ model). What came next, said Rutherford, was ‘the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life’.

Despite the airy thinness of the foil, a small fraction of the particles bounced straight back at the source – a result, Rutherford noted, ‘as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you’. Instead of whooshing straight through the thin soup of electrons that should have been all that hovered in their path, the particles had encountered something solid enough to push back. Something was wrong with matter. Somewhere, reality had departed from the best available model. But where?

The first big insight came from Rutherford himself. He realised that, if the structure of the atom were to permit collisions of the magnitude that his team had observed, its mass must be concentrated in a central nucleus, with electrons whirling around it. Could such a structure be stable? Why didn’t the electrons just spiral into the centre, leaking electromagnetic radiation as they fell?

Such concerns prompted the Danish physicist Niels Bohr to formulate a rather oddly rigid model of the atom, using artificial-seeming rules about electron orbits and energy levels to keep everything in order. It was ugly but it seemed to work. Then, in 1924, a French aristocrat and physicist named Louis de Broglie argued that Bohr’s model would make more sense if we assumed that the electrons orbiting the atomic nucleus (and indeed everything else that had hitherto been considered a particle) either came with, or in some sense could behave like, waves.

If Bohr’s atom had seemed a little arbitrary, de Broglie’s improved version was almost incomprehensible. Physical theory might have recovered some grip on reality but it seemed to have decisively parted company from common sense. And yet, as Albert Einstein said on reading de Broglie’s thesis, here was ‘the first feeble ray of light on this worst of our physics enigmas’. By 1926, these disparate intuitions and partial models were already unified into a new mathematical theory called quantum mechanics. Within a few years, the implications for chemistry, spectroscopy and nuclear physics were being confirmed.

It was clear from the start that quantum theory challenged all our previous preconceptions about the nature of matter and how it behaves, and indeed about what science can possibly – even in principle – say about these questions. Over the years, this very slipperiness has made it irresistible to hucksters of various descriptions. I regularly receive ads offering to teach me how to make quantum jumps into alternate universes, tap into my infinite quantum self-energy, and make other exciting-sounding excursions from the plane of reason and meaning. It’s worth stressing, then, that the theory itself is both mathematically precise and extremely well confirmed by experiment.

Quantum mechanics has correctly predicted the outcomes of a vast range of investigations, from the scattering of X-rays by crystals to the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. It successfully explains a vast range of natural phenomena, including the structure of atoms and molecules, nuclear fission and fusion, the way light interacts with matter, how stars evolve and shine, and how the elements forming the world around us were originally created.

Yet it puzzled many of its founders, including Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger, and it continues to puzzle physicists today. Einstein in particular never quite accepted it. ‘It seems hard to sneak a look at God’s cards,’ he wrote to a colleague, ‘but that he plays dice and uses “telepathic” methods (as the present quantum theory requires of him) is something that I cannot believe for a single moment.’ In a 1935 paper co-written with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, Einstein asked: ‘Can [the] Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?’ He concluded that it could not. Given apparently sensible demands on what a description of physical reality must entail, it seemed that something must be missing. We needed a deeper theory to understand physical reality fully.

Einstein never found the deeper theory he sought. Indeed, later theoretical work by the Irish physicist John Bell and subsequent experiments suggested that the apparently reasonable demands of that 1935 paper could never be satisfied. Had Einstein lived to see this work, he would surely have agreed that his own search for a deeper theory of reality needed to follow a different path from the one he sketched in 1935.

Even so, I believe that Einstein would have remained convinced that a deeper theory was needed. None of the ways we have so far found of looking at quantum theory are entirely believable. In fact, it’s worse than that. To be ruthlessly honest, none of them even quite makes sense. But that might be about to change.


Here’s the basic problem. While the mathematics of quantum theory works very well in telling us what to expect at the end of an experiment, it seems peculiarly conceptually confusing when we try to understand what was happening during the experiment. To calculate what outcomes we might expect when we fire protons at one another in the Large Hadron Collider, we need to analyse what – at first sight – look like many different stories. The same final set of particles detected after a collision might have been generated by lots of different possible sequences of energy exchanges involving lots of different possible collections of particles. We can’t tell which particles were involved from the final set of detected particles.

Now, if the trouble was only that we have a list of possible ways that things could have gone in a given experiment and we can’t tell which way they actually went just by looking at the results, that wouldn’t be so puzzling. If you find some flowers at your front door and you’re not sure which of your friends left them there, you don’t start worrying that there are inconsistencies in your understanding of physical reality. You just reason that, of all the people who could have brought them, one of them presumably did. You don’t have a logical or conceptual problem, just a patchy record of events.


If you think this doesn’t make any sense, that there has to be something missing, well, that’s how many thoughtful physicists feel


Quantum theory isn’t like this, as far as we presently understand it. We don’t get a list of possible explanations for what happened, of which one (although we don’t know which) must be the correct one. We get a mathematical recipe that tells us to combine, in an elegant but conceptually mysterious way, numbers attached to each possible explanation. Then we use the result of this calculation to work out the likelihood of any given final result. But here’s the twist. Unlike the mathematical theory of probability, this quantum recipe requires us to make different possible stories cancel each other out, or fully or partially reinforce each other. This means that the net chance of an outcome arising from several possible stories can be more or less than the sum of the chances associated with each.
To get a sense of the conceptual mystery we face here, imagine you have three friends, John, Mary and Jo, who absolutely never talk to each other or interact in any other way. If any one of them is in town, there’s a one-in-four chance that this person will bring you flowers on any given day. (They’re generous and affectionate friends. They’re also entirely random and spontaneous – nothing about the particular choice of day affects the chance they might bring you flowers.) But if John and Mary are both in town, you know there’s no chance you’ll get any flowers that day – even though they never interact, so neither of them should have any idea whether the other one is around. And if Mary and Jo are both in town, you’ll certainly get exactly one bunch of flowers – again, even though Mary and Jo never interact either, and you’d have thought that if they’re acting independently, your chance of getting any flowers is a bit less than a half, while once in a while you should get two bunches.

If you think this doesn’t make any sense, that there has to be something missing from this flower delivery fable, well, that’s how many thoughtful physicists feel about quantum theory and our understanding of nature. Pretty precisely analogous things happen in quantum experiments.


One attempt to make sense of this situation – the so-called ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of quantum theory, versions of which were advocated by Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and other leading quantum theorists in the first half of the last century – claims that quantum theory is teaching us something profound and final about the limits of what science can tell us. According to this approach, a scientific question makes sense only if we have a direct way of verifying the answer. So, asking what we’ll see in our particle detectors is a scientific question; asking what happened in the experiment before anything registered in our detectors isn’t, because we weren’t looking. To be looking, we’d have had to put detectors in the middle of the experiment, and then it would have been a different experiment. In trying to highlight the absurd-seeming consequences of this view, Schrödinger minted what has become its best-known popular icon – an imaginary experiment with a sealed box containing a cat that is simultaneously alive and dead, only resolving into one or other definite state when an experimenter opens the box.

The Copenhagen interpretation was very much in line with the scientific philosophy of logical positivism that caught on at around the same time. In particular, it rests on something like logical positivism’s principle of verification, according to which a scientific statement is meaningful only if we have some means of verifying its truth. To some of the founders of quantum theory, as well as to later adherents of the Copenhagen interpretation, this came to seem an almost self-evident description of the scientific process. Even after philosophers largely abandoned logical positivism – not least because the principle of verification fails its own test for meaningful statements – many physicists trained in the Copenhagen tradition insisted that their stance was no more than common sense.

However, its consequences are far from commonsensical. If you take this position seriously, then you have to accept that the Higgs boson wasn’t actually discovered at the Large Hadron Collider, since no one has ever directly detected a Higgs boson, and we have no direct evidence to support the claim that the Higgs boson is a real particle. Insofar as we learnt anything about nature from the Large Hadron Collider, it was merely what sort of records you get in your detectors when you build something like the Large Hadron Collider. It’s hard to imagine the scientists who work on it, or the citizens who funded them, being very enthusiastic about this justification, but on a strict Copenhagen view it’s the best we can do.

It gets worse. Quantum theory is supposed to describe the behaviour of elementary particles, atoms, molecules and every other form of matter in the universe. This includes us, our planet and, of course, the Large Hadron Collider. In that sense, everything since the Big Bang has been one giant quantum experiment, in which all the particles in the universe, including those we think of as making up the Earth and our own bodies, are involved. But if theory tells us we’re among the sets of particles involved a giant quantum experiment, the position I’ve just outlined tells us we can’t justify any statement about what has happened or is happening until the experiment is over. Only at the end, when we might perhaps imagine some technologically advanced alien experimenters in the future looking at the final state of the universe, can any meaningful statement be made.



Of course, this final observation will never happen. By definition, no one is sitting outside the universe waiting to observe the final outcome at the end of time. And even if the idea of observers waiting outside the universe made sense – which it doesn’t – on this view their final observations still wouldn’t allow them to say anything about what happened between the Big Bang and the end of time. We end up concluding that quantum theory doesn’t allow us to justify making any scientific statement at all about the past, present or future. Our most fundamental scientific theory turns out to be a threat to the whole enterprise of science. For these and related reasons, the Copenhagen interpretation gradually fell out of general favour.

Its great rival was first set out in a 1957 paper and Princeton PhD thesis written by one of the stranger figures in the history of 20th-century physics, Hugh Everett III. Rather unromantically, and very unusually for a highly original thinker and talented physicist, Everett abandoned theoretical physics after he had published his big idea. A good deal of his subsequent career was spent in military consultancy, advising the US on strategies for fighting and ‘winning’ a nuclear war against the USSR, and the bleakness of this chosen path presumably contributed to his chain-smoking, alcoholism and depression. Everett died of a heart attack at the age of 51; possibly we can infer something of his own ultimate assessment of his life’s worth from the fact that he instructed his wife to throw his ashes in the trash. And yet, despite his detachment from academic life (some might say from all of life), Everett’s PhD work eventually became enormously influential.

One way of thinking about his ideas on quantum theory is that our difficulties in getting a description of quantum reality arise from a tension between the mathematics – which, as we have seen, tells us to make calculations involving many different possible stories about what might have really happened – and the apparently incontrovertible fact that, at the end of an experiment, we see that only one thing actually did happen. This led Everett to ask a question that seems at first sight stupid, but which turns out to be very deep: how do we know that we only get one outcome to a quantum experiment? What if we take the hint from the mathematics and consider a picture of reality in which many different things actually do happen – everything, in fact, that quantum theory allows? And what if we take this to its logical conclusion and accept the same view of cosmology, so that all the different possible histories of the evolution of the universe are realised? We end up, Everett argued, with what became known as a ‘many worlds’ picture of reality, one in which it is constantly forming new branches describing alternative – but equally real – future continuations of the same present state.

On this view, every time any of us does a quantum experiment with several possible outcomes, all those outcomes are enacted in different branches of reality, each of which contains a copy of our self whose memories are identical up to the start of experiment, but each of whom sees different results. None of these future selves has any special claim to be the real one. They are all equally real – genuine but distinct successors of the person who started the experiment. The same picture holds true more generally in cosmology: alongside the reality we currently habit, there are many others in which the history of the universe and our planet was ever so slightly different, many more in which humanity exists on Earth but the course of human history was significantly different from ours, and many more still in which nothing resembling Earth or its inhabitants can be found.


On another paper addressing the same issue, Everett’s comment was the single word ‘bullshit’

This might sound like unbelievable science fiction. To such a gibe, Everett and his followers would reply that science has taught us many things that seemed incredible at first. Other critics object that the ‘many worlds’ scenario seems like an absurdly extravagant and inelegant hypothesis. Trying to explain the appearance of one visible reality by positing an infinite collection of invisible ones might seem the most deserving candidate in the history of science for a sharp encounter with Occam’s razor. But to this, too, Everettians have an answer: given the mathematics of quantum theory, on which everyone agrees, their proposal is actually the simplest option. The many worlds are there in the equations. To eliminate them you have to add something new, or else change them – and we don’t have any experimental evidence telling us that something should be added or that the equations need changing.
Everettians might have a point, then, when they argue that their ideas deserve a hearing. The problem is that, from Everett and his early followers onwards, they have never managed to agree on a clear story about how exactly this picture of branching worlds is supposed to emerge from the fundamental equations of quantum theory, and how this single world that we see, with experimental outcomes that are apparently random but which follow definite statistical laws, might then be explained. One of the blackly funny revelations in Peter Byrne’s biography The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III (2010) was the discovery of Everett’s personal copy of the classic text The Many‑Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, put together in 1973 by the distinguished American physicist Bryce DeWitt and a few of Everett’s other early supporters. To DeWitt’s mild criticism that ‘Everett’s original derivation [of probabilities]… is rather too brief to be entirely satisfying’, Everett scribbled in the margins ‘Only to you!’ and ‘Goddamit [sic] you don’t see it’. On another paper addressing the same issue, his comment was the single word ‘bullshit’. Although generally in more civil terms, Everettians have continued to argue over this and related points ever since.

Indeed, the big unresolved, and seemingly unsolvable, problem here is how statistical laws can possibly emerge at all when the Everettian meta-picture of branching worlds has no randomness in it. If we do an experiment with an uncertain outcome, Everett’s proposal says that everything that could possibly happen (including the very unlikely outcomes) will in fact take place. It’s possible that Everettians can sketch some explanation of why it seems to ‘us’ (really, to any one of our many future successors) that ‘we’ see only one outcome. But that only replaces ‘everything will actually happen’ with ‘anything could seem to happen to us’ – which is still neither a quantitative nor a falsifiable scientific statement. To do science, we need to able to test statements such as ‘there’s a one-in-three chance X will happen to us’ and ‘it’s incredibly unlikely that Y will happen to us’ – but it isn’t at all obvious that Everett’s ideas support any such statements.

Everettians continue to devote much ingenuity to deriving statements involving probabilities from the underlying deterministic many-worlds picture. One idea lately advocated by David Deutsch and David Wallace of the University of Oxford is to try to use decision theory, the area of mathematics that concerns rational decision-making, to explain how rational people should behave if they believe they are in a branching universe. Deutsch and Wallace start from a few purportedly simple and natural technical assumptions about the preferences one should have in a branching world and then claim to show that rational Everettians should behave as though they were in an uncertain probabilistic world following the statistical laws of quantum theory, even though they believe their true situation is very different.

One problem with this line of thought is that the assumptions turn out not to seem especially natural, or even properly defined, on close inspection. The easiest way to understand this is to look for rationally defensible strategies for life in a branching universe other than the ones Deutsch and Wallace advocate. One example I rather like (because it makes the point succinctly, not because it seems morally attractive) is that of future self elitism, which counsels us to focus only on the welfare of our most fortunate and successful future successor, perhaps on the premise that our best possible future self is our truest self. Future self elitists don’t worry about the odds of a particular bet, only about the best possible payoff. Thus they violate Deutsch and Wallace’s axioms, but it is hard to see any purely logical argument against their decisions.

Another issue is that, as several critics have pointed out, whatever one thinks of Deutsch and Wallace’s proposed rational strategy, it answers a subtly different question to the one that Everettians were supposed to be addressing. The question ‘What bets should I be happy to place on the outcomes of a given experiment, given that I believe in Everettian many-worlds?’ is certainly a question that relates something we normally try to answer using probabilities with the many-worlds picture. In that sense, it makes some sort of connection between probabilities and many worlds – and since we’ve seen how hard that is to achieve, it’s easy to understand why Everettians (at least initially) are enthusiastic about this accomplishment. But, unfortunately, it’s not the sort of connection we need. The key scientific question is why the experimental evidence for quantum theory justifies a belief in many worlds in the first place. Many Everettians – from Everett and DeWitt onwards – have tried to give a satisfactory answer to this. Many critics (myself included) appreciate the cunning of their attempts but think they have all failed.


If we cannot get a coherent story about physical reality from the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory and we cannot get a scientifically adequate one from many-worlds theory, where do we turn? We could, as some physicists suggest, simply give up on the hope of finding any description of an objective external reality. But it is very hard to see how to do this without also giving up on science. The hypothesis that our universe began from something like a Big Bang, our account of the evolution of galaxies and stars, the formation of the elements and of planets and all of chemistry, biology, physics, archaeology, palaeontology and indeed human history – all rely on propositions about real observer-independent facts and events. Once we assume the existence of an external world that changes over time, these interrelated propositions form a logically coherent set; chemistry depends on cosmology, evolution on chemistry, history on evolution and so on. Without that assumption, it is very hard to see how one might make sense of any of these disciplines, let alone see a unifying picture that underlies them all and explains their deep interrelations and mutual dependence.

If we can’t allow the statement that dinosaurs really walked the Earth, what meaningful content could biology, palaeontology or Darwinian evolution actually have? It’s even harder to understand why the statement seems to give such a concise explanation of many things we’ve noticed about the world, from the fossil record to (we think) the present existence of birds, if it’s actually just a meaningless fiction. Similarly, if we can’t say that water molecules really contain one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms – or at least that something about reality that supports this model – then what, if anything, is chemistry telling us?

Physics poses many puzzles, and the focus of the physics community shifts over time. Most theoretical physicists today do not work on this question about what really happens in quantum experiments. Among those who think about it at all, many hope that we can find a way of thinking about quantum theory in which reality somehow evaporates or never arises. That seems like wishful thinking to me.

The alternative, as John Bell recognised earlier and more clearly than almost all of his contemporaries, is to accept that quantum theory cannot be a complete fundamental theory of nature. (As mentioned above, Einstein also believed this, though at least partly because of arguments that Bell was instrumental in refuting.)


we need to supplement our quantum equations with quantities that correspond directly to real events or things – real ‘stuff’ in the world

Bell was one of the last century’s deepest thinkers about science. As he put it, quantum theory ‘carries in itself the seeds of its own destruction’: it undermines the account of reality that it needs in order to make any sense as a physical theory. On this view, which was once as close to heresy as a scientific argument can be but is now widely held among scientists who work on the foundations of physics, the reality problem is just not solvable within quantum theory as it stands. And so, along with the variables that describe potentialities and possibilities, we need to supplement our quantum equations with quantities that correspond directly to real events or things – real ‘stuff’ in the world.
Bell coined the term beables to refer to these elusive missing ingredients. ‘Beable’ is an ugly word but a useful concept. It denotes variables that are able to ‘be’ in the world – hence the name. And indeed it turns out that we can extend quantum theory to include beables that would directly describe the sort of reality we actually see. Some of the most interesting work in fundamental physics in the past few decades has been in the search for new theories that agree with quantum theory in its predictions to date, but which include a beable description of reality, and so give us a profoundly different fundamental picture of the world.

What sort of quantities might do the trick? One early idea comes from Louis de Broglie, whom we met earlier, and David Bohm, an American theoretical physicist who fled McCarthyite persecution and spent most of his career at the University of London. The essence of their proposal is that, in addition to the mathematical quantities given to us by quantum theory, we also have equations defining a definite path through space and time for each elementary particle in nature. These paths are determined by the initial state of the universe and, in this sense, de Broglie-Bohm theory can be thought of as a deterministic theory, rather like the pre-quantum theories given by Newton’s and Maxwell’s equations. Unfortunately, de Broglie and Bohm’s equations also share another property of Newton’s equations: an action at any point in space has instantaneous effects on particles at arbitrarily distant points.

Because these effects would not be directly detectable, this would not actually allow us to send signals faster than light, and so it does not lead to observations that contradict Einstein’s special theory of relativity. It does, however, very much violate its spirit, as well as the beautiful symmetry principles incorporated in the underlying mathematics. For this reason, and also because de Broglie and Bohm’s ideas work well for particles but are hard to generalise to electromagnetic and other fields, it seems impossible to find a version of the scheme that is consistent with much of modern theoretical physics. Still, de Broglie and Bohm’s great achievement was to show that we can find a mathematically consistent description of reality alongside quantum theory. When it first emerged, their work was largely unappreciated, but it led to many of Bell’s insights into the quantum reality problem and blazed a trail for later theorists.


In the 1980s, a much more promising avenue opened up, thanks to the efforts of Giancarlo Ghirardi, Alberto Rimini, Tullio Weber and Philip Pearle, three European theorists and an American. Their approach became known as the ‘spontaneous collapse’ model and their brilliant insight was that we can find mathematical laws that describe how the innumerable possible outcomes encoded in a quantum description of an experiment get reduced to the one actual result that we see. As we have already noted, the tension between these two descriptions is at the heart of the quantum reality problem.

When using standard quantum theory, physicists often say that the wave function – a mathematical object that encodes all the potential possibilities – ‘collapses’ to the measured outcome at the end of an experiment. This ‘collapse’, though, is no more than a figure of speech, which only highlights the awkward fact that we do not understand what is really happening. By contrast, in Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber-Pearle models, collapse becomes a well-defined mathematical and physical process, taking place at definite points in space, following precise equations and going on all the time in the world around us, whether or not we are making measurements. According to these new equations, the more particles there are in a physical system, the faster the collapse rate. Left isolated, a single electron will collapse so rarely that we essentially never see any effect. On the other hand, anything large enough to be visible – even a dust grain – has enough particles in it that it collapses very quickly compared to human perception times. (In Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, the cat’s quantum state would resolve in next to no time, leaving us with either a live cat or a dead one, not some strange quantum combination of both.)

One way of thinking about reality in these models, first suggested by Bell, is to take the beables to be the points in space and time at which the collapses take place. On this view, a dust grain is actually a little galaxy of collapse points, winking instantaneously in and out of existence within or near to (what we normally think of as) the small region of space that it occupies. Everything else we see around us, including our selves, has the same sort of pointillistic character.

Collapse models do not make exactly the same predictions as quantum theory, which could turn out to be either a strength or a weakness. Since quantum theory is very well confirmed, this disagreement might seem to rule these new models out. However, the exact rate of collapses per particle is a free parameter that is not fixed by the mathematics of the basic proposal. It is perfectly possible to tailor this value such that the differences between collapse model predictions and those of quantum theory are so tiny that no experiment to date would have detected it, and at the same time large enough that the models give a satisfactory solution to the reality problem (ie, everything that seems definite and real to us actually is real and definite).

That said, we presently have no theoretically good reason why the parameter should be in the range that allows this explanation to work. It might seem a little conspiratorial of nature to give us the impression that quantum theory is correct, while tuning the equations so that the crucial features that give rise to a definite physical reality are – with present technology – essentially undetectable. On the other hand, history tells us that deep physical insights, not least quantum theory itself, have often come to light only when technology advances sufficiently. The first evidence for what turns out to be a revolutionary change in our understanding of nature can often be a tiny difference between what current theory predicts and what is observed in some crucial experiment.


Like every previous theory of physics, quantum theory will turn out only approximately true, applying within a limited domain only

There are other theoretical problems with collapse models. Although they do not seem to conflict with special relativity or with field theories in the way that de Broglie-Bohm theory does, incorporating the collapse idea into these fundamental theories nevertheless poses formidable technical problems. Even on an optimistic view, the results in this direction to date represent work in progress rather than a fully satisfactory solution. Another worry for theorists in a subject where elegance seems to be a surprisingly strong indicator of physical relevance is that the mathematics of collapse seems a little ad hoc and utilitarian. To be fair, it is considerably less ugly than the de Broglie-Bohm theories, which to a purist’s eye more closely resemble a Heath Robinson contraption than the elegant machinery we have come to expect of the laws of physics. But compared with the extraordinary depth and beauty of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, or of quantum theory itself, collapse models disappoint.
This could simply mean that we have not properly understood them, or not yet seen the majestic deeper theory of which they form a part. It seems likelier, though, that collapse models are at best only a step in roughly the right direction. I suspect that, like de Broglie-Bohm theory, they will eventually be seen as pointers on the way to a deeper understanding of physical reality – extraordinarily important achievements, but not fundamentally correct descriptions.


There is, however, one important lesson that we can already credit to collapse models. De Broglie-Bohm theory suffers from the weakness that its experimental predictions are precisely the same as those of quantum theory, unlike collapse models that, as we have noted, are at least in principle testably different. The beables in de Broglie-Bohm theory – the particle paths – play a rather subordinate role: their behaviour is governed by the wave function that characterises all the possible realities from which any given set of paths is drawn, but they have no effect on that wave function. In metaphysical language, the de Broglie-Bohm theory beables are epiphenomena. The American psychologist William James once poetically described human consciousness as ‘Inert, uninfluential, a simple passenger in the voyage of life, it is allowed to remain on board, but not to touch the helm or handle the rigging’. Much the same might be said of a de Broglie-Bohm beable. Collapse-model beables, on the other hand, give as good as they get. Their appearance is governed by rules involving the quantum wave function, and yet, once they appear, they in turn alter the wave function. This makes for a far more interesting theory, mathematically as well as scientifically.

It’s tempting to declare this as a requirement for any variable in a fundamental theory of physics – or at least, any variable that plays as important a role as the beables are meant to play: it should be mathematically active, not purely passive. Any interesting solution to the quantum reality problem should (like collapse models but unlike de Broglie-Bohm theory) make experimentally testable predictions that allow us to check our new description of reality.

How might we do that? Assuming these ideas are not entirely wrong, what sort of experiments might give us evidence of a deeper theory underlying quantum theory and a better understanding of physical reality? The best answer we can give at present, if collapse models and other recent ideas for beable theories are any guide, is that we should expect to see something new when some relevant quantity in the experiment gets large. In particular, the peculiar and intriguing phenomenon called quantum interference – which seems to give direct evidence that different possible paths which could have been followed during an experiment all contribute to the outcome – should start to break down as we try to demonstrate it for larger and larger objects, or over larger and larger scales.

This makes some intuitive sense. Quantum theory was developed to explain the behaviour of atoms and other small systems, and has been well tested only on small scales. It would always have been a brave and perhaps foolhardy extrapolation to assume that it works on all scales, up to and including the entire universe, even if this involved no conceptual problems. Given the self-contradictions involved in the extrapolation and the profound obstacles that seem to prevent any solution of the reality problem within standard quantum theory, the most natural assumption is that, like every previous theory of physics, quantum mechanics will turn out only approximately true, applying within a limited domain only.

A number of experimental groups around the world are now trying to find the boundaries of that domain, testing quantum interference for larger and larger molecules (the current record is for molecules comprising around 1,000 atoms), and ultimately for small crystals and even viruses and other living organisms. This would also allow us to investigate the outlandish but not utterly inconceivable hunch that the boundaries of quantum theory have to do with the complexity of a system, or even with life itself, rather than just size. Researchers have proposed space-based experiments to test the interference between very widely separated beams and will no doubt spring into action once quantum technology becomes available on satellites, as it probably will in the next few years.


With luck, if the ideas I have outlined are on the right lines, we might have a good chance of detecting the limits of quantum theory in the next decade or two. At the same time we can hope for some insight into the nature and structure of physical reality. Anyone who expects it to look like Newtonian billiard-balls bouncing around in space and time, or anything remotely akin to pre-quantum physical ideas, will surely be disappointed. Quantum theory might not be fundamentally correct, but it would not have worked so well for so long if its strange and beautiful mathematics did not form an important part of the deep structure of nature. Whatever underlies it might well seem weirder still, more remote from everyday human intuitions, and perhaps even richer and more challenging mathematically. To borrow a phrase from John Bell, trying to speculate further would only be to share my confusion. No one in 1899 could have dreamed of anything like quantum theory as a fundamental description of physics: we would never have arrived at quantum theory without compelling hints from a wide range of experiments.

The best present ideas for addressing the quantum reality problem are at least as crude and problematic as Bohr’s model of the atom. Nature is far richer than our imaginations, and we will almost certainly need new experimental data to take our understanding of quantum reality further. If the past is any guide, it should be an extraordinarily interesting scientific journey.

This article was originally published by Adrian Kent at Aeon

There is a simple "law" concerning the radiuses of the orbits of the planets. As remarkable as this is for predicting the orbit radiuses of the planets there is no explanation of the law in terms of other laws of physics. A laughably easy way to use Base 2 numbers that seriously diminish its scientific value:

• The relationship between bits and bytes and binary              values: 0 and 1 on computers seem to be related to this :      Eg. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096,        8192, 16384
• Gravity does the Universe apply more keys by which gravity works instead of unexplainable magical forces that pull each other?
• Perpetual Motion or a harmonic oscillator?
• Relationship between sizes of planets in our solar system
• Lastly, there seems to be a systematic relationship between the periods of planets revolving around a primary body. The distances of the planets from the sun, seems based on the numerical sequence 0, 3, 6, 12, 24,48… By adding 4 to each number and then by dividing that number by 10 gives the sequence of 0.4, 0.7, 1, 1.6, 2.8,5.6,which is a reasonable representation of distances in astronomical units for most planets.

Artist's concept of a distant planetary system (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Albert Einstein Français : Portrait d'Albert Einstein (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Quantum entanglement or superposition is a phenomenon in which the quantum states of two or more objects are linked together — even though the specific objects may be spatially separated. Since quantum entanglement implies faster than light-speed interactions, it creates an experience of non-locality, or what Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” that defies classical and relativistic concepts of space and time.

“‘Quantum entanglement’ may sound like an awful sci-fi romance flick, but it’s actually a phenomenon that physicists say may someday lead to the ability to teleport an object all the way across the galaxy instantly.
It’s not exactly the Star Trek version of teleportation, where an object disappears then reappears somewhere else. Rather, it ‘entangles’ two different atoms so that one atom inherits the properties of another. ‘According to the quantum theory, everything vibrates,’ theoretical physicist Michio Kaku tells NPR’s Guy Raz. Kaku is a frequent guest on the Science and Discovery channels. ‘When two electrons are placed close together, they vibrate in unison. When you separate them, that’s when all the fireworks start.’ This is where quantum entanglement — sometimes described as ‘teleportation’ — begins. ‘An invisible umbilical cord emerges connecting these two electrons. And you can separate them by as much as a galaxy if you want. Then, if you vibrate one of them, somehow on the other end of the galaxy the other electron knows that its partner is being jiggled.’ This process happens even faster than the speed of light, physicists say.” (“Scientists Take Quantum Steps Toward model Teleportation,” NPR, Aug 1, 2010)

A pattern sometimes associated with the phenomenon of quantum entanglement (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In 1982, a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect at the University of Paris initially verified that measurements performed on one quantum system instantly influence other systems entangled with the measured state, even if they are far apart.In 1993, Charlie Bennett and associates at IBM’s Watson Research Center showed how to transmit quantum information from one point in space to another without traversing the intervening space. They called the technique “teleportation.”In 2003, researchers at the Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna, Austria led by Marcus Aspelmeyer successfully sent entangled photons to opposite sides of the Danube River, by using satellites to beam entangled photons to Earth.In 2007, a team led by Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna transmitted entangled photons some 144 kilometers (89 miles) between La Palma and Tenerife, two of Spain’s Canary Islands, using a laser to create entangled pairs of photons and fire one member of each pair to a telescope of the European Space Agency (ESA).In 2009, researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland along with colleagues at the University of Michigan succeeded in teleporting a quantum state directly from one atom to another over a meter away. The scientists reported that atom-to-atom teleported information could be recovered with perfect accuracy about 90 percent of the time — and the figure could be improved.In 2010, a team led by Xian-Min Jin maximally entangled two photons using both spatial and polarization modes and teleported the one with higher energy through a ten-mile-long free space channel. They found that the teleported photon was still able to respond to changes in the state of the photon they held onto, even at that distance.
Brain Entanglement Memories
Modern teleportation research is also based on the psychological awareness of observing quantum entanglements. It is expected that “people will see photons that were entangled with each other.” The stimulation of living systems awakens a somewhat “metabolic” quantum superposition. Dietmar Plenz and Tara Thiagarajan at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, wondered whether complicated brain cell signatures might also link groups of neurons. To investigate, they analyzed neuronal activity using arrays of electrodes:

“Subatomic particles do it. Now the observation that groups of brain cells seem to have their own version of quantum entanglement, or ‘spooky action at a distance’, could help explain how our minds combine experiences from many different senses into one memory. Previous experiments have shown that the electrical activity of neurons in separate parts of the brain can oscillate simultaneously at the same frequency — a process known as phase locking. The frequency seems to be a signature that marks out neurons working on the same task, allowing them to identify each other.”
(“Brain ‘entanglement’ could explain memories,” David Robson, New Scientist, Jan 12, 2010)

Psychic powers and extra-sensory perception (ESP) are among the most significant unsolved phenomena at present, since belief in them is so common. ESP is frequently called the “sixth sense.” It is sensory information that a person supposedly receives beyond the ordinary five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Sir Richard Burton used the term ESP in 1870. The first controlled study of ESP was organized in 1882, when the Society for Psychical Research was founded in London.

In the 1920s a Munich specialist in medical and surgical eye problems, Dr. Rudolph Tischner, referred to ESP as the externalization of sensibility. In the 1930s the American parapsychologist J. B. Rhine at Duke University, Durham, N.C., popularized the term to include psychic phenomena related to sensory functions. Rhine was among the first parapsychologists to test ESP proficiency in the laboratory.
The term “psi,” referring to extrasensory perception and psychokinesis, was coined by biologist Bertold P. Wiesner, and first used by psychologist Robert Thouless in a 1942 article in the British Journal of Psychology. In the 1970s, physicists Russel Targ and Harold Puthoff conducted experiments with psychics Uri Geller and Ingo Swann at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. They felt that Geller, retired police commissioner Pat Price, and Swann had genuine psychic abilities.

The CIA and the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), overseeing Andrija Puharich, allegedly worked with Geller, Price, and Swann to develop psychic powers for the military. The 1977 arrest in Moscow of Los Angeles Times reporter Robert Toth by the KGB, for taking a paper on telepathy and brain wave biofeedback, proved that the Russians were also tracking top-secret ESP experiments. The US Navy from 1972 until 1995 supposedly conducted research in remote viewing. L.R. Bremseth, then a Navy commander, described it as a broad-based transcendent and asymmetrical research program. Scientists have examined many people who claim to have psychic powers, but results under controlled laboratory conditions have until now remained unclear. A 2008 Newsweek magazine article on paranormal experiences reported:

“According to periodic surveys by Gallup and other pollsters, fully 90 percent of Americans say they have experienced such things or believe they exist.” (“Why We Believe,” Sharon Begley, NEWSWEEK, Nov 3, 2008)

English: Carl Gustav Jung עברית: קרל גוסטב יונג (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung first described his idea of “synchronicity” in the 1920s. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung first met in 1907 and had a significant influence on each other’s theories. Synchronicity is the relationship of two or more seemingly causally unconnected events occurring together in a meaningful way. To be valid as synchronicity, the events must be unlikely to happen together by chance.

Jung introduced his concept as early as the 1920s but only gave a full description of it in 1951 in an Eranos lecture. In 1952, he published a paper, “Synchronicity — An Acausal Connecting Principle,” in a book with a related study by the physicist and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli. After discussions with both Einstein and Pauli, Jung believed that there were similarities between synchronicity and quantum mechanics.
Synchronicity was explanatory of a dynamic that underlies the human experience. Jung coined the word to describe what he called “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events.” It was a theory that Jung felt gave convincing evidence for his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious from Freud’s psychoanalysis.

Ultrasonic Balance Organs
Throughout the ages, extra-sensory perception has perhaps been the most laughed at and disgraced personal faculty. But now, the sixth sense is after a long wait being studied as an extension of the instinctive consciousness of balance, hearing, and smell. A 2008 New York Times, International Herald Tribune newspaper story reported:

“Essential to a fully embodied sense of self is the vestibular system, a paired set of tiny sensory organs tucked deep into the temporal bone on either side of the head, right near the cochlea of the inner ear. The vestibular system isn’t a high-profile, elitist sense like the famed five of vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell. It’s more of a Joe Sixth-Sense, laboring in anonymity and frequently misunderstood.”
(“The unsung system that makes walking possible,” Natalie Angier, International Herald Tribune, Oct 29, 2008)

“Three of the organs are designed to detect twisting movements of the head, by sensing the discrepancy between the angular momentum of the membranes, which are attached to the bone, and that of the free-floating fluid, which lags slightly behind. The other two organs have tiny stones of calcium carbonate, which rise and fall like flakes in a snowglobe and so detect the effects of gravity and of linear head motions, if you’re walking forward, for example, or up stairs.”
Carl Jung believed that many experiences that are “coincidences due to chance” in terms of causality suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances in terms of meaning. His synchronicity concept reflected a mysterious effect very similar to quantum entanglement. Sigmund Freud observed this line of reasoning in his essay “Dreams and Telepathy” (1922) pertaining to synchronicity.

Jung was fascinated by the idea that life was not a series of random events but rather an expression of a deeper order, and that the realization of this was a spiritual awakening. Yet, most scientists in those days barely mentioned the vestibular system and did not dream that it could contain “little organic gyroscopes and linear accelerometers.”

The vestibular system is not only crucial for perceptual stability, but it is also required to produce neural representations of the environment in order to accurately guide our behavior. Loss of function can produce an imbalance that manifests as stress symptoms or a dramatic, sudden onset of vertigo. By harmonizing the brain’s hemispheres, people can stimulate the vestibular system to ease types of stress and create a healthy, balanced attentive state:

“Tel Aviv University researchers discovered a link between balance and anxiety in children and that improving balance may ease anxiety. Dr. Orit Bart at Tel Aviv University’s School of Health Professions and colleagues found that a simple course of physical treatment for balance problems can also resolve anxiety issues in children.”
(“Improving balance may ease anxiety,” UPI, Jan. 27, 2009)

Despite its humble status, the vestibular system has lately gained admirers among neuroscientists, who are amazed by its significance for perceptual equilibrium and general health. Vestibule dysfunction increases the risk of falling by a factor of 12, according to a recent medical study:

“Now a new study conducted by Johns Hopkins researchers offers potentially lifesaving clues. Looking at data from the National Institutes for Health, researchers found that an estimated 35% of Americans over the age of 40 — roughly 69 million people — suffer from vestibular dysfunction, or as it is more commonly known, an inner-ear balance disorder. By age 60 and older, the data showed, inner-ear imbalances strike more than half of all Americans.”
(“Many Elderly Falls Due to Inner-Ear Imbalance,” Kathleen Kingsbury, TIME, May 26, 2009)

In 1991, Martin Lenhardt of the University of Virginia discovered that people could hear ultrasonic communication, using the vestibular system as a hearing organ. Ultrasound is sound with a frequency greater than the upper limit of human hearing. The most current ultrasound technology bypasses the normal audio mechanisms used by the body to hear sounds and provides a direct neural stimulation to the brain:

“So outlandish is the concept that humans can have the hearing range of specialized mammals, such as bats and toothed whales, that ultrasonic hearing has generally been relegated to the realm of parlor tricks rather than being considered the subject of scientific inquiry.”
The validity of ultrasonic hearing was previously demonstrated by “playing opera” to a deaf subject. The experimental work of Dr. Roger Maass performed in 1946 made all the essential observations in regard to ultrasonic hearing phenomenology. In 1962, teenage inventor Pat Flanagan became the subject of a Life magazine profile.

“At 15, Flanagan had already begun to demonstrate the invention that would change his life: the neurophone. Built in his home laboratory from wire and brillo pads, the device transmitted audio signals from a stereo directly into the brain, bypassing the ears entirely. Although he knew that the sound was somehow being picked up by the wearer’s skin and bone, the exact mechanism would evade the inventor for 33 years.”
At length, Martin Lenhardt duplicated Flanagan’s findings in 1991 using ultrasonic signals. He discovered that the “saccule,” a pea-sized organ in the inner ear typically associated with balance — a vestibular function — is also sensitive to ultrasonic sound, finally explaining how Flanagan’s invention worked.

Understanding Chemical Signals
Located just behind the nostrils in the nose’s dividing septum are two tiny pits referred to as the vomeronasal organ (VNO), also associated with extra-sensory perception. Named for the vomer bone, where the septum meets the top of the mouth, the VNO contains nerve cells that understand chemical signals called pheromones, secreted by many animals, including humans.
The University of Chicago authenticated proof of human pheromones in 1998. They transmit fear, stimulate courtship behavior, and give rise to moods of affection. Our ancestors probably communicated by a sixth sense, using semiochemical signals. Plants, animals, and even secluded microbes converse or “talk” to each other with the molecular signals of pheromones — their external hormones.

There are alarm pheromones, sex pheromones, food trail pheromones, and many others that run life through a type of sixth sense. Insects mark trails with pheromones. Plants emit distress pheromones when grazed upon. Some organisms use pheromones to attract their mates from a distance of several miles.

Along with scent, the molecular signals of pheromones are detected in the olfactory bulb. “It’s all subliminal,” said bio-psychologist Martha K. McClintock. Life communicates with these molecules, and perhaps we are entering a “phase of ideal communication.” Prototypes of “hi-tech pheromone detectors” are expected to be in use in the immediate future:

“British scientists are aiming to develop a device that can detect the smell of fear, and that could one day identify terrorists, drug smugglers, and other criminals. The 18-month project to develop two sensor systems is being carried out at the City University London, and is being led by Professor Tong Sun. The project has funding from the Home Office Scientific Development Branch. After a feasibility study is complete, two devices are expected to be designed to identify the fear pheromone in human sweat; one by laser absorption, and the other by a portable optical fiber instrument.”
(“‘Fear detector’ being developed,” Lin Edwards Customs, PhysOrg.com, Nov 3, 2009)

Scientists discovered that pheromone signals bear a “tether” resemblance to fractal geometry, or the bulb building process of the Mandelbrot Set. In 1999, Jeremy Avnet and Jennifer Carter gave a lecture entitled “Chaos and Neurodynamics” at the University of California, Santa Cruz. They studied EEG attractor formations in the olfactory bulb and processes controlling the oscillations between the inhalation attractor and exhalation attractor. They found that the exhalation process acts as a sort of reset button, causing all attractors throughout the olfactory bulb to dissolve.
Russian biophysicist Pjotr Garjajev and his colleagues found that DNA could cause a disturbing pattern in a vacuum that churns out magnetized wormholes, or tunneling nanotubules. Wormholes are microscopic equivalents of Einstein-Rosen bridges near black holes. They connect — by quantum superposition — different areas of space-time through which information can be transmitted instantaneously.

“Physicists David Hochberg and Thomas Kephart have shown how gravity was strong enough in the very early universe to have provided the energy required to spontaneously create massive numbers of self-stabilizing wormholes. A significant portion of these wormholes is likely to still be around and may be pervasive, providing a vast network of corridors that reach far and wide throughout the universe. It might be easier to discover and use these natural wormholes than to create new ones.”
(Foreword to James Gardner’s “The Intelligent Universe” by Ray Kurzweil, 2007)

DNA also has the amazing ability to recognize similarities in other DNA strands from a distance. Somehow they are able to identify one another, and the tiny bits of genetic material tend to congregate with similar DNA, in a mysterious process like synchronicity or quantum entanglement. DNA has been found to have a bizarre ability to put itself together, even at a distance, when according to known science it shouldn’t be able to:
“Even so, research published in ACS’ Journal of Physical Chemistry B, shows very clearly that homology recognition between sequences of several hundred nucleotides occurs without physical contact or presence of proteins. Double helixes of DNA can recognize matching molecules from a distance and then gather together, all seemingly without help from any other molecules or chemical signals. In the study, scientists observed the behavior of fluorescently tagged DNA strands placed in water that contained no proteins or other material that could interfere with the experiment. Strands with identical nucleotide sequences were about twice as likely to gather together as DNA strands with different sequences. No one knows how individual DNA strands could possibly be communicating in this way, yet somehow they do. The ‘telepathic’ effect is a source of wonder and amazement for scientists.”
(“The DNA Mystery: Scientists Stumped By ‘Telepathic’ Abilities,” Rebecca Sato, The Daily Galaxy, Sep 22, 2009)

Researcher Chris Clarke believes that superposition “or at least something very like it” may play a role within a living organism, as part of its internal communication and control system. Stuart Hameroff, a physician at the University of Arizona, has drawn attention to the possible role of microtubules or tethers forming a “micro-skeleton” inside each living cell. Because of their small size, and the way they are shielded by their surrounding structures, such tubes could support internal vibrations whose states are well protected from “decoherence” by the environment — and set off superposition to link together natural quantum entanglement pairs.

In 2005, a team of molecular biologists from London’s Imperial College detected such long-distance nanotubes or “invisible umbilical cords” connecting multiple cells:

“Long membrane tethers between cells, known as membrane nantotubes or tunneling nanotubules, create supracellular structures that allow multiple cell bodies to act in a synchronized manner. Calcium fluxes, vesicles, and cell-surface components can all traffic between cells connected by nanotubes. Thus, complex and specific messages can be transmitted between multiple cells, and the strength of signal will suffer relatively little with the distance traveled, as compared to the use of soluble factors to transmit messages.”
Today, Oriol Romero-Isart from the Max-Planck-Institut fur Quantenoptik in Germany and a few associates sketch out the challenges that will have to be tackled to create a quantum superposition of a living thing — to “teleport” bits of genetic information by means of chemical signaling or a calcium-fluxed code through long-distance nanotubes. They say that it is achievable with our current technology:

“One of the great challenges for quantum physicists is to find quantum behavior in macroscopic objects. There are obvious examples of quantum behavior on a large scale, such as superconductivity and superfluidity, but physicists want more. Having created quantum superpositions of photons, electrons, atoms and even molecules, one of the current obsessions is to create a quantum superposition of a living thing, such as a virus.”
(“How to Create Quantum Superpositions of Living Things,” MIT Technology Review, Sep 10, 2009)

Paolo Manzelli, director of the Educational Research Laboratory at the University of Florence, Italy, has written much about biological entanglement and said that “the new idea of viewing bio-quantum states as carriers of pure information energy signals leads to interesting
questions regarding the ability of living systems to manage information in a way that otherwise never would have been asked.” Miguel Molla of the University of Florence compared biological entanglement to a “quantum bio-antenna.” Dean Radin, a psychologist writing in “SHIFT:” for the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), said in a recent article:

“Researchers will discover that under certain conditions, living cells also exhibit properties associated with quantum entanglement. Then the idea of bioentanglement will emerge, a concept that is more general than today’s special cases of entanglement involving inanimate particles and photons.”
What might an invisible umbilical wormhole or long-distance nanotube look like? Maybe it looks like a “frozen thunderbolt” or lightning discharge — a quantum bio-antenna of filaments and tethers within a micro-skeleton of fractal geometry. Most researchers think that such filaments are probably common plasma jet structures: the fourth state of matter. But scientists like Dr. Laszlo Kortvelyessy of Hungary hold a different view.

According to Kortvelyessy and his associates, the filament-state is a fifth state of matter, due to its form of energy or particle-acceleration. The filament-state is a non-thermal state of matter, bordering on the Bose-Einstein condensate. (A zero state Bose-Einstein condensate has no thermal but only a very low quantum mechanical energy.)

Filament-States of Matter
Filaments are thus wrongly said to be of plasma. But within them, particles move in only one direction, often against gravity. Celestial bodies that do not obey thermodynamics, gravity, and many other physical laws have a filament form. “They are not in the fourth, but in a fifth state of matter,” as indicated by the beam-state-of matter. The zigzag ebb and flow of plasma does not exist in the filament-state because its particles do not move in all three dimensions. A filament is a parallel flight in one direction, of either electrons or ions. Gravity-free expansion of a magnetized wormhole may produce faster than light-speed entanglement and non-locality by tethering the fifth state of matter.
All charged filaments have the same elegantly simple explanation: the pinch effect that routinely produces the cylindrical form of electrically charged and ejected matter. The electrically emitted coronal ions fly along straight lines. They do not emit any electromagnetic waves from their high motion energy. Dr. Kortvelyessy described the characteristics of bodies in a fifth state of matter:

“They all have a filament-form, their particles fly parallel to the filament axis. They mostly have particles of higher energy than those of the plasma bodies. In spite of the very high particle-energy, they all do not emit heat. They all have a circular cross section and, therefore, a more or less bent cylindrical body. Like crystals, they have a deeply organized form, also in their smallest branches. Like crystals, they can oscillate with more frequencies. They move as if gravity would not exist even in the very mouth of a black hole. Their electric charge is either positive or negative. They dissolve in space at zero charge.”
(“The 5th state of matter,” Dr. Laszlo Kortvelyessy, Hungarian Observatory Kleve, 2002-2006)

The idea of synchronicity may have a new explanation. Contained by an entanglement wormhole or superposition tether in the filament-state of matter, a very high energy of ions or electrons (i.e. quantum-state information) moves with instantaneous velocity in only one direction — the direction of teleportation. And you can lengthen the cylindrical umbilical cord by as much as a galaxy if you want.

If it were possible for us to see quantum teleportation with the naked eye, could we also experience the non-locality of a superluminal influence? Would we notice synchronicity and ESP? By boosting the light emitted by one member of a quantum entangled photon pair, Nicolas Gisin at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and his colleagues think they can make the quantum superposition effect visible to a human eye:

“In the traditional set-up, two widely separated particle detectors are used to measure the entanglement of the two photons. But Gisin and his colleagues want to let the human eye do some of the work. The researchers would send one photon to a standard detector and the other to a human observer in a dark room. The human would see a dim point of light in either the right or left field of view, depending on the photon’s quantum state. If those flashes of light correlate strongly enough with the output of the ordinary photon detector, then the scientists can conclude that the photons are entangled
.” (“Can Physicists Make Quantum Entanglement Visible to the Naked Eye?” Discover Magazine, Jun 6, 2010)

If a person could see photons that were entangled with each other, would the stimulus really transmit faster than light? American physicist Mario Rabinowitz has proposed the travel of microscopic primordial wormholes through the atmosphere. In his “Little Black Holes: Dark Matter And Ball Lightning” (2002), Rabinowitz provided indication that a long-distance nanotube tether could show outwardly as ball lightning that veils it.

Ball lightning is thus far an unfamiliar phenomenon. A standard hypothesis currently suggests that ball lightning consists of vaporized silicon burning through oxidation. But the exact cause and composition of ball lightning has yet to be determined. There may be several different varieties. It usually appears as a grapefruit-sized sphere of light moving slowly through the air, which may end by fizzling out or exploding.
Gazing into a tunneling wormhole might let us glimpse into the strange and unknown workings of one of the most powerful forces in the universe. A burning sphere of light could perhaps point to a theoretical boundary known as the “event horizon” near a magnetized wormhole.

Ted Jacobson from the University of Maryland and Thomas Sotiriou from the University of Cambridge examined what is needed to look closely within a wormhole — beyond its elusive event horizon — and observe its internal stretched cylindrical form. Astronomer David Floyd at the University of Melbourne appraised their investigation:

“According to Floyd, if you could survive a journey beyond the event horizon of a black hole you would see unusual optical effects. ‘You would see what’s behind you in front of you and multiple images of things wherever you looked. That would become more extreme as you approached the heart of the singularity, at least that’s what the maths tells us,’ he says.” (“New theory on how to see inside black holes,” Stuart Gary, ABC, June 21, 2010)
Psychic and television personality Uri Geller is a relative of Sigmund Freud. Uri claimed that he first became aware of his “spoon bending” ability when he was about five years old. He was in a neighbor’s yard in Tel Aviv when a light from the sky hit him and knocked him to the ground. Years later, an Israeli man named Yaakov Avrahami recalled at one time walking in Tel Aviv and seeing a ball of light: “At that certain moment I noticed a little boy with a white shirt come out from the building to the left.” Avrahami said the ball of light followed the youth.
People who miraculously survive lightning strikes can sometimes develop extraordinary “savant” talents. An electromotive force might also critically alter the optical discharges and biophoton emissions of DNA molecules. Researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute led by Ian Spielman recently created “synthetic magnetic fields” using visible light. With the metal bending aspect of the Geller Effect, biophoton emissions apparently convey a charge on neutral atoms and create a synthetic magnetic field to which they respond –– even though no field is there.

Hilary Evans observed that a small number of people seem to interfere with streetlights and electrical appliances. He cited an established Hungarian physicist who is a specialist on ball lightning:

“In my opinion during such incidents some special, presently not known type of magnetic field is created around the body, which has an effect upon the structure of the materials. Consequently their fundamental properties are changed temporarily: like their tensile stress, electric conductivity, magnetic momentum, optical properties, etc. The same effects are detected in the case of ‘metal bending,’ or similar features are observed sometimes around ball lightnings.”
People undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) might for a few minutes suddenly display savant intelligence –– exceptional surges of brilliant cerebral ability –– as a temporary effect of magnetic brain stimulation. Doctors in Austria believe that magnetic fields made by lightning could have the same effect as TMS machines on nearby humans:
“Joseph Peer and Alexander Kendl at the University of Innsbruck in Austria wondered whether ball lightning is really a hallucination induced by magnetic stimulation of the brain’s visual cortex or the eye’s retina. Focusing magnetic fields on the visual cortex of the brain caused the subjects to see luminous discs and lines. When the focus was moved around within the visual cortex, the subjects reported seeing the lights move.”
(“Ball Lightning May Be All in Your Head,” Ker Than, National Geographic News, May 14, 2010)

If Mario Rabinowitz’s ball lightning is shaped by a magnetic wormhole’s event horizon, its “orb image” is certainly an optical illusion. What may look like a sphere of light to an eyewitness is really a umbilical tether line: a stretched filament teleporting electrons or ions from a constricting black hole to an expanding white hole –– conceivably over a cosmic distance of space and time.

An extraordinary effort is on track to create a quantum superposition of living things, and for a real person to see quantum entanglements with the naked eye. But can teleportation technology use entangled states to see backwards into time? Russian physicists seriously believe that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located on the border of Switzerland and France can be used for time travel:

“‘Modern principles of theoretical mathematical physics allow the possibility of time travel,’ explains Igor Volovich, a member of RAS. ‘One of the admissible models of working time machine is the so-called wormhole, that is, a space-time tunnel leading to another time or space. And the probability of formation of a wormhole in the LHC is comparable to the probability of occurrence of the black hole itself, which can occur when particles collide with high energy.’ Another necessary condition for making the machine work is to distort space and time so it closes up in a ring. And the LHC is quite capable of that. ‘This phenomenon in physics is called “closed time-like curve,”‘ explains Professor Irina Arefyeva. ‘It allows, at least theoretically, returning to the past.’”
(“Time Machine Built in Europe, Russian Scientists Say,” Pravda, Aug 6, 2010)

Medieval spiritualists declared peculiar synchronicities or entanglement intricacies with artifacts of exceptional historical value, such as the spear of destiny or wood of the cross. At the present time, a particle physics experiment will use ancient Roman lead bricks whose radioactivity diminished over the centuries:
“The cargo from a Roman ship sunk off the coast of Sardinia more than 2,000 years ago will finally be put to use –– it will become a shield for a neutrino detector. In Italy, 120 lead bricks recovered from the shipwreck will soon be melted to make a protective shield for Italy’s new neutrino detector, CUORE (Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events). The ancient lead, which is useful because it has lost almost all traces of its natural radioactivity, has been transferred from a museum in Sardinia to the national particle physics laboratory at Gran Sasso. After spending two millennia on the seabed, the lead bricks will now be used in an experiment that will take place beneath 4,500 feet of rock.”
(“Particle Physics Experiment Will Use Ancient Lead From a Roman Shipwreck,” Discover magazine, April 16, 2010)

A bizarre urban whimsy of time travel tells of a brainwashed captive pinned down as a living target assembly in the “Montauk chair” of a physics laboratory to absorb black hole disintegration. Yet, quantum bio-entanglement with a “parallel universe” might be more benignly possible using a novel ensemble, in a way that allows measurement of a superluminal effect. At the base of every strand of human hair are “clock genes” that influence circadian rhythms:

“Tracking your internal clock may be as easy as plucking a few strands of hair, according to a new study. The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that hair follicles hold a record of the gene activity that influences when we wake and when we sleep. So Makoto Akashi, a researcher at Yamaguchi University in Japan, and colleagues turned to hair. At the base of every strand of hair is a follicle of living cells, which clings to the hair when plucked. By tweezing an average of 10 head hairs per person (five for thick-haired folks and as many as 20 for those with thin locks), the researchers were able to isolate and track the activity of three separate clock genes.”
(“Sleep Secrets Revealed in Human Hair,” Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience, Aug 23, 2010)

The teleportation of human clock genes through “universal black hole mergers” could herald Bracewell-von Neumann probes for interstellar exploration, since conventional radio signals cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of light, and local space-time is based on a Cartesian dimensionality. Ronald L. Mallett, a professor of physics at the University of Connecticut, is currently conducting time travel experiments limited to atomic particles. Pavel Sekatski at the University of Geneva is trying to replace photon detectors with human observers. Efstratios Manousakis of Florida State University, Tallahassee, claims to have come up with the first successful use of quantum theory to explain features of consciousness.

“Dr. Daryl Bem, a social psychologist at Cornell University, conducted a series of studies that will soon be published in one of the most prestigious psychology journals (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). Across nine experiments, Bem examined the idea that our brain has the ability to not only reflect on past experiences, but also anticipate future experiences. This ability for the brain to ‘see into the future’ is often referred to as psi phenomena. Similarly, modern quantum physics has demonstrated that light particles seem to know what lies ahead of them and will adjust their behavior accordingly, even though the future event hasn’t occurred yet.”
(“Have Scientists Finally Discovered Evidence for Psychic Phenomena?!” Melissa Burkley, Ph.D., Psychology Today, Oct 11, 2010)

Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Carl Marci first established a connection or ‘‘physiological concordance’’ between two people. The maternal instinct, marriage vows, and token actions like a kiss or handshake suggest phase locking entanglements –– in order that synchronicity may persist at a distance. But Marci’s 2007 study was limited and he called for more study into networked metabolic states. In 2010, volunteers were observed using electrocardiography and a monitor on the finger to measure skin conductance resonance to identify the moment of alignment or ‘‘oneness’’ during counseling:
“A five-year study monitoring brain activity during therapy sessions has shown that two people can become physiologically aligned –– parts of their nervous systems beating in harmony –– despite having no physical contact with each another. Trisha Stratford, the neuropsychotherapist who did the research at University of Technology, Sydney, said her study provided a deeper understanding of what happened when people interacted, including when a couple fell in love.”
(“Mind blowing power of love,” Tim Barlass, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sept 26, 2010)

During a visit to Freud in Vienna, Jung attempted to defend his telepathic viewpoint and sparked a heated debate. A shocking synchronistic event followed. Jung writes in his memoirs:

“While Freud was going on this way, I had a curious sensation. It was as if my diaphragm were made of iron and were becoming red-hot — a glowing vault. And at that moment there was such a loud report in the bookcase, which stood right next to us, that we both started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over on us. I said to Freud: ‘There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon.’ ‘Oh come,’ he exclaimed. ‘That is sheer bosh.’ ‘It is not,’ I replied. ‘You are mistaken, Herr Professor. And to prove my point I now predict that in a moment there will be another such loud report!’ Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words that the same detonation went off in the bookcase. To this day I do not know what gave me this certainty. But I knew beyond all doubt that the report would come again. Freud only stared aghast at me.”

English: NASA StarChild image of Stephen Hawking. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Freud was ready to admit that knowing the time and location of a quantum superposition would be important for scientific investigation. But Jung’s synchronicity also gave a spot of credibility to the fascination of astrology — and spooky action in the bookcase.
Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose first confirmed that a singularity must result inside a black hole. Theoretical physicist John Wheeler made up the terms black hole and wormhole. (Nowadays wormholes are occasionally also called “rabbit holes.”) But in all likelihood, the incomprehensible teleportation of a tunneling nanotube unconsciously takes us back to a remembrance of the birth canal — for the simple reason that we are a bio-quantum superposition of the X and Y states of our parents.

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