Reality of the Observer

Have you heard that light is both a particle and a wave? What does this mean?

i. Light can exhibit characteristics of both waves and particles an observation fundamental to quantum mechanics.

ii. Quantum mechanics describes light and atoms as probabilistic waves before measurement and definite particles upon measurement.

iii. Starlight travels as spreading waves but upon reaching an observer behaves like a particle embodying the wave-particle duality."

Although the basic principles of quantum mechanics are well established, There are many interpretations of them. here are the basic principles: 

First, light (and everything else!) obeys essentially the same mathematical equations. The solution to this math happen to be oscillations. Think of the air traveling through an oboe. The air creates oscillations. Also, there's not only one oscillation but many. When it comes to quantum particles, the many different “oscillations” in fact correspond to different possible realities!

As time goes by, the number of possible realities increases! This is called unitary evolution. I describe it as a “tree of possibilities.”

The second major principle is called “collapse”. Every time an experimenter actually interacts with their experiment, they see only one definite result, rather than the whole tree of possibilities.

The theory of quantum mechanics forces us to question our intuition about the physical world. Matter seems solid. Light seems ephemeral. But really, both are both.

The Importance of the Observer

What really distinguishes these cases is not the thing we're looking at, but us who is doing the looking. 

If you like, close your eyes for a second. Imagine what was there a minute ago. Do you think anything has changed since you closed your eyes?  

Now open them again. While your eyes were closed, did the world around you become untethered? Did anything change? Did a cat walk across your desk? Did an email come in?  If you couldn't hear or see it, how would you know?

There's a lot that we cannot hear or see in the world at a given moment. Quantum mechanics asks us to question the definiteness of the reality of all that we have not seen or heard.

When we look, we see the real world. 

When we don't look, there is no objective-definite reality There are only possibilities. We are the center of that subjective reality. What we can see or hear we call “particles” everything else is imagined as “waves” on the ocean, undulating and changing form.

This is called wave-particle duality. It's a fundamental part of every interpretation of the theory.

Quantum Mechanics is open to interpretation

People can interpret what the wave-particle thing means in different ways. Some groups of people think it simply says that there's only so much we can know. The wave function doesn't represent anything real: it's just a calculational tool.

I myself align with the camp called relational or many worlds interpretation. The essence of this is that the world is subjective. 

Instead of one actual description of reality, there are as many descriptions of reality as there are Observers. You're kind of like a gamer in some distributed multiplayer online game, immersed in a reality that seems true for everybody, but is actually presented just for you.

Welcome to a Leap to Wholeness

We are starting a new series of social media posts around my second book, Leap to Wholeness, How the World is Programmed to Help Us Grow, Heal, and Adapt. One of the big themes in the book is identifying the filters that color the way we look at the world and ourselves. When we can identify a filter or belief we have, without trying to change it, we naturally start to see it better and it's easier to see beyond it. I offer this as a way of healing our old patterns of behavior.