Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  I find the manyworlds interpretation most intriguing for what it says about the many scientists who in their love for this theory arguably stop practicing science at all. The idea that our universe is one of a seemingly infinite number, splitting off into still more “copies” of the universe (or perhaps just copies of quantum wave functions, depending on who’s doing the talking) as different possibilities are realized—as in one universe the electron spins up, in another it spins down—is pretty tough to accept outside the Cineplex. And so the manyworlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is in a sense modern science’s great Achilles’ heel—the evidence of what desperation can do to us all. Because in trying to reconcile a mechanistic picture of the world with the vagaries of quantum mechanics, a surprisingly large number of scientists endorse the seemingly unscientific idea of an infinite number of parallel somethings operating unseen alongside ours.

  I don’t call the manyworlds theory unscientific just because it sounds like something out of a science fiction plot. I call it unscientific because more than fifty years after it was first introduced, by a theoretical physicist named Hugh Everett, no one has devised an experiment to test whether the manyworlds theory is so. Of course, the scientific method calls for scientists to construct testable hypotheses. And in fact, if a theory isn’t testable it’s normally not considered sound science. Some scientists rail against manyworlds for these very reasons, yet the idea has largely been granted a pass.

  In a poll conducted by political scientist L. David Raub of leading cosmologists and other quantum field theorists, in fact, 58 percent responded, “Yes, I think [the] ManyWorlds Interpretation is true.”

  Proponents of manyworlds include some of science’s greatest luminaries, like Stephen Hawking, Murray Gell-Mann, and Richard Feynman. Supporters seem to like this theory, no matter how far-out it sounds, because it allows them to go on looking at this universe exactly the way they already do. These many universes, the theory goes, don’t interfere with each other in any way that might force us to refigure our current understanding of physics. But this lack of direct observation, from any one universe to another, is also what nudges the idea from the empirical confines of science toward philosophy.

  There is some hypocrisy here: mental telepathy, which we discussed in chapter 2, is dismissed by the scientific mainstream—despite mountains of well-controlled scientific research suggesting something small but real is going on there. In contrast, an untestable idea like manyworlds, unencumbered by the stigma surrounding the paranormal, can win wide acceptance from these very same people.

  That QM has driven a great many scientists into a claim that, like the supernatural, seems to lie beyond the current reach of science should not come as a surprise. The legendary physicist Richard Feynman knew what a challenge QM presented to our understanding. Often, this kind of talk is dismissed as hyperbole, scientists patting themselves on the back for understanding what mere mortals can’t—or in Feynman’s case, a beautiful mind speaking off the cuff. But in a philosophical sense Feynman meant every word. In a lecture collected in The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Feynman says of quantum mechanics: “It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it… . I don’t understand it. Nobody does.”

  We should be clear here. In a practical sense, scientists do understand quantum physics.

  Quantum mechanics enabled scientists to predict new kinds of particles, which they subsequently found. And quantum mechanics helped us discover the forces that bind atoms into molecules—in short, chemistry. Quantum mechanics, or the science of subatomic particles, is the foundation of computers, televisions, all the electronics we consume. Our knowledge of the subatomic world is powerful, powerful enough to make it work for us. But what we don’t understand about quantum mechanics is what it means for our philosophy. And so the iPod has also come with a terrible cost—and I don’t mean $250.

  Traditionalists, including Einstein, thought the new uncertain foundation of the universe that had just been discovered was itself illusory, though he himself had helped to usher in this new understanding! If the strangeness of the quantum world was not somehow explained away, complained Einstein, “I would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming house, than a physicist.”

  There is something important to consider here about the human beings who practice science. Einstein, like many physicists and rationalists, simply liked the idea of a predictable world better. He chose to enter physics because—like Hameroff, dreaming of standing at the edge of the universe—he liked the idea of being able to explain how everything worked. And he was honest enough to admit his own disappointment in the world Quantum Mechanics described. Today, physicists and cosmologists remain embroiled in a controversy over whether the Many Worlds interpretation of QM even qualifies as science. This infinite number of hypothesized universes could turn out to be real. But for now, their reality seems largely subjective, a matter of preference.

  The terrible cost of QM is that it has thrown up the shutters on us all; and in its mysteries, it has forced scientists to go beyond the evidence and data at hand to find some way of claiming the world they prefer is also the world that is so. This is the stormy, conflicted milieu into which Hameroff and Penrose reached to explain consciousness. In doing so, they immediately subjected themselves not just to scientific criticism—but to scientific anger. That is in great part why Hameroff got the reception he did at the Beyond Belief conference—a reception that was at least as emotional as it was reasonable. And that is why so many scientists continue to castigate his quantum-based theory of consciousness, even though we have more reason than ever to believe QM might play some role in biological systems.

  HAMEROFF REMAINS PERHAPS BEST known for his appearance in the surprise hit documentary film, What the Bleep Do We Know?, a New Agey treatment of quantum mechanics in which human beings are said to create their own reality. Critics of the 2004 film contend it got its science something less than half-right—stretching the role of the observer in choosing whether to measure a particle into an almost Godlike power to succeed in life, love, and career merely by thinking it so. The movie has since become a kind of Exhibit A in arguments skeptics make against the invocation of what is often dubbed “quantum magic” or “quantum quackery.” But Hameroff, who was one of numerous talking heads in the film, isn’t afraid to speak up for it—to a point. “I thought the movie was meant to entertain and inspire,” he says, “and on that score it succeeded. Look at how popular it is. I stand by everything I said in the film, and as for the rest, I had nothing to do with it.”

  The things Hameroff says in and outside the film, however, are more than enough to earn him a spot in the skeptic’s Hall of Shame. Telepathy, the afterlife, spirituality: Hameroff has claimed that a quantum origin for consciousness could open the door to all these things. Entanglement might explain telepathy and contribute to an afterlife spent roaming the cosmos in a tiny subatomic form. Crazy stuff, that. But it’s safe to say, more than fifteen years after they first introduced their theory to the world, the jeering is loud but the jury is still out on the Penrose-Hameroff model of consciousness.

  In sum, what became known as Orch-OR, or orchestrated objective reduction, would explain consciousness and the primary mystery of quantum mechanics in one shot. The observer effect, in which the waveform is said to “collapse” into a particle state, is consciousness; each conscious moment is a collapse. The particulars of how this happens are as complicated as you might wish them to be, revolving around a theory of quantum gravity. But essentially, the Penrose-Hameroff model relates collapse of the wave function/consciousness to fundamental components of the universe—like the properties of space and time. They cannot be explained or reduced because there is nothing to reduce them to.

  The most often cited argument against Orch-OR was given early on by physicist Max Tegmark, who argued that microtubules could not sustain quantum states for a long enough period of time to be relevant to neu
ral processing. But Hameroff and a physicist named Jack Tuszynski countered by saying that Tegmark had improperly modeled the Orch-OR theory, rendering his calculations inaccurate. The state of play hasn’t really changed since then, and so, in short, no one has yet falsified Orch-OR or completed an experiment that suggests Orch-OR must be so. For now, the theory’s real value lies in the reaction it has provoked, demonstrating how desperate believers are to earn the scientific validation of quantum physics, and how deathly afraid materialists are of considering that quantum mechanics might validate some paranormal claims about the nature of the world or even influence our philosophy.

  In fact, the most telling assault on Orch-OR was the one launched by philosopher Patricia Churchland before the Penrose-Hameroff model was even published. “She couldn’t wait until it even came out to attack it,” Hameroff told me, smiling. “I mean—what is that?”

  Churchland is herself renowned. But in this instance, her emotions seem to have got the better of her. She tried a twin-barreled, microtubule/anesthesia-based argument on Hameroff, an expert on microtubules and anesthesia. Perhaps predictably, Hameroff’s response demonstrated the errors she and coauthor Rick Grush made in their haste to object to Orch-OR. Still, I can’t help but admire Tegmark and Churchland (and anyone who has bothered to do any research in association with shooting down Hameroff’s idea). More often his critics do … nothing.

  As a kind of pushback to the more whacky ideas in What the Bleep Do We Know?, a lot of popular science journals and a lot of popular scientists argue that there really isn’t anything crazy about quantum mechanics—and all arguments that QM plays a role in consciousness are de facto bunk. All this stuff going on at the micro-level of reality is only going on there, anyway, so in effect, Who the bleep cares?

  Quantum mechanics is the science of the small. How small, you ask? Well, as physicist Brian Greene writes in The Fabric of the Cosmos, at the infinitesimal level of the Planck Scale, where the weirdest aspects of the quantum take hold, “there would be no such thing as a distance shorter than the Planck length.” So you take the skeptics’ point. Quantum effects may underlie our physical world, but they are too small to influence what we perceive.

  As we scale up from the quantum micro-world of subatomic particles to the macroworld of people and things, all the weirdness of the quantum literally disappears and has no effect on the reality we interact with every day.

  This wall, between the big and the small, has for a long time seemed particularly high and sound. But as I stated earlier, the authority of science is its method—not its current base of knowledge. And the fact is, the “too small” argument no longer works so well.

  The micro-scale of the quantum interacts with the macroworld of you and me far more than we knew just three years ago. These new findings may not have made the Penrose-Hameroff model likely, but they do render the idea that quantum effects play a significant role in consciousness more plausible. Biologists are in fact finding that quantum processes may underlie the migratory habits of birds, the human sense of smell, and photosynthesis in plants. Quantum processes are proving far more stable and resistant to warm, wet biological environments than anyone ever thought possible.

  Experiments are also seeking quantum processes in human visual perception, which should perhaps not come as such a great surprise. Experts in art, architecture, and music have long known about the golden ratio—a precise mathematical formulation that holds mysterious aesthetic appeal. Why is the Mona Lisa such a compelling figure? After all, M’lady’s forehead is so wide! But the Mona Lisa is so appealing because her proportions are equal to the golden ratio, which can be expressed in a variety of forms or as a mathematical figure, 1.6180339887. Mona’s mischievous eye and the corner of her playfully curled lip are lined up in so-called golden sections within the painting. And what does this have to do with quantum mechanics?

  Well, in early 2010, experimenters at Oxford University found that quantum particles in a resonant state reflected the same ratio: 1.618. The lead investigator, Radu Coldea, claimed the ratio is too precise for its appearance in quantum physics, and art, to be a coincidence. “It reflects a beautiful property of the quantum system—a hidden symmetry. Actually quite a special one called E8 by mathematicians, and this is its first observation in a material.”

  Was Hameroff’s Beyond Belief presentation exactly right when he talked, years before this experiment, about perfect forms being embedded as a fundamental property of the universe? Is this, in fact, another sign of an intimate relationship between the macro-and micro-scales? As Penrose noted in Emperor’s New Mind, two experiments, including one conducted in 1941, demonstrated that the human retina can react to a single photon. This is a direct example of a physical interaction between the micro-and macro-scales, known for sixty-eight years, which raises a question I think we can answer: if that discovery about the retina being sensitive to a single photon was known in 1941 (and reconfirmed in 1979), how had this wall between micro-and macro-scales ever stood so high for so long in the first place?

  Well, because we wanted it to, we needed it to.

  Give the wall some credit. Maintaining a strict dividing line between these two worlds was and is convenient. There is a real difference between what we observe at these two scales of reality. None of us goes winking out of existence in one place and appearing in another, for instance, like quantum particles. But it’s also the case that we don’t know precisely where to draw the line between the micro-and macroworlds at all—and never really did.

  In a 2008 Seed magazine article, which I suspect will go down as one of the most important pieces of popular science journalism ever written, author Joshua Roebke captures experimental physicist Anton Zeilinger’s long, dark, and productive night of the scientific soul. Zeilinger has been finding more and more quantum processes going on in macro-scale objects, suggesting these strange quantum occurrences are going on all the time, in objects large and small, and are simply out of the range of our ability to perceive them. Zeilinger admitted to Roebke that he was in fact so thrown by what these experiments were showing him that he felt he had no choice other than to give in to the mystery, and hire, of all things, a philosopher.

  In fact, Roebke’s article ends with Zeilinger placing just such an employment ad. (Can you imagine how that must have read? Wanted: World-renowned experimental physicist seeks philosopher. Someone who can take long walks on the beach with him in consideration of what his experiments suggest about the nature of reality.)

  I also, of course, felt compelled to call Zeilinger for this book, at the lab where he works in Vienna. His press rep got back to me almost immediately. When a phone call was hastily arranged, however, it quickly became apparent that neither Zeilinger nor his press rep understood what I meant by “I am a journalist and I would like to talk to Dr. Zeilinger about what he has learned from the philosopher he hired.”

  “Are you a philosopher?” Zeilinger asked me. I could hear what sounded like traffic on his end of the line. And even though there was a language barrier in effect, I attempted a lame joke. “Well,” I said, “we’re all philosophers to some extent. But no, I’m a journalist.”

  “A journalist?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I got in touch to interview you. Did you succeed in hiring a philosopher?”

  “Yes,” he said. “In fact, I have consulted with a great many philosophers. But … you are a journalist?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, I am busy,” said Zeilinger. “I am driving. I will call you later.”

  I knew what that meant. And here at the macro-scale my predictions are pretty good: I never did hear from Zeilinger again. Neither he nor his press aide responded to any more of my emails. But there is enough of Zeilinger out there, on the record, for us to gain some meaningful traction. The reductionistic practice of science has in fact led Zeilinger to a strange conclusion: in short, while most of mainstream science and all the hardcore skeptics spend their time arguing that the
world ultimately reduces down to physical matter, Zeilinger claims his research has demonstrated exactly the opposite. What really exists, and what seems to have properties like nonlocality, are the properties, or information, contained in the atom. This information can, in a quantum state, even be sent from one particle to another and is the basis of quantum cryptography—an end the U.S. military pursues to send super-secret messages. As Zeilinger puts it, “Matter itself is completely irrelevant. If I swap all my carbon atoms for other carbon atoms, I am still Anton Zeilinger.”

  This is big, important stuff, suggesting that the reductionistic practice of science has found that, at bottom, this isn’t a classically material universe after all. Tough news, I should think, for materialists to take. But perhaps the most appealing thing about Zeilinger, in all his public remarks, is that he acknowledges these mysteries, notes our current inability to understand what they mean about the nature of reality, and then refuses to say more.