by William Brandon Shanley
Introduction from Lewis Carroll's Lost Quantum Diaries, William Brandon Shanley, ed. (DVA, Stuttgart, 1999; Tokuma-Shoten, Tokyo, 2003)
‘There may be no such thing as the glittering central mechanism of the universe. Not machinery, but magic may be the better description of the treasure that is waiting.’
— John A. Wheeler, physicist
A revolution in thought is taking place all around us, a revolution beyond our senses. It is a change so profound, and so far-reaching, that it promises to be the most momentous since Sir Isaac Newton's discovery of the ‘Laws of Nature’ changed our thinking from mystical to mechanical and ushered in the Age of Reason. 1
This great leap in scientific knowledge occurred circa 1900 in Berlin when Max Planck proposed the existence of the quantum: energy is emitted in quanta, or discrete bursts of energy. Moreover quantum particles engaged in discrete jumps between states—the famous quantum jump. ‘An act of desperation... a theoretical explanation had to be supplied at all cost, whatever the price,’ said Planck on the discovery of the quantum. 2 And who could have foreseen the most remarkable discovery of all? Who could have known that by reaching out and touching the universe we would be disturbing it—not only here—but far away?
Ever since the universe jumped, our concept of reality has been transforming. All matter in the universe is now seen as instantly connected in some mysterious way; the basic building blocks of the universe exist only as a possibility until they are observed; and, upon observation, the form they take obligingly depends on what they are asked to do!
Newtonian physics implied that the universe is a machine—the quantum model showed there is no machine, but a mysterious entanglement with the observer. Newtonian physics suggested an end to free will and creativity—the quantum model put the observer back into the universe as a participant/creator.
Newton's universe was seen as a giant clockwork made of matter which God wound up at the beginning of time and left running unattended. Events developed in an orderly, continuous fashion according to Newton's laws, just as the planets circle the sun. Knowing Nature's mechanical laws plus the conditions at the beginning of the universe, man could, in principle, predict every future event.
In Newton’s vast machine, the universe is made of dead, insensate matter and isolated separate parts, acting in opposition, like so many billiard balls. In the quantum model, we see the universe as an amazingly complicated, finely balanced assemblage of forces and particles woven together in exquisite detail dancing in space-time. In sharp contrast with Newton’s model, Quantum Reality is possibilistic and probabilistic, not fixed and determined. Energy seeks to fulfill all potentials in every possible variation. The Quantum Universe is holistic: alive, creative, interconnected, interpenetrated, and communicating with itself at every level of existence. In this more lively kind of universe, there is room for consciousness to play an essential role.
Technology, cities, economies, wars, riots, crime and environmental destruction are the result, in the end, of a way of thinking. And today, that way of thinking, is largely inherited from what Newton thought about the universe back in the eighteenth century. The mechanistic universe model is the central paradigm of the modern world. In the almost three centuries since his ‘discoveries,’ all major developments in Western thought have sprung from the Newtonian model of reality, including reductionism and determinism, materialism, Marxism, Darwinism, Freudian psychology, and the Industrial and Technological Revolutions. Marx’s deterministic laws of history, Darwin’s blind evolutionary struggle, and the dark nature of Freud’s psyche all find their source in Newton’s methods. The question is, where has this system of thought led us?
Unfortunately, the mechanistic worldview, including classical, Newtonian physics and the objectivity of the Scientific Method, has ushered in a ‘nightmare of determinism’ alienating humanity from Nature. ‘The world that science presents to our belief,’ philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote at the turn of the 20th century—which would become the bloodiest and most environmentally devastating of all—tells us,
...that man is the product of causes which had no provision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve the individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.....
A meaningful life is impossible in a meaningless universe, and as we look out into the world around us, we see that life itself is all too often reduced to a budget line in calculating cost benefit ratios. In the wake of this materialistic void, in this universe without meaning, we swim in a sea of unprecedented social malaise, psychological dysfunction, substance abuse and violence. The same scientific paradigm that made possible the wonders of today’s technology and our unparalleled material success has also brought us to the brink of a psychological, sociological and environmental abyss. Old answers and familiar ways of doing things simply aren’t working anymore. Our institutions are in free-fall, gridlock, and disintegration from within. It seems that no number of new laws or methods of enforcement can stem this tide. In the words of futurist Alvin Toffler, ‘The Age of the Machine is screeching to a halt.’
At its most fundamental level, the diagnosis of alienation is based on the view that modernization forces upon us a world that, although baptized as real by science, is denuded of all humanly recognizable qualities.... the scientific world view makes it illegitimate to speak of them as being ‘objectively’ part of the world, forcing us instead to define such evaluation and such emotional experience as ‘merely subjective’ projections of people's inner lives. The world, once an ‘enchanted garden’, to use Max Weber's memorable phrase, has now become disenchanted, deprived of purpose and direction, bereft—in these senses—of life itself. All that is allegedly basic to the specifically human status in nature comes to be forced back upon the precincts of the ‘subjective’ which, in turn, is pushed by the modern scientific view ever more into the province of dreams and illusions.’
Manfred Stanley, philosopher 3
The level of thinking that has brought us to this juncture is woefully inadequate to resolve the crises of meaning we now face. We are searching for nothing less than an entirely new way of seeing, thinking and being. As Albert Einstein said, ‘The world that we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems that we cannot solve at the same level we created them.’ The million new faces born each day demand no less of us.
We know Newton's model works for large objects in the familiar, day-to-day world, but at the most fundamental level of reality, that of atoms and light quanta, any attempt to verify Newton's model disrupts the very thing we are looking for. We have been looking at the world and each other through a dark, distorted, diminutive conceptual lens. Ironically, the real illusion is the familiar world of our senses, for science now tells us that we live our lives in the thinnest of veneers, as little as one per cent of what it can now measure and calculate to exist. And yet, we insist on living our lives in this paradigm of gross materialism that obeys only Newton's laws.
The objective observer, the very basis of the Scientific Method and the hallmark of our political, judicial and journalistic systems—has now given way to the ‘Observer Effect.’ Instead of seeing events only in terms of the causes and effects of isolated separate parts, we now must also look at our problems in terms of context, causal weaves and relationships.
In Newton’s world, ambiguity is the enemy—mechanism stresses the absolute, the unchanging and the certain—things are ‘either/or,’ ‘good/bad.’ In the quantum world, reality is ‘both/and’—a coexistence of mutually contradictory possibilities, all equally true, each one a potentially possible constituent of reality. Acausal, non-local synchronicities can give rise to effects and events that seem to ‘pop up’ out of thin air. There are no isolated, separate, closed systems in Nature. Everything affects everything else, from the most fundamental elementary particles to faraway galaxies at the edge of the universe.
We are learning that life itself can no longer be forced into strict, machine-like time/space frameworks for purposes of predictability, control and short-term profit. So why do we continue to cling to this inaccurate and outmoded paradigm in our daily lives?
As Danah Zohar has written, ‘...the details of quantum physics, and the sweeping conceptual revolution that underpins it, have made almost no impact on our perceptions of ourselves or the world around us. We simply don’t understand it, and most of us, like Alice, think we can’t.’
The discovery of the quantum nature of matter and energy has made possible the wonders of today's technology, but few of us have any inkling just what processes are occurring that make these innovations possible. Television, motion picture technology, photographic film recording, integrated circuits, computers, deep space communication, genetic engineering, the observable properties of materials, and simple photocells that open doors, are just a few of the innovations that depend on the power of the tiny but mighty quantum—Nature's way of moving from one place to another without going in between. The startling emergence of the Internet is but one example of Quantum Reality at our very fingertips, a non-local, self-organizing network that mimics Nature’s ways.
Quantum physics not only describes the unimaginably small world of the atom, but the physics of life itself—cell wall activity in plants and animals, DNA, and perhaps human consciousness. Quantum physics also describes large things like lasers, superconductors and superfluids, and very enormous things like neutron stars and interstellar laser beams (masers). In fact, quantum physics accurately describes all physical phenomena.4
What this means is that we are entering a revolution in thought and technology more astonishing than anything we could ever imagine. What's more, this revolution may be our one hope of saving the planet and healing the wounds of humanity.
If people only knew that at the most fundamental level, we are not made of atoms—and that things are not made of atoms—but the consciousness is the ground of being—and that we create our reality literally—then our behavior, our relationship with everything in our experience and in our environment would undergo radical change.
Amit Goswami, physicist 6
The inevitable revolution in thought that might have been expected to follow the discovery of the quantum nature of reality has been slow in coming. This may be due to the fact that, unlike Newtonian physics that describes our everyday world, quantum physics describes the unimaginably small and subtle that underpins it. Be that as it may, the revolution is nigh.
Surprisingly, many features of the new physical reality mirror, uncannily, qualities some progressive thinkers are hoping to evoke in a new social reality: holistic, beyond dichotomy, plural, responsive, emergent, ‘green,’ spiritual, and in dialogue with science. 7
The idea of a quantum society stems from the conviction that a whole new paradigm is emerging from our description of quantum reality and that this paradigm can be extended to change radically our perception of ourselves and the social world we want to live in. I believe that a wider appreciation of the revolutionary nature of quantum reality, and the possible links between quantum processes and our own brain processes, can give us the conceptual foundations we need to bring about a positive revolution in society.
Danah Zohar 8
1 Special thanks to Fred Alan Wolf, Danah Zohar and Huston Smith.
2 Fred Alan Wolf, “Taking the Quantum Leap,” Harper & Row, New York: 1981. p. 58.
3 Manfred Stanley, "Beyond Progress: Three Post-Political Futures,” from Huston Smith, “Beyond the Post-Modern Mind,” Crossroad, New York: 1982. p. 84.
4 Except the collapse of the wave function, the bridge between quantum and classical reality.
6From an interview with William B. Shanley
7Danah Zohar, The Quantum Society. William Morrow, New York: 1994. Pp.29-32
8Ibid, p.22
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