by Robert Lanza
is true enough—but then, without explanation or elaboration, goes
on to say that it proves people can travel into the past or “choose
which reality you want.”
Quantum theory says no such thing. Quantum theory deals with
probabilities, and the likely places particles may appear, and likely
actions they will take. And while, as we shall see, bits of light and
matter do indeed change behavior depending on whether they are
being observed, and measured particles do indeed amazingly appear
to influence the past behavior of other particles, this does not in any
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way mean that humans can travel into their past or influence their
own history.
Given the widespread generic use of the term quantum theory,
plus the paradigm-changing tenets of biocentrism, using quan-
tum theory as evidence might raise eyebrows among the skepti-
cal. For this reason, it’s important that readers have some genuine
understanding of quantum theory’s actual experiments—and can
grasp the real results rather than the preposterous claims so often
associated with it. For those with a little patience, this chapter
can provide a life-altering understanding of the latest version of
one of the most famous and amazing experiments in the history
of physics.
The astonishing “double-slit” experiment, which has changed
our view of the universe—and serves to support biocentrism—has
been performed repeatedly for many decades. This specific ver-
sion summarizes an experiment published in Physical Review A (65, 033818) in 2002. But it’s really merely another variation, a tweak to
a demonstration that has been performed again and again for three-
quarters of a century.
It all really started early in the twentieth century when physi-
cists were still struggling with a very old question—whether light
is made of particles called photons or whether instead they are
waves of energy. Isaac Newton believed it was made of particles.
But by the late nineteenth century, waves seemed more reason-
able. In those early days, some physicists presciently and cor-
rectly thought that even solid objects might have a wave nature
as well.
To find out, we use a source of either light or particles. In the
classic double-slit experiment, the particles are usually electrons,
because they are small, fundamental (they can’t be divided into any-
thing else), and easy to beam at a distant target. A classic television
set, for example, directs electrons at the screen.
We start by aiming light at a detector wall. First, however, the
light must pass through an initial barrier with two holes. We can
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shoot a flood of light or just a single indivisible photon at a time—
the results remain the same. Each bit of light has a 50-50 chance of
going through the right or the left slit.
After a while, all these photon-bullets will logically create a pat-
tern—falling preferentially in the middle of the detector with fewer
on the fringes, because most paths from the light source go more or
less straight ahead. The laws of probability say that we should see a
cluster of hits like this:
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When plotted on a graph (in which the number of hits is ver-
tical, and their position on the detector screen is horizontal) the
expected result for a barrage of particles is indeed to have more hits
in the middle and fewer near the edges, which produces a curve
like this:
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But that’s not the result we actually get. When experiments like
this are performed—and they have been done thousands of times
during the past century—we find that the bits of light instead create
a curious pattern:
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Plotted on a graph, the pattern’s “hits” look like this:
In theory, those smaller side peaks around the main one should
be symmetrical. In practice, we’re dealing with probabilities and
individual bits of light, so the result usually deviates a bit from the
ideal. Anyway, the big question here is: why this pattern?
Turns out, it’s exactly what we’d expect if light is made of waves,
not particles. Waves collide and interfere with each other, causing
ripples. If you toss two pebbles into a pond at the same time, the
waves produced by each meet each other and produce places of
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higher-than-normal or lower-than-normal water-rises. Some waves
reinforce each other or, if one’s crest meets another’s trough, they
cancel out at that spot.
So this early-twentieth-century result of an interference pattern,
which can only be caused by waves, showed physicists that light is
a wave or at least acts that way when this experiment is performed.
The fascinating thing is that when solid physical bodies like elec-
trons were used, they got exactly the same result. Solid particles
have a wave nature too! So, right from the get-go, the double-slit
experiment yielded amazing information about the nature of reality.
Solid objects have a wave nature!
Unfortunately, or fortunately, this was just the appetizer. Few
realized that true strangeness was only beginning.
The first oddity happens when just one just photon or electron
is allowed to fly through the apparatus at a time. After enough have
gone through and been individually detected, this same interference
pattern emerges. But how can this be? With what is each of those
electrons or photons interfering? How can we get an interference
pattern when there’s only indivisible object in there at a time?
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A single photon hits the detector.
A second photon hits the detector.
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A third photon hits the detector.
Somehow, these individual photons add up to an interference
pattern!
There has never been a truly satisfactory answer for this. Wild
ideas keep emerging. Could there be other electrons or photons
“next door” in a parallel universe, from another experimenter doing
the same thing? Could their electrons be interfering with ours? That’s
so far-fetched that few believe it.
The usual interpretation of why we see an interference pattern
is that photons or electrons have two choices when they encoun-
ter the double slit. They do not actually exist as real entities in real
places until they are observed, and they aren’t observed until they hit
the final detection barrier. So when they reach the slits, they exer-
cise their probabilistic freedom of taking both choices. Even though actual electrons or photons are indivisible, and never split themselves under any conditions whatsoever, their existence as probability waves
are
another story. Thus, what go “through the slit” are not actual enti-
ties but just probabilities. The probability waves of the individual photons interfere with themselves! When enough have gone through, we see the overall interference pattern as all probabilities congeal into actual
entities making impacts and being observed—as waves.
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Sure it’s weird, but this, apparently, is how reality works. And
this is just the very beginning of quantum weirdness. Quantum
theory, as we mentioned in the last chapter, has a principle called
complementarity, which says that we can observe objects to be one
thing or another—or have one position or property or another, but
never both. It depends on what one is looking for and what measur-
ing equipment is used.
Now, suppose we wish to know which slit a given electron or
photon has gone through on its way to the barrier. It’s a fair enough
question, and it’s easy enough to find out. We can use polarized
light (that is, light whose waves vibrate either horizontally or verti-
cally or else slowly rotate their orientation) and when such a mixture
is used, we get the same result as before. But now let’s determine
which slit each photon is going through. Many different things have
been used, but in this experiment we’ll use a “quarter wave plate” or
QWP in front of each slit. Each quarter wave plate alters the polarity
of the light in a specific way. The detector can let us know the polar-
ity of the incoming photon. So by noting the polarity of the photon
when it’s detected, we know which slit it went through.
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Now we repeat the experiment, shooting photons through the
slits one at a time, except this time we know which slot each pho-
ton goes through. Now the results dramatically change. Even though
QWPs do not alter photons other than harmlessly shifting their
polarities (later, we prove that this change in results is not caused
by the QWPs), now we no longer get the interference pattern. Now
the curve suddenly changes to what we’d expect if the photons were
particles:
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Something’s happened. It turns out that the mere act of measure-
ment, of learning the path of each photon, destroyed the photon’s
freedom to remain blurry and undefined and take both paths until it
reached the barriers. Its “wave-function” must have collapsed at our
measuring device, the QWPs, as it instantly “chose” to become a par-
ticle and go through one slit or the other. Its wave nature was lost
as soon as it lost its blurry probabilistic not-quite-real state. But why
should the photon have chosen to collapse its wave-function? How did
it know that we, the observer, could learn which slit it went through?
Countless attempts to get around this, by the greatest minds of
the past century, have all failed. Our knowledge of the photon or electron path alone caused it to become a definite entity ahead of the pre-
vious time. Of course, physicists also wondered whether this bizarre
behavior might be caused by some interaction between the which-
way QWP detector or various other devices that have been tried, and
the photon. But no. Totally different which-way detectors have been
built, none of which in any way disturb the photon, yet we always
lose the interference pattern. The bottom line conclusion, reached
after many years, is that it’s simply not possible to gain which-way
information and the interference pattern caused by energy waves.
We’re back to quantum theory’s complementarity—that you
can measure and learn just one of a pair of characteristics but never
both at the same time. If you fully learn about one, you will know
nothing about the other. And, just in case you’re suspicious of the
quarter wave plates, let it be said that when used in all other con-
texts, including double-slit experiments but without information-
providing polarization-detecting barriers at the end, the mere act of
changing a photon’s polarization never has the slightest effect on the
creation of an interference pattern.
Okay, let’s try something else. In nature, as we saw in the last
chapter, there are entangled particles or bits of light (or matter) that
were born together and therefore share a wave-function according
to quantum theory. They can fly apart—even across the width of
the galaxy—and yet they still retain this connection, this knowl-
edge of each other. If one is meddled with in any way so that it
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loses its “anything’s possible” nature and has to decide instantly
to materialize with, say, a vertical polarization, its twin will then
instantaneously materialize too, and with a horizontal polarity. If
one becomes an electron with an up spin, the twin will too, but with
a down spin. They’re eternally linked in a complementary way.
So now let’s use a device that shoots off entangled twins in dif-
ferent directions. Experimenters can create the entangled photons
by using a special crystal called beta-barium borate (BBO). Inside
the crystal, an energetic violet photon from a laser is converted to
two red photons, each with half the energy (twice the wavelength)
of the original, so there’s no net gain or loss of energy. The two out-
bound entangled photons are sent off in different directions. We’ll
call their path directions p and s.
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We’ll set up our original experiment with no which-way infor-
mation measured. Except that now we add a “coincidence counter.”
The role of the coincidence counter is to prevent us from learning
the polarity of the photons at detector S unless a photon also hits
detector P. One twin goes through the slits (call this photon s) while the other merely barrels ahead to a second detector. Only when both
detectors register hits at about the same time do we know that both
twins have completed their journeys. Only then does something
register on our equipment. The resulting pattern at detector S is our familiar interference pattern:
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This makes sense. We haven’t learned which slit any particular
photon or electron has taken, so the objects have remained prob-
ability waves.
But let’s now get tricky. First, we’ll restore those QWPs so we
can get which-way information for photons traveling along path S.
As expected, the interference pattern now vanishes, replaced
with the particle pattern, the single curve.
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So far, so good. But now, let’s destroy our ability to measure the
which-way paths of the s photons but without interfering with them in any way. We can do this by placing a polarizing window in the
path of the other photon P, far away. This plate will stop the second detector from registering coincidences. It’ll measure only some of the
photons, and effect
ively scramble up the double-signals. Because a
coincidence counter is essential here in delivering information about
the completion of the twins’ journeys, it has now been rendered
thoroughly unreliable. The entire apparatus will now be uselessly
unable to let us learn which slit individual photons take when they
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travel along path S because we won’t be able to compare them with
their twins—because nothing registers unless the coincidence coun-
ter allows it to do so. And let’s be clear: we’ve left the QWPs in place
for photon S. All we’ve done is to meddle with the p photon’s path in a way that removes our ability to use the coincidence counter to gain
which-way knowledge. (The setup, to review, delivers information
to us, registers “hits” only when polarity is measured at detector S
and the coincidence counter tells us that either a matching or non-
matching polarity has been simultaneously registered by the twin
photon at detector P. ) The result:
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They’re waves again. The interference pattern is back. The physi-
cal places on the back screen where the photons or electrons taking
path s struck have now changed. Yet we did nothing to these photons’
paths, from their creation at the crystal all the way to the final detec-
tor. We even left the QWPs in place. All we did was meddle with
the twin photon far away so that it destroyed our ability to learn
information. The only change was in our minds. How could pho-
tons taking path S possibly know that we put that other polarizer
in place—somewhere else, far from their own paths? And quantum
theory tells us that we’d get this same result even if we placed the
information-ruiner at the other end of the universe.
(Also, by the way, this proves that it wasn’t those QWP plates
that were causing the photons to change from waves to particles,
and to alter the impact points on the detector. We now get an inter-
ference pattern even with the QWPs in place. It’s our knowledge
alone with which the photons or electrons seem concerned. This
alone influences their actions.)