Fear of a Black Universe

by Stephon Alexander

  The iconic theorist John Archibald Wheeler asked similar questions and believed that quantum mechanics plays a pivotal role in relating conscious observers to the very operation of the universe. While it may seem absurd, this type of reasoning led Wheeler to formulate a more bizarre version of the double slit experiment that he called the delayed choice experiment. Maybe the wildest thing about the delayed choice experiment is that it has been experimentally observed.6 Here is an easy way to understand the experiment. Let’s revisit the double slit experiment. We know that observing the electron before it enters the slit results in particle behavior, and not observing causes the electrons to behave like waves, due to interference. But what if we take the observation device away from the slits and place it at the screen? With precision technology, experimenters were able to wait till the last moment before the electrons hit the screen to watch it. In this case the electrons went through the slit like waves, and right before hitting the screen they collapsed like particles—the pattern was the same as when the double slit experiment measures the electron at the slit, which is not a wavelike pattern, even though you might expect that we’d get a wavelike distribution. From this bizarre behavior it means that the electron retrocausally went back in time and went through the slits like a particle. In other words, observers can delay their measurement of the electron’s particle or wavelike behavior before it hits the screen.

  In his own words, Wheeler asked, “So what does the quantum have to do with the universe? Perhaps everything, because in any fundamental theorem of existence, the large and the small cannot be separated.” Here we get a sense of what it means for the universe to have a wave function. Like a quantum particle that traverses many paths from beginning to end, our quantum universe traces out many histories simultaneously from the bang to the present. In his idea that he called the participatory universe, which is a delayed choice experiment for the universe, Wheeler proposed that when conscious observers make quantum measurements of the early universe, we collapse the universe’s quantum wave function to a history consistent with our existence.

  As a younger, wide-eyed grad student I came across Wheeler’s crazy ideas, such as “it from bit” (about the relationship between information and matter) and the absorber theory (about the direction of time) that he coauthored with Richard Feynman. Ironically, and similar to the experience Michael Faraday had with the idea of fields, these ideas began as outlandish but are now the norm of theoretical physics research, especially our quest to build a quantum computer. Nevertheless, most physicists shy away from entering Wheeler’s rabbit hole of the participatory universe and exploring the possibility that seemingly insignificant specks like us can have any connection to and influence on the cosmos.

  Wheeler believed that the universe implemented Darwinian evolution—and, as I and Salvador Almagro-Moreno argued, the entropocentric principle to create conscious life for the universe to observe itself. This self-measurement solves the measurement problem in quantum cosmology in one sense, because it gives a mechanism to collapse the universe’s wave function to its current and future state of existence. However, the universe had to wait fourteen billion years for the first form of biological life to come on the scene. If there was no life before then, how could the universe measure itself? I do not know if Wheeler was aware of Schrödinger’s musings on consciousness in the universe, but his statement points to the underlying physics: “So what does the quantum have to do with the universe? Perhaps everything, because in any fundamental theorem of existence, the large and the small cannot be separated.”

  This statement points to what I believe is the key insight to reconcile the lack of life as we know it to collapse the wave function of the universe—a nonlocal conscious observer. This nonlocality is complementary to locality in the same way the electron’s position is complementary to its momentum. Recall that we discussed that the entirety of the quantum electron relies on opposing local and nonlocal properties; it is both a wave and a particle at the same time. Let us assume that consciousness, like charge and quantum spin, is fundamental and exists in all matter to varying degrees of complexity. Therefore consciousness is a universal quantum property that resides in all the basic fields of nature—a cosmic glue that connects all fields as a perceiving network.

  Others are pursuing similar questions. Recently, Johnjoe McFadden and others have published neuroscience research arguing that consciousness is carried by electromagnetic field patterns distributed throughout the brain. Different organizational properties of fields can carry an array of conscious experiences. They point out each neuron in the brain can generate electric fields around their cell membrane and these individual fields can superpose across billions of neurons creating a complex pattern, rich in an organizational property, discovered by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, called integrated information. Many prominent neuroscientists, such as Christof Koch and Tononi, believe some form of panpsychism is necessary to address the hard problem of consciousness.

  What these proposals don’t do is consider whether consciousness must be limited to our bodies. Our conscious experience is local in that our internal experience is in reference to our localized body in space and time. We might take this for granted, but that doesn’t mean the universe does. What would it look like to have a nonlocal conscious experience? It could not be in reference to a place. According to the superposition principle in quantum mechanics, we could represent the nonlocal state of consciousness by superposing a large number of local conscious observers. If the universe’s quantum state is endowed with a nonlocal state of consciousness, then according to this type of complementarity, it is dual to a superposition of local consciousness. This would resolve Schrödinger’s paradox—why do so many minds have their own conscious experience? All these local minds need to be superposed to reconstruct a unitary, nonlocal, cosmic mind, like the positions of the electron needs to be superposed to create its field. The cosmic mind is contained in the local minds, though hidden from our everyday local experiences. What this means for you and me is that our consciousness contains an aspect of the cosmic mind. In Vedic philosophy this is referred to as the Atman, or the self.

  This conclusion to some might be awe-inspiring or preposterous. When I set out to write this book, there was no way I could have imagined presenting this argument. If you find this line of reasoning preposterous, it is even crazier that we came into being to even be able to ponder these questions. Giving a shout-out to the distinguished Indian physicist: No one ever died from theorizing!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  When I first entertained the idea of writing this book I was overwhelmed with self-doubt. I want to especially thank K.C. Cole and Maria Popova for empowering and supporting me with some important tools and encouragement to get through writing this book. I also want to thank Mark Gould, one of the world’s most brilliant social theorists, for his ongoing support and collaboration on theorizing the sociology of science with me. To my editor, the magician TJ Kelleher—thanks for yet another amazing journey. Thanks to Lara Heimert, Kelly Lenkevich, Sharon Kunz, Liz Wetzel, and the Basic, Perseus, Hachette team for helping to bring this book into reality. Thanks, Brandon Ogbunu, for your inspiration, guiding me through the very first stages of writing, and continuing to be a soundboard all the way through. Thank you Glenn Loury for writing The Anatomy of Racial Inequality and for your constructive criticisms that made this book stronger. Thanks to David Spergel for reading and providing scientific guidance on the manuscript. Thanks, Indradeep Ghosh, for your frank insights and guidance, Joao Magueijo, for many discussions, and Jaron Lanier, for co-writing a chapter and teaching me how to think outside the box. Finally, thank you to members of the Alexander Theory Group at Brown University.

  Thank you Jerome Alexander, Salvador Almagro Moreno, Asohan Amarasingham, Sarah Bawabe, Willis Bilderback, Brown University, Will Calhoun, Liam Carpenter-Urquhart, Saint Clair Cemin, Colin Channer, Dwayne Ray Cormier, Everard Findlay, Batia Freedman-Shaw, Ashok Gangadean, Mel
ving Gibbs, Heather Goodell, Jeff Greenwald, Leah Jenks, Ned Kahn, Brian Keating, Dagny Kimberly, Jaron Lanier, Janna Levin, Evan McDonough, Fernanod Pezzino, Vernon Reid, David Rothenberg, Susan Sharin, Jim Simons, Lee Smolin, Richard Snyder, Greg Tate, Greg Thomas, and Eric Weinstein.

  Discover Your Next Great Read

  Get sneak peeks, book recommendations, and news about your favorite authors.

  Tap here to learn more.

  © Heather Goodell

  Stephon Alexander is a professor of physics at Brown University and the 2020 president of the National Society of Black Physicists. He is also a jazz musician and released his first electronic jazz album Here Comes Now with Erin Rioux and God Particle with bassist Melvin Gibbs. The author of Jazz of Physics, Alexander lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

  NOTES

  Chapter 2: The Changeless Change

  1. Mathematically we can define a space-time vector as where c is the speed of light and has dimensions . This gives the time axis a dimension of length since the dimensions of the time interval, , is length.

  2. A local, freely falling observer in an exactly homogenous gravitational field experiences no forces. However, in a realistic situation there are gravitational field lines that are inhomogenous around the observer that will yield tidal forces.

  3. Our direct experience of being in rotating environments seems different from being at rest, especially since rotation is a form of acceleration, which seems to mimic the effect of a force. We will soon see that this was part of Albert Einstein’s insight about the equivalence of acceleration and being subject to a gravitational field without accelerating.

  4. A geodesic can be understood more geometrically with vectors that are tangent to a point on a curved space, called a tangent vector. If we take a tangent vector, , and transport it to a nearby region while keeping it parallel to itself, this amounts to satisfying the geodesic equation:

  5. A solid example of a dynamical equation is that for how a pathogen like a virus grows in time:

  Rate of growth of virus at a later time = (R-1)amount of virus at earlier time

  Or symbolically

  = (R-1)y(t)

  Here R is famously known as the reproduction number. As I write this the COVID-19 virus has an average R of 2.3 in the United States. This leads to a solution of the number of infections to be exponentially growing in time .

  6. All four Maxwell equations are contained in one equation if we write it in a manifestly Lorentz covariant form: . The left-hand side of the equation is the four-dimensional derivative of the field strength tensor that contains all electric and magnetic field information, and the right-hand side is the four-dimensional current, containing the electric charge and currents.

  Chapter 3: Superposition

  1. The concept of phase space was pioneered by Ludwig Boltzmann, Henri Poincaré, and Josiah Willard Gibbs. Phase space is a key tool in formulating thermodynamics and statistical mechanics and in identifying attractors in chaos theory.

  2. The particles, like the photon, that communicate the forces between matter are called bosons and have integer spin. But half-integer spin belongs in Alice’s Wonderland. To get a feel, consider a child riding a merry-go-round. If the merry-go-round had half-integer spin, a child would have to go around two full rotations to ap-pear at his or her original position. Likewise, an electron needs to spin not 360 but 720 degrees to come back to its original spin orientation. M. C. Escher’s drawing of ants traversing a Möbius strip is an example of a space that requires two orbits to return to the same place. Another fundamental characteristic of an electron is that it never stops spinning.

  3. I even used the concept of quantum entanglement in my role of science adviser for Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time, directed by Ava DuVernay.

  4. Wave functions are vectors that live in a complex vector space called a Hilbert space. Said another way, a Hilbert space is a space of all possible wave functions and has all the usual properties of linear vector spaces commonplace to linear algebra.

  Chapter 4: The Zen of Quantum Fields

  1. Kensho is a Japanese word that translates to what Westerners call enlightenment, a liberating experience recorded by Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha. According to the Buddha this potential to experience kensho is accessible to all humans. Similar accounts of the enlightenment experience were recorded by individuals across different cultures. Meister Eckhart calls it a breakthrough. The theologian St. Symeon calls it waking up. “I wasn’t there.” “There was only the tree.” “A sense of utter liberation and bliss.” “It is overwhelmingly positive.” “It’s like being drunk, but on reality.” “It’s more real than real.”

  2. This cosmic ocean is called the vacuum state of quantum field theory. The vacuum state can both create and annihilate particles with quantum operators called creation and annihilation operators, respectively.

  3. This “simple way” is a linear interaction between the photon vector potential and the fermion current. Such a linear interaction guarantees a local phase invariance for the electrons provided the gauge field simultaneously compensates the phase with its own phase transformation.

  Chapter 5: Emergence

  1. In modern times, solid-state physics is often called condensed-matter physics, which also involves the study of the various states of matter, such as liquid, gaseous, and crystalline, where many quantum particles interact quantum mechanically.

  2. Kenneth Chang, “When Superconductivity Became Clear (to Some),” New York Times, January 8, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/science/08super.html.

  Chapter 6: If Basquiat Were a Physicist

  1. The electron can only have discrete (quantum) spin about its axis of rotation and never stops spinning. This is to be contrasted with a macroscopic spinning object, which can continuously change its spin orientation from up to down, such as when a top starts spinning and eventually falls to its surface. If the electron’s spin flips from up to down, it does so discretely, in a quantum unit of spin. And strangely, experiments seem to require one electron to coexist in a spin up and spin down state at the same time.

  2. A conformal invariant theory is analogous to looking at features of a theory under a “magnifying glass.” This is equivalent to zooming in or rescaling the coordinates of the observables of the theory. If the predictions of the theory do not change under this zooming in, or zooming out, the theory is said to be scale-invariant. The microcosm has the same properties as the macrocosm. In some special cases, conformal invariance is the same as scale-invariance.

  3. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

  4. Du Bois wrote that “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” W. E. B. du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Orinda, CA: SeaWolf Press, 2020).

  5. The conscience collective constitutes the shared social values within any social order; it regulates norms and activities in every social order, but it is not always well integrated; the values are not always consistent, and thus the social order might be poorly ordered. Here we might think about the conscience collective for both the larger society and for the community of physicists.

  6. Phenomenologists sometimes call these cultural norms, which differentiate between sense and nonsense, the “lifeworld.” If the lifeworld is functioning effectively, it is tacit—we are unaware that we are seeing the world through it.

  7. Durkheim recognized three functi
ons of punishment. The first is the one usually discussed in the literature. Punishment creates an incentive to conform to social and cultural norms; it realigns what is in the interest of actors. Second, as noted in the text, punishment delineates the boundary of what is allowed. If a public violation of a normative expectation goes unpunished, it will undermine the clarity of the normative orientation; in contrast, the punishment of specific actions reinforces normative boundaries. Third is what we call the “sucker effect.” If conformity to a normative expectation continually disadvantages an actor, this will undermine her commitment to the relevant norm; she will feel like a sucker conforming while those who violate the norm are advantaged over her. If she knows, instead, that violators are likely to be punished for their violations, this enables her to sustain her sense of obligation.