The Quantum Surrender of Science

Science, a once-paralyzed minority of yesterday’s evangelical world, has long last come to the pinnacle of its predecessor. Scientists, now modern day vicars of faith, don fact as surrogates for dogma in their indoctrination of the ever impressionable public mind. As if clergy of old, their methods of derivation remain sacrosanct outside of scientific circles, impervious to the same investigation they readily apply elsewhere. To question the possible defects of the system that produces the central truths by which we live is to question reality itself, for how well our world view has been prescribed by scholastic teachings of scientific convention. All of our lives we have been taught that the world is a predictable place, and where it is not, thereby a lack of information, and not science, exists. We have been told to hold our tongue and quietly shave with the Razor of Occam when faced with the complexities of the unknown. But, let us exhibit caution before we obediently lock ourselves in the edifice of science, for a house of verity built on a foundation of error is sure to fall. Truths, despite adherence to the rules from which they are erected, become little more than falsehoods under incomplete laws of construct.  Heterodoxies Blog presents The Quantum Surrender of Science, a composition on the deconstruction of scientific axiom, which aims to usurp the primacy of science by means of its own dilation, as the progression of such institutions are to be understood as an evolution, and not as the doctrine of truth we have been made to believe.

The invalidity of scientific theory as a truism can be aptly introduced through Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (similar to the liar paradox but with truth replaced by provability), which states that, at a minimum for theories that include a small portion of number theory, “a complete and consistent finite list of axioms can never be created.” Therefore, “in order to establish the consistency of a system S, one needs to use some other more powerful system T, but a proof in T is not completely convincing unless T’s consistency has already been established without using S.” Enter Science, where S=Science and T=Truth, we find that the theory and associated laws of science are built on the truths that science itself produced, hence science is not an axiomatic system that can prove its own consistency. However, in the spirit of fairness, let’s dig deeper and start by reviewing the limitations of science as acknowledged by the scientific community itself.

Science, as we know it, is based on induction, the “process of estimating the validity of observations of part of a class of facts as evidence for a proposition about the whole class.” Simply put, this inductive methodology works by searching out things and making conclusions about those things. Now, if induction is based on the observation of things, then scientists can only conclude on the things they find, and not on the things that they do not find, correct? For example, scientists cannot conclude on the non-existence of apparitions if they are unable to find one, just as they cannot conclude on the non-existence of a white raven without ruling out every raven in existence as black, including those from the past and future.

So what does this all mean for science? Answer: Science, by default, is never capable of proving the non-existence of anything. It can prove the existence of things, but it cannot ever prove the non-existence of them.

So are we only talking about infinitesimal probabilities? No. In fact, briefly consider the ratio of the things that science has proven to date as compared to the infinite possibilities of things that science cannot disprove the existence of, and what might you conclude? Finite vs. infinite? Furthermore, the things that have already been proven by science, that we consider fact today, can never absolutely preclude future refutation. Sure, many of us would stand with confidence behind the things we believe to be true today, however it is impossible for any truth to safeguard itself against reversal in the future, as we will exemplify shortly. It simply cannot be proven that any fact is absolute in nature ad infinitum.

The statistical suspicion that there are more possible truths not yet proven than there are existing scientific truths, combined with the already existing scientific truths that cannot weather themselves against possible future refutation, leads to the stark revelation that scientific fact in itself is but a small minority compared to the truths of tomorrow waiting to be discovered. That’s right, and we are taught never to break convention and think outside of that which science has already deemed true. “Already deemed true” occurs in the past tense, hence the shackling of ourselves to our own historical record, forever prohibited from stepping into the present for fear that the “rules” may discontinue conformity. In sum, not only are we shutting out possible future truths by adhering to science’s own limitations, we are also deterring ourselves from considering the possibilities where science is simply wrong. We’ll explore but a few of these irreconcilable examples where science has, not only proven itself to be incorrect, but, depraved the very laws on which the world view of its making has depended since its rise to prominence.

Through such fundamental scientific principles as reductionism, complex systems have become nothing more than the sum of their parts where pre-existing local hidden variables reside that autonomously determine the outcome of all measurements as independent of the subjects who study them. From the principle of locality, where objects are only influenced directly by their immediate surroundings, to their counterfactual definiteness (CFD) in which every possible measurement (in practice or theory) yields a single definite result, we have built a predictable world that behaves deterministically via prior causal occurrences. Such theories have become the truths we live by right down to Albert Einstein’s “God does not play dice”; a cornerstone of scientific thought that affirms physical theories must be deterministic to be complete. Until recently, scientific principles as these were allegedly absolute maxims of our world view. That is until Quantum Physics, more popularly known as Quantum Mechanics, was discovered.

Science likes to laud how Quantum Mechanics was discovered, as if it were a building block atop classical scientific principles. But, as you will see, it turned many of scientific so-called truths that are still being taught in classrooms today on their head.

Through Quantum Mechanics, emergentism has trumped reductionism, finding that “strong interaction between units produce new phenomena in higher levels that cannot be accounted for solely by reductionism.” Emergent phenomenon was discovered by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in which enantiomer molecules, “made up of precisely the same atoms, in precisely the same arrangement, have different properties when interacting with other molecules.” Simply put, in the words of Nobel physicist Philip W. Anderson, to the chagrin of Occam, “more is different”.

Bell’s Theorem, developed by physicist John S. Bell, aptly demonstrated that “no physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics”, and no algorithm could avoid nonlocalities, concluding that determinism/CFD and local hidden variables cannot both be true. Bell’s Inequalities went on to show that quantum mechanically entangled particles “have been shown to influence each other when physically separated by 18 km, thus the principle of locality is false.” Bell’s Theorem empirically proved that the world is in fact nonlocal, that is, as recounted in New Scientist, “things can influence one another instantaneously regardless of how much space stretches between them, violating Einstein’s (Special Relativity) insistence that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light”, which depends on the principle of locality to work. This means, as recounted in the infamous EPR paradox, when “the spin of one particle is measured, the spin of the other particle is now instantaneously known.” Moreover, “the most discomforting aspect of this paradox is that the effect is instantaneous so that something that happens in one galaxy could cause an instantaneous change in another galaxy.”

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle further demonstrated that the fundamental constituents of matter behave indeterministically, and with complementarity, as in the case of ecological and biological phenomena where the very act of being observed or measured changes the results. One good example can be found when trying to measure features of an electron; “The more precisely one can localize the position of an electron along an axis, the more imprecise becomes the ability to determine its linear momentum along this axis and vice-versa.” Complementarity describes how the physical properties exist in pairs and how the manifestation of these properties is driven by trade-offs between these complementary pairs, which are not fixed, thus indeterministic. In physics, these different states of “known” and “unknown” are captured by the concept of the wavefunction, which represents the probability distribution that any given system will be in any of the possible states (unknown), and the particle, which represents the singular resulting state after a probability comes to fruition (known). When the position of a wave is defined, concentrated at one point, it in turn has an indefinite wavelength. On the flip-side, when a wavelength is fixed, its oscillation, hence position, becomes indefinite. Each property, once they have interacted, becomes entangled with its relative state.

The bizarreness of the phenomenon only grows deeper. A study, called the double-slit experiment, demonstrated that these waves and particles are in actuality inseparable, expanding the complementarity principle to what is called wave–particle duality. The experiment identified that that the electron properties can switch back and forth between being a wavefunction probability and being a precisely measured particle, and although both views can never be viewed at the same time, the electron in reality is both a wave and a particle simultaneously, and it is merely the act of measurement that toggles the view. The wave can be likened if you were standing at a fork in a road, and as you walk down one of the two paths, the path you walk down has its probability distribution narrowed as it becomes detailed and known (particle), while the path you left behind has its probability distribution widen as it gets further away and becomes less known (wave). But, moreover, both roads still remain as both the wave and the particle, for it is only your conscious interaction with one of the roads that drives your perception of the state change.

This interaction-induced phenomenon is called the observer effect (as described in the Wigner’s Friend analogy, an extension of the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment), and/or the measurement problem, depending on if the interpretation is based on “consciousness causes collapse” or “measurement causes collapse”. According to the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, after the wave is measured, it coalesces into a single physical particle/outcome through what is called the wavefunction collapse (i.e. – collapse of the wave probabilities into a single known particle). Flipping a coin can be used as an analogy. As the coin is flipped into the air the wavefunction contains all probabilities (heads, tails, or other), and higher probabilities are just wider openings for the wave to enter and “become” the particle of a single reality.

Where the Copenhagen interpretation presumes the wavefunction collapses into a single reality, the Many Worlds interpretation conversely denies the wavefunction collapse through a theory that assumes that the wave is sustained, containing all outcomes in parallel worlds, where the act of measurement generates a “splitting” or “branching” that merely hones in on one of those worlds. In other words the Copenhagen interpretation views the wave as unrealized probabilities that ultimately result in a single derived reality while the Many Worlds interpretation views the wave not as probabilities, but actualities simultaneously existing in parallel worlds where the act of conscious observation or measurement drives an irreversible difference between which branch will be perceived, while the other branches will be perceived by other observers in alternate worlds. This is described in Parallel Universes,by Fred Alan Wolfe, as “the wave takes advantage of each opening possibility for it to flow into…just as an ocean wave splits into parts, flowing into different channels or eddies.” Yet, when one attempts to measure what is happening, “the different possibilities are not waves spilling over jetties and around barriers or piers, they are realities in different worlds” where “each world appears and disappears recombining back into one world each time a subatomic particle interacts with something.”

According to the Schrödinger Equation, there is a “linear superposition of different states, but actual measurements always find the physical system in a definite state”, but because the state of the observers is indefinite, the wavefunction spreads out into an ever larger superposition of parallel worlds. Any single observer can be likened to a multitude of observers witnessing different results, yet each observer never feels the superposition, only the single result that they have manifested, hence believing there is only one firm result in a static reality. This superposition of parallel worlds, hence parallel consciousness, is now giving rise to the idea that certain psychological disorders, such as schizophrenia, have their answers in the quantum realm of explanation.

The double-slit experiment appears to support the Many Worlds interpretation. When a wave of particles (prior to being measured) was forced through two slits in a wall (to be measured on an adjacent landing wall), the wave’s apparent “choice” between the two slits appeared to cause the wave to interfere with itself and narrow its probability to the entrance of a one slit at a time, where the quantity of particles hitting the adjacent landing wall were, unexpectedly, no greater in quantity than when the wave was forced through a single slit in the wall. The results were wrongly predicted to be additive, as the more slits, the more particles there are that should have transferred through the slits to be measured on the adjacent wall. This gave rise to the notion that if these probabilities can literally affect one another, then they must be manifest in some way and be more than mere probabilities. They are thought to be akin to parallel realities that exist simultaneously, while only one particle (outcome) within the wave would exist in any one world, explaining why the dual-wave only yields one particle from each point where the wave is measured. It appears that, if Quantum theory applies to all reality, “other worlds are as real as ours”, or so admits Stephen Hawking.

Contrary to classical interpretations of science, Quantum Mechanics has demonstrated that the non-existent affects the existent and vice versa, that particles don’t exist until you measure them, that they can be in more than one place at a time, that the very act of consciously interacting with them in fact changes their reality, and that they can affect one another when separated by great distances, even to the point of demonstrating quantum telecloning between two “entangled” particles, resulting in “the first remote copies of beams of laser light, by combining quantum cloning with quantum teleportation into a single experimental step.” Unlike classical systems of thought, in quantum mechanics there is no naive way of identifying the true state of the world. As stated by Wolfe in Parallel Universes, if an electron were to follow the physics of Sir Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell, “it would never be able to leave the atom, nor would it ever be able to emit radiation, as it does when a light bulb is turned on.” Ronald Giere, an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota and one-time President of the Philosophy of Science Association, explains in his book Explaining Science, “if [Newton’s laws of motion and the various force laws one finds in the standard texts] are understood as statements making claims directly about the world, all the laws of motion and force laws one finds written down are known to be false — a discomforting fact to say the least.” This is summarized in his book Scientific Perspectivism where he argues that scientific methods are like colors that only capture narrow aspects of reality, not as they exist independently unto themselves, but rather as seen from a distinctive human perspective.

Old scientific concepts, such as the idea that things have definite properties even when no one is there to measure them, or that “real things” behave as we predict they should, are now as incomplete as the world is flat, as least in terms of the fundamental components that make up our everyday objects. What is true of the particles that compose our everyday objects also has bearing on the everyday objects themselves. French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat, through The Guardian , confirms that “the basic components of objects – the particles, electrons, quarks etc. – cannot be thought of as self-existent”. He explains in Discover Magazine, that “Quantum Mechanics introduced another point of view, which consists essentially that the aim of science is not to describe ultimate reality as it really is,” but, “rather, it is to make account of reality as it appears to us, accounting for the limitations of our own mind and our own sensibilities.”

In the world of Quantum Mechanics, phenomena of low probability, such as paranormal phenomena that used to be considered impossible if not abiding by the deterministic, repeatable scientific descriptions, are now just as “real” as “normal” events that demonstrate the high probability of being repeatedly predictable. If the paranormal is defined as lacking scientific explanation, then likewise should not science be defined as lacking the proper means to explain the paranormal? This is in fact what has been determined with submolecular paranormal events, giving rise to the Quantum theory of explanation. Even the late Albert Einstein admitted “the more I learn of physics, the more I am drawn to metaphysics.” So what is stopping us from exploring such possibilities as Quantum Healing, which “invokes quantum entanglement and the observer effect to argue that the consciousness of a healer could impact the body of another person”? What is stopping us from exploring the “reality” beneath the mind of the conscious observer that has the power to turn the unknown wave into the known world? There are some investigations of this nature, such as conducted by The Monroe Institute, or as detailed by Richard Strassman in DMT: The Spirit Molecule, among select others, however most of these endeavors are not taken seriously by the majority of the scientific community who, although acknowledge Quantum Physics, remain stuck inside the self-constructed boundaries of the micro-quantum world despite its provision for the foundation of our macro-quantum reality. Even those in the Neuroscience fields shy away from considering reality, as constructed from the mind, as a “real” thing, instead opting to explain away phenomena as neurological disorders prone to imagination. The doorway beckoning us to explore the unknown is not only being barred shut to those outside of scientific circles, we continue to be herded through the old doors of classical science in our education systems as its doctrine persists at predicating our interpretations of the world as the local, deterministic place that it is not. Until we truly explore the world from inside of the mind that creates the world, we will likely never fully understand it.

What is needed now is the persistent disposal of scientific models that are limited to reductionism, determinism and localism, to be replaced with new models that consider factors from both higher and lower hierarchical levels, as well as those that acknowledge the observer and the act of measurement itself on reality. We are in need of models that literally include the unknown as part of their architecture, where, according to Wolfe, “things that aren’t play a role in the world of everything that is”, such that “which isn’t also is”. As unconventional as it seems, the scientific models of tomorrow must challenge scientific doctrine and implore heterodoxies – they must reject conformism and invite dissent, and eliminate boundaries, not solicit them. For we now are beginning to understand, through such examples as Quantum Physics, that we live in a world that is in fact full of infinities overlapping infinities, where worlds upon worlds exist simultaneously, and where reality is literally in the eye of the “conscious beholder”. But most of all, in our infinite trek for truth, our scientific models of tomorrow must not only remember to bring society and its educational establishments along for the ride, they must demand participation from the true unveilers of the infinite realities they seek to ascertain.