Gilliam Does Quantum Reality: Part Two

Harold Gilliam at Baker Beach, San Francisco

Harold Gilliam died last month (Dec 2016) at age 98. He was an eloquent writer on environmental issues and a popular columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Intending perhaps to explore the inner environment of the physical world, Gilliam attended a weekend workshop at Esalen Institute in the summer of 1985 given by myself and my friend and physics colleague Heinz Pagels, To commemorate Gilliam's death and the death of Pagels who died a few years later, I am reprinting a few weeks apart the two Sunday Chronicle columns that Gilliam wrote about his experience with us in Big Sur. Part One is here. Fasten your seat belts for "Gilliam Does Quantum Reality: Part Two"

TO BE AND NOT TO BE

Harold Gilliam, SF Chronicle Aug 25, 1985

"To be or not to be." is not the question. It is the answer.
                --- Fred Alan Wolf

Bell's Theorem is the most profound discovery of science.
                --- Physicist Henry Stapp

Esalen Institute, on a verdant shelf of the Big Sur coast, far from the frenetic agglomerations of the Bay Area and Southern California, is an idyllic place for leisurely contemplation, for gazing out to sea and looking for clues as to what the world is all about and what your own place in it might be.

And that is what 17 people from various points of the compass were doing there on a recent weekend in a workshop on Quantum Reality as we noted here last Sunday.

We peered (metaphorically) into the microscopic world of the quanta, where atoms and subatomic particles perform their weird unearthly dances that physicists are only beginning to understand.

Consider Bell's Theorem, for example, which has revolutionized our view of the world, at least in the eyes of some quantum physicists.

As explained to us by physicist Nick Herbert, author of Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics, Bell's Theorem, very much simplified, states that, if you shoot twin particles in opposite directions, and then if you change the spin or polarity of one of the particles, the other must change in the same way at the same instant, whether it's across the lab or across the galaxy.

Since the change in the two particles occurs simultaneously, this action seems to violate Einstein's dictum that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light -- 186,000 miles per second. How does the second particle 'know' immediately that the first particle has been changed, unless some superluminal message passes between the, an event for which physics has no explanation? The theorem seems to indicate also that events (and maybe people) can be influenced by forces that are "non-local" -- extremely remote.

Herbert explained it this way: "The mechanism for this instant connectedness is not some invisible field that stretches from one part to the next, but the fact that "a bit of each part's 'being' is lodged in the other."

Bell was not talking about people, but particles, yet his theorem has been eagerly adopred by believers in extrasensory perception: If particles can "communicate" with each other simultaneously over long distances (violating Einstein's speed limit), minds can surely do the same.

Everyone has heard the stories: A mother wakes up in alarm and learns later that her child at that moment was in danger. "Remote viewing" experiments at SRI International and elsewhere claim to substantiate telepathic communication. Perhaps part of each person's being is "lodged in the other."

And perhaps, some say, both are lodged in a transcendental mind that constitutes the basic order of the universe. Is science, I wondered, finally meeting religion in the rarified atmosphere of Bell's Theorem?

Herbert was speculating in a different direction about faster-than-light communication: "Superluminal signals would open up similar channels from the present to the past -- channels that would allow people today to change what by conventional reckoning has already happened.

I was reminded of a certain legendary young female:

There was a young lady named Bright
Who traveled much faster than light
She went out one day
in a relative way
And came back the previous night.

I was already drawing up a list of past events I would like to "unhappen; when Herbert's colleague spoke up in dissent. Pagels is the author of The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature and a new book on the origin of the universe Perfect Symmetry: The Search for the Beginning of Time. He is also the executive director of the New York Academy of Sciences and somewhat of an iconoclast. it turned out he didn't agree with Herbert at all.

Heinz Pagels & Nick Herbert, circa 1964

"Bell's Theorem does not prove that anything can travel faster than light," Pagels maintained, "It's a quantum fact, accepted by everyone, that the observer has an effect on what he's observing. Under Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, as soon as you observe or measure certain aspects of the quantum world, you change them. So the change in Bell's particle, which seems to happen faster than light, simply reflects what the observers are doing when they measure the particles."

Herbert's response and Pagels' rebuttal went too fast for me to even begin to follow, but it was clear that the two views represented a central schism in the fast-moving world of quantum physics -- Pagels representing the establishment view and Herbert the speculative, philosophical school.

When the dust had settled, i raised a question that had plagued me throughout the weekend. Physicists can spin mystifying theories about the invisible world of the quanta, but what does all this have to do with the price of potatoes?

Pagels responded with a glowing vision: "Quantum research results in new technologies, giant new industries, new economies, and in fact a whole new idea of civilization can come out of these developments. New technologies change our perceptions. The printing press, for example, led to the development of books and a new literacy that made democracy possible. The impact of computers has already made major changes in our economy.

"Nuclear weapons have created a period of unsurpassed world stability. There has not been a war between two nuclear nations -- as a result of a technology that came out of quantum physics.

"We're already living in the world of the quantum revolution: Microchips, the whole world of the computers, the whole world of the revolutions in molecular biology -- all these came out of the human mastery of the microworld that was made possible in part by the advent of quantum physics. The full implications of living in the world of the quantum revolution have not yet dawned on us. But these new technologies are driving the engines of social change,"

We sat there in silence for a moment, listening to the roar of the ocean. Then somebody said it: "But are they driving the engines of social change in the right direction? Nuclear weapons. for example ..."

Pagels responded: "I said these were technologies that changed our perceptions. I didn't say whether they were for better or for worse. That's for other people to decide, in terms of their own values. The new technologies open a whole new spectrum of moral choices, alerting people to examine their own consciences about matters as fundamental as human survival. My own view is that we must learn to live without using nuclear weapons."

I thought about that as i shifted around on the uncomfortable pillows that substitute for chairs at Esalen. it seemed to me that there was one overarching fact that had not received much attention: Quantum physics is giving us incredible new powers that we are ill-equipped to use. It's like putting a 5-year-old at the steering wheel of a Maserati on a downtown street. Compared with the R & D devoted to quantum research and its weapons-technology offspring, the attention given to learning how to use these powers wisely is minuscule.

Later, as I strolled along the clifftops over the roaring surf, it occurred to me that the contribution of quantum theory might not be limited to technology. For example, pre-quantum physicists assumed that the constituents of an atom were simply particles like electrons and neutrons. Later theorists decided that they were not particles but waves. The current view is that they are simultaneously particles and waves. Not "either/or" but "both/and".

In the Newtonian particle view everything was sharply defined as one thing or the other. Quantum theory introduces the idea that an object can be perceived in two or more ways, each valid. To be and not to be. That's the meaning of ambiguity.

The American mind, schooled in Newtonian definiteness and frontier certainties, is accustomed to precise labels. There are good guys and bad guys. There are friends and enemies. You are either with us or against us.

It seemed to me, as I paced the shoreline, that the quantum "both/and" approach might prove useful in our relations with each other and with other nations. A nation (like a person) might be aggressive, intransigent and tyrannical. It might simultaneously be peace-loving, friendly and cooperative. And the question would be: Can we move beyond merely opposing the negative qualities to encouraging the positive ones with equal energy and vigor?

Here, I speculated, might be a model that could revolutionize world politics just as the discovery of the quanta has revolutionized physics. It would not be the first time that a new scientific paradigm had led to a new world-view that had altered everyone's thinking in profound ways and influenced the course of history.

Or maybe, I thought, as I inhaled the aroma of salt and kelp on the sea breeze and watched the sunlight glittering from the swells offshore, maybe I was just experiencing an Esalen high.

View of Pacific Ocean from the Esalen baths

Gilliam Does Quantum Reality: Part One

Harold Gilliam (1918 - 2016)

Harold Gilliam died this month (Dec 2016) at age 98. He was an eloquent writer on environmental issues and a popular columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Intending perhaps to explore the inner environment of the physical world, Gilliam attended a weekend workshop at Esalen Institute in the summer of 1985 given by myself and my friend and physics colleague Heinz Pagels, To commemorate Gilliam's death and the death of Pagels who died a few years later, I am reprinting a few week apart the two Sunday Chronicle columns that Gilliam wrote about his experience with us in Big Sur. Part Two is here. Fasten your seat belts for "Gilliam Does Quantum Reality: Part One"

THE WEIRD WORLD OF THE QUANTA

Harold Gilliam SF Chronicle Aug 18, 1985

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific -- and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise --

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

 -- John Keats

In the last 10 years physicists have learned

more about the universe than in previous

centuries -- they have seen a new picture of reality

requiring a conversion of our imaginations.

 -- Heinz Pagels

Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory

has not understood it.

  -- Niels Bohr

Driving down the Big Sur coast to Esalen the other day, looking for some clues to the new picture of reality, I saw on roadside buildings, along several miles of Highway 1, big hand-lettered signs: THANK YOU, FIREFIGHTERS.

The reason for the expression of gratitude soon became evident.. The steep hillsides to the left of the road were charred for miles where the Rat Creek fire had raced down the slopes on a hot dry wind from the east, burning nearly everything in its path.

Esalen, on the ocean side of the highway, barely escaped. The burned hills behind us were screened by Esalen's trees, and we faced the ocean, but occasionally we caught the odor of the scorched earth of the Santa Lucia, and that pungent reminder of another reality became a symbol of the ambiguities in the amazing world of the quanta.

The weekend workshop had a formidable title: "Bell's Theorem and the Nature of Reality." Our leaders were Bay Area physicist Nick Herbert, author of the new book Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics and Heinz Pagels, executive director of the New York Academy of Sciences, author of The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature and Perfect Symmetry: the Search for the Beginning of Time.

With titles like these, we were expecting some tall talk, and we got it, interspersed with good-natured banter between the two physicists who were each convinced that on certain points the other was dead wrong.

In the mellowed-out ambience of Esalen, the 17 workshop participants sprawled on the carpeted living-room floor of the Big House, a former seaside residence, and contemplated the invisible microcosm of the quanta, which seems to turn our common-sense view of the world upside down, or maybe inside out.

The future results of such a revolutionary shift in viewpoint are unpredictable, but the phenomenon has happened before in world history. Nick Herbert reminded us the new view of the universe developed by Isaac Newton overturned the hierarchical medieval world view and pictured a world governed by law -- forming a philosophical basis for a society of laws rather than arbitrary leadership.

The Declaration of Independence: ("We hold these truths to be self-evident ---") cited natural law as the basis for democratic government. In the same way, quantum theory, we were told, seems likely to revolutionize our Newtonian-based views of the world -- and maybe also our technology, our economics, our politics, our entire culture.

Newton had described a clockwork universe ticking along in orderly, predictable fashion -- a gigantic machine governed by such laws as gravitation. "Quantum theory," Herbert told us in the Big House at Esalen, "has smashed Newton's clockwork."

What has replaced Newton's clockwork is a picture of reality that can't be grasped by conventional thinking. Listening to Herbert's description of some very weird interpretations of the quantum world, I began to feel that the theories must have come out of a bottle. Actually they came out of a microscope -- or rather out of certain complicated contraptions such as the cyclotron and the bevatron at the University of California at Berkeley, that serve as supermicroscopes peering into the curious world of the atom.

Quanta are simply particles that are atom-sized or smaller; quantum theory describes these particles and their attributes -- more or less. No one has ever seen an atom, of course, but scientists can detect what the atoms are doing and can smash them together to find out what they're made of. As the supermicroscopes improve, they keep finding smaller and smaller particles, like a series of Chinese boxes.

Physicists examining the workings of atoms were badly shaken up when the particles they found seemed to violate Newton's laws that had been accepted for 300 years as descriptions of how the world works.

Quantum Reality image by Todd Stock aka Dr Paradise

"One of the best kept secrets of science," Herbert told us, "is that physicists have lost their grip on reality." He proceeded to list eight different and partly conflicting versions of how physicists look at quantum reality, most of them utterly preposterous to the non-physicist. Consider these, for example:

# The Copenhagen interpretation was originated by the late Niels Bohr and his colleagues at the Copenhagen Institute. Outlandish as it seems, it is now the view of most mainstream theoretical physicists, Herbert explained. The world we see around us is real, but that world is made up of particles that are not real -- at least not as real as what we see.

As if statements like that were not mystifying enough, Herbert went on to point out that some Copenhagen physicists go further and say that even the world we see around us is not real until we observe it.

Sitting there on the floor of the Esalen living room, trying to adjust the big pillows to be more comfortable, I recalled the old riddle as to whether the tree that falls in the forest makes any sound if there's no one there to hear it. These Copenhagen theorists would say: "No, the tree makes no sound because it isn't really there. Nothing is there until somebody observes it."

In other words, reality is created by the observer. Is the reality of the universe a mirror of one's own mind?

A sobering notion, I reflected. Whatever it means. It could mean that we are not simply cogs in Newton's mechanical universe, but that we somehow participate in ongoing Creation. "Observer-created reality" implies that we have something to say about how the world is put together. Maybe.

"The universe," Sir James Jeans wrote as he contemplated quantum theory, "begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine."

Before I could absorb that one, Herbert was listing a further interpretation.

# Reality is an undivided wholeness. We are all part of the universal being. This viewpoint was expressed by Berkeley physicist Fritjof Capra a few years ago in The Tao of Physics, the book that first aroused popular interest in the interpretation of quantum theory. Capra found certain correlations between this quantum view of reality and the teachings of oriental mystics.

The book created flurries of excitement among mental telepathy enthusiasts, who maintained that physics had now proved the existence of what they had believed all along -- that a transcendental unity behind surface appearances included the interconnectedness of human minds with one another and perhaps with a universal mind.

Actually physics proved no such thing. Capra was simply calling attention to some interesting parallels between quantum theory and the intuitions of the mystics.

# The next quantum reality Herbert described for us was the most outrageous of all. It was the "many worlds" interpretation: In this view reality consists of a steadily increasing number of parallel universes.

Science fiction writers have fun with this one. In one universe you are sailing to Alpha Centauri in a space ship. Simultaneously, in another universe you are having chicken dinner with Henry VIII.

Or you toss a coin and it comes up heads, but in another universe on the same toss the same coin comes up tails. Everything that can happen does happen -- someplace, in some other universe.

I protested silently. It makes no sense, it's not logical. But at that moment Herbert started talking about quantum logic, which is totally different from traditional logic. Under the new logic, apparently, parallel universes make sense.

By this time I had been able to rearrange the pillows in a relatively comfortable position, and as I closed my eyes for a moment to contemplate quantum logic, the voices in the room began to merge with the soporific roar of the surf below, and my mind drifted off.

Instead of a quantum physicist talking to us, it was a fellow in a long robe. He was saying that although we can see the sun rising in the east and setting in the west on its daily trip around the Earth, we are suffering from an illusion. Things don't happen that way at all: the Earth is actually revolving around the sun.

What a preposterous notion, I thought. How could anybody believe in such nonsense? The man, who said his name was Copernicus, was obviously out of his mind.

Before I could tell him so, he was gone, and there was physicist Herbert at a blackboard showing us how Bell's Theorem worked. It turned out to be wilder than anything we had heard so far. And if you want to know what all this has to do with the price of a Big Mac or the national deficit or your latest telephone bill, join us here next Sunday.

The Big House: Esalen Institute

Quantum Assimilation: Resistance is Futile

Mark & Heinz Pagels circa 1980

In Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature, his best-selling quantum theory book, physicist Heinz Pagels explains how an alien intelligence has entered the human world and is beginning to reprogram our culture according to its own inhuman logic. Here I excerpt from his Cosmic Code a segment in which Professor Pagels foresees our inevitable quantum assimilation.

"I think the universe is a message written in code, a cosmic code, and the scientist's job is to decipher that code.

If we accept the idea that the universe is a book read by scientists, then we ought to examine how reading this book influences civilization. Scientists have unleashed a new force into our social, political and economic development--perhaps the major force. What distinguishes this new knowledge is that its source lies outside of human institutions--it comes from the material universe itself. By contrast, literature, art, the law, politics, and even the methods of science have been invented by us. But we did not invent the universe.

In 1965 I was walking through the Boston Commons with friends and met an elderly woman with bright and lively eyes. She was wearing a homemade dress. A poet, she belonged to a small community which rejected the use of machines. The woman told me that her small group saw the human spirit as corrupted by modern life and by technology. She explained that a demonic spirit had come upon this earth about three hundred years ago, a spirit inimical to humanity, which it set out to destroy. The malevolence began when the best minds were captured. The conquest was all but complete, she said, only a few held firm against the final fall. I thought of William Blake, another poet, lamenting Newton's blindness.

The woman asked me what I did, and when I said I was a physicist I was greeted by a look of horror. I was one of "them", the enemy. I felt a chasm open between us.

Some years later I spoke to a mentally disturbed young man. Very agitatedly, he described to me how alien beings from outer space had invaded the earth. They were formed of mental substance, lived in human minds, and controlled human beings through the creations of science and technology. Eventually this alien being would have an autonomous existence in the form of giant computers and would no longer require humans [as hosts.] Soon he was hospitalized because he was unable to shake off this terrible vision.

The old poet and the young man are correct, in their perception that science and technology come from "outside" the realm of human experience. They were sensitive to this perception in a way that most of us suppress. What is outside of us is the universe as a material revelation, the message that I call the cosmic code and that is now programming human social and economic development. What may be perceived as threatening in this alien contact is that scientists, in reading the cosmic code, have entered into the invisible structures of the universe. By the nature of the phenomena it studies, science has become increasingly abstract. The cosmic code has become invisible. The unseen is influencing the seen."