1\. SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES.

This book is about what you are, and how you are connected to that which
you are not. It is about the impact of the revolutionary developments in
physics during the twentieth century upon science's idea of you as a
thinking and acting entity, and your linkage to 'the other'.

These questions might appear to belong more to philosophy, metaphysics,
or religion, rather than to physics, which is usually assumed to deal
only with such tangible items as machines, rockets, transistors, and
atomic bombs. But the radical change in our understanding of the
physical world that occurred during the twentieth century has
transformed connections that formerly had been matters of pure
philosophical speculation into issues covered by basic physical theory.
The aim of this book is to explain this new idea of the nature of human
beings and their causal role in the unfolding of reality to readers with
no prior understanding of the quantum character of the world.

Science has improved our lives in many ways. It has lightened the load
of tedious tasks and expanded our physical powers, and thereby
contributed to a great flowering of human creative energy. On the other
hand, it has also given us the capacity to ravage the environment on an
unprecedented scale and obliterate our species altogether. Yet along
with this fatal power it has provided a further offering which, though
subtle in character and still hardly felt in the minds of men, may
ultimately be its most valuable contribution to human civilization, and
the key to human survival.

Science is not only the enterprise of harnessing nature to serve the
practical needs of humankind. It is also part of man's unending search
for knowledge about the universe and his place within it. This quest is
motivated not solely by idle curiosity. Each of us, when trying to
establish values upon which to base conduct, is inevitably led to the
question of one's role in nature. The linkage of this philosophical
inquiry to the practical question of personal values is no mere
intellectual abstraction. Martyrs in every age are vivid reminders of
the fact that no influence upon human conduct, even the instinct for
self preservation, is stronger than beliefs about one's relationship to
the power that shapes the universe. Such beliefs form the foundation of
a person's self image, and hence, ultimately, of that person\'s values.

It is often claimed that science stands mute on questions of values:
that science can help us to achieve what we value once our priorities
are fixed, but can play no role in fixing these weightings. That claim
is certainly incorrect: science plays a key role in these matters. For
what we value depends on what we believe, and what we believe is
increasingly determined by science.

A striking example is the impact of science upon the system of values
promulgated by the church during the Middle Ages. That structure rested
on a credo about the nature of the universe, its creator, and man's
connection to that creator. Science, by casting doubt upon that belief,
emasculated the system of values erected upon it. Moreover, it put forth
a credo of its own. In that "scientific" vision we human beings were
converted from sparks of divine creative power, endowed with free will,
to automatons\-\--to cogs in a giant machine that grinds inexorably
along a preordained path in the grip of a blind mechanical process.

Gone from this "scientific" picture of our species is any rational basis
for the notion of a person's responsibility for his own actions. Each of
us is asserted to be a mechanical extension of what existed prior to his
birth. Over that earlier situation one has no control. Hence for what
emerges, preordained, from that prior state one can bear no
responsibility.

Given this conception of man, the collapse of moral philosophy is
inevitable. This notion of human beings provides no rational basis for
any value but self interest: behavior promoting the welfare of others,
including future generations, becomes rational only to the extent that
such behavior serves one's own interests. Hence science becomes doubly
culpable: it not only undermines the foundations of earlier value
systems, but also strips man of any vision of himself and his place in
the universe that could be the rational basis for any elevated set of
values.

This mechanical picture of man is the image created by the science that
reigned early in the twentieth century. According to that view the
physical universe is composed of tiny separate bits of reality, and the
unfolding, or evolution in time, of nature is completely fixed by direct
contact interaction between these localized microscopic parts. Human
beings, insofar as they belong to this physical aspect of nature, are
simply conglomerations of these elemental material bits.

During the twentieth-century this simple picture of nature was found to
be profoundly wrong: it failed not just in its fine details, but at its
fundamental core. In place of the old idea Heisenberg, Bohr, Pauli, and
their companions erected a vastly different conceptual framework. They
were forced to a radical alteration of the very subject matter of
physical theory itself by the strange character of the new mathematical
rules, which were invariably validated by reliable empirical data.

The new theory accounts in a uniform manner for all the successes of the
earlier physical theories, plus the immense mass of new data where the
earlier methods fail abysmally. However, it describes a world built not
out of bits of matter, as matter was understood in the nineteenth
century, but rather out of bits of information. Straightforwardly
interpreted, the quantum rules describe a universe composed of *a new
kind of stuff,* whose properties combine features formerly conceived to
be imbedded in the physical world with aspects that belong to our
streams of conscious thoughts.

The laws that govern the evolution of the world over the course of time
differ significantly from the pre-twentieth century idea of these rules.
According to the new physics, this evolution is specified not by a
single causal process but rather by an interplay between two very
different ones. The first of these is analogous to the operation that
fixes the development of the material world in classical physics, and it
is "locally deterministic": what occurs at any point is completely fixed
by what has just happened at nearby points. But that local rule is not
the whole story. At certain instants a *second kind of process*
intervenes: a "quantum jump" occurs. This intervention is highly
non-local: it involves, in a well specified way, coordinated changes in
regions that can lie far apart. The structure of these abrupt changes
are mathematically similar to sudden increases in knowledge or
information. Indeed, the original, and still orthodox, "Copenhagen"
interpretation of quantum theory associates each quantum jump with an
actual increase in somebody's knowledge. Thus our basic scientific
theory of the physical world, in its orthodox formulation, has become
intrinsically entwined with our streams of conscious knowings.

The existence of this "second process" provides a reprieve from the
classical-physics verdict that human thoughts and feelings can make no
difference in the flow of physical events. The new theory involves
choices that are not determined by any currently known law of nature,
but can nevertheless strongly influence the course of physical events.
This means that contemporary science accommodates causally efficacious
free will. The new physics allows, and in fact demands, the occurrence
of happenings that, on the one hand, are fixed by no known law, yet, on
the other hand, can influence in mathematically determined ways, both
the unfolding of our thoughts and the course of our actions. The details
of how this influence works match beautifully with the empirical
findings that have accumulated over the past few decades in the field of
The Psychology of Attention.

The potency and novelty of the new dynamics both stem directly from the
property of "quantum entanglement", and the closely related feature
called "quantum nonlocality". Entanglement is the property of two (or
more) systems that have strongly interacted with each other but then
moved far apart, to become, according to the theory, a single unified
entity until observations are made that re-establish independent
properties for the spatially separated parts.

This entanglement feature leads to the remarkable property of
*non-locality*: no theory of nature can both accommodate the predictions
of quantum theory and confine all influences of free choices to regions
that can be reached by traveling no faster than light.

The upshot of these radical changes is this: Taken at face value, the
new mathematical description of the universe portrays a world in which
your mind can by free-willed actions influence, although not completely
control, what happens in your body/brain. This participatory view
contrasts starkly with the earlier science-based image of the human
person as a conglomeration of atoms being mindlessly buffeted about by
the chance collisions of atoms.

What impact, if any, can this altered idea of what you are have upon
your life? Does not a completely rational approach still lead you to
value only your own well being? Perhaps so! But this leads to the
further question: What is the self whose well being one values?

Values arise from self-image. Generally one is led by training,
teaching, propaganda, or other forms of indoctrination, to expand one's
conception of the self: one is encouraged to perceive oneself as an
integral part of some social unit such as family, ethnic or religious
group, or nation, and to enlarge one's self-interest to include the
interests of this unit. If this training is successful your enlarged
conception of yourself as good parent, or good son or daughter, or good
Christian, Muslim, or Jew, causes you to give weight to the welfare of
the unit as you would yourself. In fact, if well conditioned you may
give more weight to the well-being of the group than to that of your
bodily self.

In the present context it is not relevant whether this human tendency to
enlarge one's self image is a consequence of natural malleability,
instinctual tendency, spiritual insight, or something else. What is
important is that we human beings do in fact have the capacity to expand
our image of \"self\", and that enlarged concept can become the basis of
a drive so powerful that it becomes the dominant determinant of human
conduct, overwhelming every other factor, including even the instinct to
survive.

But where reason is honored, belief must be reconciled with empirical
evidence. If you seek evidence for your beliefs about what you are, and
how you fit into nature, then science claims jurisdiction, or at least
relevance. Physics presents itself as the basic science, and it is to
physics that you are told to turn. Thus a radical shift in the
physics-based conception of man from that of an isolated mechanical
automaton to that of an integral participant in the nonlocal process
that gives form to the evolving universe is a seismic event of
potentially momentous proportions.

The quantum concept, being based on objective science equally available
to all, rather than arising from special personal circumstances, has the
potential of providing a universal system of values suitable to all
people, without regard to the accidents of their origins. With the
diffusion of this Quantum Conception of Human Beings, science may
fulfill itself by adding to the material benefits it has already
provided a philosophical insight of perhaps greater ultimate value.

This issue of the connection of science to values can be put into
perspective by seeing it in the context of a very brief historical
account. For this purpose let human intellectual history be divided into
five periods: traditional, modern, transitional, post modern, and
contemporary.

During the "traditional" era our understanding of ourselves and our
relation to nature was based on "ancient traditions" handed down from
generation to generation: "Traditions" were the chief source of wisdom
about our connection to nature. The "modern" era began in the
seventeenth century with the rise of what is still called "modern
science". That approach was based on the ideas of Bacon, Descartes,
Galileo and Newton, and it provided a new source of knowledge that came
to be regarded by many thinkers as more reliable than tradition.

The basic idea of modern science was "materialism": the idea that the
physical world is composed basically of tiny bits of matter whose
contact interactions with adjacent bits completely control everything
that is now happening, and that ever will happen. According to these
laws, as they existed in the early twentieth century, a person's
conscious thoughts and efforts can make no difference at all to what his
body/brain does: whatever you do was deemed to be completely fixed by
local interactions between tiny mechanical elements, with your thoughts,
ideas, feelings, and efforts being a strictly determined high-level
consequence of the low-level mechanical process.

This materialist conception of reality began to crumble at the beginning
of the twentieth century with Max Planck's discovery of the quantum of
action. Planck announced to his son that he had, on that day, made a
discovery as important as Newton's.

That assessment was certainly correct: the ramifications of Planck's
discovery were eventually to cause Newton's materialist conception of
physical reality to come crashing down. Planck's discovery marks the
beginning of the "transitional" period.

A second important transitional development soon followed:

In 1905 Einstein announced his Special Theory of Relativity. It denied
the validity of our intuitive idea of the instant of time "now", and
promulgated the thesis that even the most basic quantities of physics,
such as the length of a steel rod, and the temporal order of two events,
had no objective "true values", but were well defined only "relative" to
some observer's point of view.

Planck's discovery led by the mid twenties to a complete break-down, at
the fundamental level, of the material conception of nature. A new basic
physical theory was developed, principally by Werner Heisenberg, Niels
Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and Max Born, and it brought "the observer"
explicitly into physics. The earlier idea that the physical world
composed in part of tiny particles was abandoned in favor of a theory of
natural phenomena in which the consciousness of the human observer is
ascribed an essential and independent role. This successor to classical
physical theory is called "Copenhagen quantum theory".

This turning away by science itself from the tenets of the objective
materialist philosophy lent support to Post-Modernism. That view, which
emerged during the second half of the twentieth century, promulgated, in
essence, the idea that all "truths" were relative to one's point of
view, and were mere artifacts of some particular social group's struggle
for power over competing groups. Thus each social movement was entitled
to its own "truth", which was viewed simply as a socially created pawn
in the power game.

The connection of Post-Modern thought to science is that both Copenhagen
Quantum Theory and Relativity Theory had retreated from the idea of
observer-independent objective truth: science in the first quarter of
the twentieth century had not only eliminated materialism as a possible
foundation for objective truth, but had discredited the very idea of
objective truth in science. Yet if the community of scientists have
renounced the idea of objective truth in favor of the pragmatic idea
that "what is true for us is what works for us," then every group
becomes licensed to do the same, and the hope evaporates that science
might provide objective criteria for resolving contentious social
issues.

This philosophical shift has had profound social ramifications. But the
physicists who initiated this mischief were generally too interested in
practical developments in their own field to get involved in these
philosophical issues. Thus they failed to broadcast an important fact:
already by mid-century, a development in physics had occurred that
provides an effective antidote to both the 'materialism' of the modern
era, and the 'relativism' and 'social constructionism' of the
post-modern period. In particular, John von Neumann developed, during
the early thirties, a form of quantum theory that brought the physical
and mental aspects of nature together as two aspects of a rationally
coherent whole. This theory was elevated, during the forties\-\--by the
work of Tomonaga and Schwinger\-\--to a form compatible with the
physical requirements of the Theory of Relativity.

Von Neumann's theory, unlike the transitional ones, succeeded in
integrating into one coherent idea of reality the empirical data of
subjective experience with the basic mathematical structure of
theoretical physics. Von Neumann's formulation of quantum theory is the
starting point of all efforts by physicists to go beyond the
pragmatically magnificent but ontologically incoherent Copenhagen form
of quantum theory.

Von Neumann capitalized upon the key Copenhagen move of bringing human
knowings into the theory of physical reality. But, whereas the
Copenhagen approach excluded the bodies and brains of the human
observers from the physical world that they sought to describe, and
renounced the aim of describing reality itself, von Neumann demanded
logical cohesion and mathematical precision, and was willing to follow
where this rational approach led. Being a mathematician, fortified by
the rigor and precision of his thought, he seemed less intimidated than
his physicist brethren by the sharp contrast between the nature of the
world called for by the new mathematics and nature of the world that the
genius of Isaac Newton had concocted.

The common core feature of Copenhagen and von Neumann quantum theory is
the incorporation of human knowings into the structure of basic physical
theory. How this is done, and what the consequences are, is the subject
of this book. But before plunging directly into this topic I shall say a
little more about knowings.

2\. Knowings

What are you made of? What is reality made of? What does intuition say
about this? What does science say?

The deliverance of intuition on these matters is not unambiguous.
Western science and philosophy begins with Thales of Miletus, who
proclaimed \"All is Water!\". Other Greeks believed the primordial stuff
to be \"Air\", or \"Earth\", or \"Fire\", and Empedocles settled on all
four. On the other hand, Leucippus and Democritus thought everything was
composed of tiny invisible, immutable atoms. Two millennia later, it
looked like the two atomists had gotten it right: Isaac Newton built his
sixteenth-century theory of the universe on the idea of enduring
miniscule particles, and John Dalton\'s atomic hypothesis explained many
facts of chemistry.

This notion that everything is composed of small bits of matter
encountered, however, a serious difficulty. The earlier idea that
\"air\" was a primary ingredient allowed soul or spirit to be construed
as constructed out of one of the primitive substances. But it was hard
to see how such a thing as a sensation of the color \"red\" or
\"green\", or a feeling of \'\'pain\" or \"joy\" could be fully
described in terms of a collection of tiny immutable bits of matter
careening through space. Given even supreme knowledge and comprehension,
how could the motions of billions of particles in a person\'s brain/body
be understood to be the very same thing as a conscious sensation, or the
*feeling* associated with the grasping of an idea? One can understand
all manner of motions of objects, and of their changing shapes, in terms
of the motions of their constituent parts, but there is a rationally
unbridgeable gap between the purely geometrical concepts of motions of
particles in space and the psychological realities of conscious
sensations, feelings, and ideas.

Isaac Newton built his theory upon the ideas of the French philosopher
Rene Descartes, who resolved this dilemma concerning the psychological
realities by conceiving nature to be built out of two sorts of
substances: \"matter\", which was located in and occupied space, and the
\"mental stuff\" that our thoughts, sensations, and feelings are made
of.

This sundering of nature worked well in science for more than two
hundred years, but was abandoned by physicists during twentieth century.
The old idea that the material part of nature is made out of tiny bits
of reality whose changes are completely fixed by the prior state of the
nearby physical stuff\-\--independently of mind\-\--was replaced by a
very different picture. Once it became clear that the old notions could
not account for the growing mountain of data concerning the properties
of the atoms and their parts the focus shifted to what the experiments
were actually telling us. This opened the door to a new approach that
dealt directly with *what we could find* *out* about the systems being
examined, rather than with the system itself. An incredibly beautiful
and rationally coherent new kind mathematical structure eventually
revealed itself, but this new mathematics was understood to describe not
a self-sufficient physical reality that can exist independently of all
minds, but rather our human knowledge of a reality in which our mental
activities reside.

This original way of conceiving and applying the quantum mathematics was
created by a group of physicists working closely with the Danish
physicist Niels Bohr, and is called the \"Copenhagen interpretation\".
This approach was closely tied to actual experimental procedures, which
involve in the end the human experimenters who design the experiments
with some purpose in mind, and later record and interpret the results of
their investigations. This practical formulation of the theory defines
the way the mathematical structure is used operationally, and is the
touchstone of all later efforts to retain the original predictive power
of the quantum rules, while expanding their scope into the domains of
cosmology and neuro-dynamics.

The foundation of all attempts to increase the scope of the theory is
the work of the great Hungarian mathematician and logician John von
Neumann. But before going on to describe von Neumann\'s contribution it
will be helpful, and also fascinating, to appreciate the tremendous
change in outlook instituted already by Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr,
Wolfgang Pauli, and the other founders. For their insights are preserved
and expanded in the work of von Neumann.

In the introduction to his book \"Quantum theory and reality\'\'

the philosopher of science Mario Bunge (1967) said:

\"The physicist of the latest generation is operationalist all

right, but usually he does not know, and refuses to believe, that

the original Copenhagen interpretation\-\--which he thinks he

supports\-\--was squarely subjectivist, i.e., nonphysical.\'\'

Let there be no doubt about this point. The original form of quantum
theory, which is still alive today, is subjective: it is about
relationships among conscious human experiences, and it expressly
recommends to scientists that they resist the temptation to try to
understand the underlying processes of nature that are responsible for
the connections between our experiences that the theory correctly
describes. The following brief collection of quotations by the founders
give a conspectus of the Copenhagen philosophy:

Heisenberg (1958a): \"The conception of objective reality of the
elementary particles has thus evaporated not into the cloud of some
obscure new reality concept but into the transparent clarity of a
mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of particles but
rather our knowledge of this behavior.\'\'

Heisenberg (1958b): \"\...the act of registration of the result in the
mind of the observer. The discontinuous change in the probability
function...takes place with the act of registration, because it is the
discontinuous change in our knowledge in the instant of registration
that has its image in the discontinuous change of the probability
function.\'\'

Heisenberg (1958b:) \"When the old adage \`Natura non facit saltus\' is
used as a basis of a criticism of quantum theory, we can reply that
certainly our knowledge can change suddenly, and that this fact
justifies the use of the term \`quantum jump\'. \'\'

Wigner (1961): \"the laws of quantum mechanics cannot be
formulated\...without recourse to the concept of consciousness.\'\'

Bohr (1934): \"In our description of nature the purpose is not to
disclose the real essence of phenomena but only to track down as far as
possible relations between the multifold aspects of our experience.\'\'

Bohr (1963): \"Strictly speaking, the mathematical formalism of quantum
mechanics merely offers rules of calculation for the deduction of
expectations about observations obtained under well-defined classical
concepts.\'\'

Bohr (1958): \"\...the appropriate physical interpretation of the
symbolic quantum mechanical formalism amounts only to prediction of
determinate or statistical character, pertaining to individual phenomena
appearing under conditions defined by classical physics concepts.\'\'

The references to \`\"classical physics concepts\'\' is explained in
Bohr (1958): \"\...it is imperative to realize that in every account of
physical experience one must describe both experimental conditions and
observations by the same means of communication as the one used in
classical physics.\'\'

Bohr (1958) \"\...we must recognize above all that, even when phenomena
transcend the scope of classical physical theories, the account of the
experimental arrangement and the recording of observations must be given
in plain language supplemented by technical physical terminology.\"

Bohr is saying that scientists do in fact use, and must use, the
concepts of classical physics in communicating to colleagues the
specifications on how the experiment is to be set up, and what will
constitute a certain type of outcome. He in no way claims or admits that
there is an actual reality out there that conforms to the precepts of
classical physics.

In his book \"The creation of quantum mechanics and the Bohr-Pauli
dialogue\'\' (Hendry, 1984) the historian John Hendry gives a detailed
account of the fierce struggles by such eminent thinkers as Hilbert,
Jordan, Weyl, von Neumann, Born, Einstein, Sommerfeld, Pauli,
Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Dirac, Bohr and others, to come up with a
rational way of comprehending the data from atomic experiments. Each man
had his own bias and intuitions, but in spite of intense effort no
rational comprehension was forthcoming. Finally, at the 1927 Solvay
conference a group including Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, and Born
come into concordance on a solution that came to be called \"The
Copenhagen Interpretation\'\', due to the central role of Bohr and those
working with him at his institute in Denmark.

Hendry says: \"Dirac, in discussion, insisted on the restriction of the
theory\'s application to our knowledge of a system, and on its lack of
ontological content.\'\' Hendry summarized the concordance by saying:
\"On this interpretation it was agreed that, as Dirac explained, the
wave function represented our knowledge of the system, and the reduced
wave packets our more precise knowledge after measurement.\'\'

Certainly this profound shift in physicists\' conception of the basic
nature of their endeavor, and the meanings of their formulas, was not a
frivolous move: it was a last resort. The very idea that in order to
comprehend atomic phenomena one must abandon physical ontology, and
construe the mathematical formulas to be directly about the knowledge of
human observers, rather than about the external real events themselves,
is so seemingly preposterous that no group of eminent and renowned
scientists would ever embrace it except as an extreme last measure.
Consequently, it would be frivolous of us simply to ignore a conclusion
so hard won and profound, and of such apparent direct bearing on our
effort to understand the connection of our knowings to our bodies.

Einstein never accepted the Copenhagen interpretation. He said: \"What
does not satisfy me, from the standpoint of principle, is its attitude
toward what seems to me to be the programmatic aim of all physics: the
complete description of any (individual) real situation (as it
supposedly exists irrespective of any act of observation or
substantiation).\'\' (Einstein, 1951, p.667: the parenthetical word and
phrase are part of Einstein\'s statement.);

and \"What I dislike in this kind of argumentation is the basic
positivistic attitude, which from my view is untenable, and which seems
to me to come to the same thing as Berkeley\'s principle, {\\it esse est
percipi}. (Einstein, 1951, p. 669). \[Transl: To be is to be perceived\]

Einstein struggled until the end of his life to get the observer\'s
knowledge back out of physics. But he did not succeed! Rather he
admitted that: \"It is my opinion that the contemporary quantum theory
constitutes an optimum formulation of the \[statistical\]
connections.\'\' (ibid. p. 87).

He also referred to: \"the most successful physical theory of our
period, viz., the statistical quantum theory which, about twenty-five
years ago took on a logically consistent form. This is the only theory
at present which permits a unitary grasp of experiences concerning the
quantum character of micro-mechanical events.\'\' (ibid p. 81).

One can adopt the cavalier attitude that these profound difficulties
with the classical conception of nature are just some temporary
retrograde aberration in the forward march of science: one may imagine,
as some do, that a strange confusion has confounded our best minds for
seven decades, and that the strange conclusions of physicists can be
ignored because they do not fit our classical-physics-based intuitions.
Or one can try to claim that these problems concern only atoms and
molecules, but not the big things built out of them. In this connection
Einstein said: \"But the \`macroscopic\' and \`microscopic\' are so
inter-related that it appears impracticable

to give up this program \[of basing physics on the \`real\'\] in the

\`microscopic\' domain alone.\'\' (ibid, p.674).

Philosophers have tried for three centuries to understand the role of
mind in the workings of a brain conceived to function according to
principles of classical physics. We now know no such brain actually
exists: neither the brain nor the body nor anything else in the world of
nature is composed of those tiny bits of matter that Democritus and
Newton imagined the universe to be made of. Hence it is hardly
surprising that those endeavors of philosophers have been beset by
enormous difficulties, which have led to such positions as that of the
\`eliminative materialists\', who hold that our conscious thoughts do
not exist; or of the \`epiphenomenalists\', who admit that human
experiences do exist but claim that they play absolutely no role in how
we behave; or of the \`identity theorists\', who claim that each
conscious feeling is exactly the same thing as a motion of the particles
that nineteenth century science thought brains and everything else in
the universe to be made of. The difficulties in reconciling mental
realities with pre-quantum physics is dramatized by the fact that for
many years the mere mention of \"consciousness\" was considered evidence
of backwardness and bad taste in most of academia, including,
incredibly, even the philosophy of mind.

Given these difficulties with the earlier approach, coupled with the
further fact that human experience is now understood to be a central
player in our best theory of all purely physical phenomena, the question
naturally arises: why not try to understand the role of mind in the
workings of the thinking brain?

Success in this endeavour is augured by the fact that the mathematical
structure uncovered by quantum physics, although highly
counter-intuitive to minds indoctrinated in classical concepts, has an
amazing internal logical cohesion, as well as the capacity to correctly
predict numbers that can be measured to accuracies of one part in a
hundred million. This inner consistency, combined with that incredible
precision, means that quantum theory must embody some deep truth about
the structure of reality. And this truth brings human experiences into
the description of atomic processes. Can one then expect to ignore it in
the description of the organ of experience itself?

3\. FASTER THAN LIGHT?

\"Nonlocality gets more real\". This is the provocative title of a
bulletin in the December \`98 issue of \"Physics Today.\" It reports the
completion of experiments performed at Innsbruck, Los Alamos, and Geneva
that all confirm to high accuracy some predictions of quantum theory
that appear to entail superluminal action at a distance.

The work done in Switzerland is the most spectacular of the three
efforts. It got wide press coverage because it confirms the validity of
this mysterious holistic quality of nature, not merely at the atomic
scale of a billionth of a meter, nor even over a laboratory scale of
meters, but now over a geographic scale of more than ten kilometers.

Many experiments of this general kind, but involving shorter distances,
have been carried out over the past thirty years. The popular and
technical accounts of these works invariably stress that they imply an
interconnectedness of the physical universe that contradicts the simple
conception of nature that ruled science from the time of Isaac Newton
until the dawn of the twentieth century. However, those accounts never
provide both a sufficient description of the experiment together with
the detailed argumentation that demonstrates their action-at-a-distance
implications, and hence the rational need to adopt new ideas about the
nature of the world. These experiments do show conclusively that the old
notions fail, and fail decisively far beyond the realm of atomic-scale
distances.

Surely, no reasonable person should accept on hearsay a radical new idea
of reality that overturns everything that has been believed for
generations, and is, moreover, wildly counter-intuitive: the physicists
who are setting forth this \"craziness\" might be carried away by
enthusiasm, or be so beguiled by the power of their mathematical tools
that they lose touch with reality. This abrogation of the formerly well
established science has such far-reaching consequences that serious
thinkers need to understand for themselves the empirical evidence and
its logical implications. Accordingly, I shall now describe in
non-technical terms, first very schematically and later in more detail,
the experiment performed in Switzerland by members of the Applied
Physics Group of the University of Geneva, and then explain how their
results contradict the classical-physics principle that bans
faster-than-light action at a distance.

Very briefly, the overall general form of the Swiss experiment is this.
First, a pair of highly correlated \"twin-particles\" is created by a
special procedure performed in downtown Geneva. One of the two twins is
sent to a laboratory in Bellevue, and the other is sent to a laboratory
in Bernex. In each lab the arriving twin is sent into one or the other
of two devices, which subjects it to one or the other of two alternative
possible actions. The choice between these two alternative devices is
made in a random fashion. Each twin is then examined in a way that
produces one or the other of two alternative possible observable
outcomes. The random choices made in the two far-apart regions, and the
subsequent actions, are all performed so quickly that no information
about which action is chosen in either lab has time to get to the other
lab before the experiment there is completed\-\--unless the information
travels faster than light.

Classical physics forbids faster-than-light transfer of information. If
that condition were satisfied then the behavior of neither twin could
depend upon which of the two actions was randomly chosen and performed
upon his faraway sibling. However, that condition of non-dependence
cannot be reconciled with the predictions validated in this experiment.

Before expanding this cryptic synopsis of the experiment and its
implications into a more generous offering it will be helpful to review
the theoretical background.

According to Einstein\'s theory of relativity, any faster-than-light
action would, from some point of view, be instantaneous. But
instantaneous action at a distance is anathema to many scientists, on
aesthetic and intuitive grounds. Of course, Newton\'s theory of gravity
postulated an instantaneous action at a distance over a planetary scale,
without any explanation of what was transmitting this action, and
Newton\'s theory was severely criticized on that account. Even Newton
himself was troubled by this feature. In a letter to his friend Bentley,
he expressed his own skepticism about the notion of non-mediated action
at a distance, and by implication, I think, about any instantaneous
action at a distance:

\",...that one body may act upon another at a distance

through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by

and through which their action and force may be conveyed

from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I

believe no man, who has in philosophical matters a

competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it. Gravity

must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to

certain laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial

I have left to the consideration of my readers.\"

More than two centuries later Einstein\'s general theory of relativity
explained gravity as being due to the warping of space-time by the
presence of matter. According to this theory, the gravitational effect
is indeed conveyed from point to point by a local-contact kind of
interaction that transfers information no faster than the speed of
light. Thus Einstein accomplished what Newton had intuited, the
abolition of instantaneous action at a distance. He also enunciated the
closely connected principle of no faster-than-light action. But this
demand was imposed upon, and was directly relevant to, a conception of
nature in which the continuous history of the physical world for all
time was determined by certain simple immutable laws from the state of
the world at early times.

When quantum theory was created Einstein objected forcefully to the
\"mysterious action at a distance\", which is explicitly built into the
normal computational procedures, and which, as we shall now see,
directly infects also the predictions derived from those calculations.

The initial phase of the Swiss experiment occurs at a lab in downtown
Geneva. That is where the twins are born. This birthing is achieved by
directing a laser beam at a crystal. Most of the laser light goes
through the crystal, but each laser photon in a small subset is split
into a pair of photons, with each member of the pair carrying about half
the energy of its laser-photon parent.

For some of these pairs one partner is sent by optical fiber to a lab in
the village of Bellevue, while the other partner is sent to a lab in the
town of Bernex. These two labs lie more than ten kilometers apart.

At each lab the arriving twin is sent into an \"interferometer\".

Interferometers are, themselves, very interesting devices, and they need
to be understood if the experiment is to be made clear.

These instruments exhibit in a striking way one essential aspect of the
quantum mystery: wave-particle duality. What they reveal is similar in
principle to what is shown by the famous double-slit experiment. But the
double-slit experiment involves many detectors of photons and many
possible trajectories that they might traverse. Only two detectors and
two paths are needed for an interferometer, and the whole situation is
consequently much clearer.

There are different kinds of interferometers. For ease of explanation I
shall describe one that is slightly different from what was used in the
Swiss experiment. But the principle is the same.

This interferometer involves two ordinary (i.e., fully silvered)
mirrors, each of which reflects all the light falling on it, and two
half-silvered mirrors, each of which reflects (like a mirror) half the
light incident upon it, and transmits (like a plate of clear glass) the
other half.

Suppose the beam entering one of these devices is traveling
horizontally. Upon entering the interferometer this beam strikes a
half-silvered mirror that is slanted at 45 degrees. Half the light goes
straight though, while the other half is deflected vertically upwards.
The half that goes straight through travels a short distance and then
strikes the second half-silvered mirror, which is cocked at 45 degrees
in the opposite direction, so that half of that beam goes straight
through, and exits the device horizontally, whereas the other half is
deflected vertically downward, and exits vertically.

A photon detector is placed in each of these two exit beams. Let the
detector placed in the horizontal exit beam be called the
horizontal-beam detector H, and the photon detector placed in the
vertical exit beam be called the vertical-beam detector V.

The half-beam that was deflected vertically upward at the first
half-silvered mirror takes a round-about path, via the two fully
silvered mirrors, to the second half-silvered mirror: it is reflected by
the first of these two mirrors into a horizontal beam that runs parallel
to the original horizontal beam, and is then reflected back downward to
the second half-silvered mirror. Thus half of the original beam travels
a short route between the two half-silvered mirrors along the bottom
side of a rectangle whereas the other half takes a longer path along the
other three sides.

At the second half-silvered mirror both halves of the beam, the one
traveling the shorter direct route, and the one taking the longer
round-about route, both split 50-50, with half going out along the
horizontal exit beam and the other half exiting along the
(downward-directed) vertical exit beam.

Because there are two interferometers in each village, and each one has
two photon detectors, there are four detectors in each village, and
hence eight altogether. But for each particle pair the two independent
random processes will select only one or the other of the two
interferometers in each village.

![](media/image1.wmf){width="5.9847222222222225in" height="2.83125in"}

The Experimental Set up.

\[The laser beam is split at D. The two R\'s indicate the two random
processes, each of which randomly sends the photon that arrives in its
laboratory to one or the other of the two interferometers. H and V label
the photon detectors in the horizontal and vertical exit channels,
respectively. The primes indicated alternative possibilities.\]

Some of the photons get lost along the way and do not reach a detector.
But there are many pairs whose two members both reach detectors, one in
Bellevue, the other in Bernex. Signals from those two detectors are sent
back by ordinary wires to a central processor in Geneva.

\[There is one fine point, which needs mention, but which is not central
to the main argument.

The prediction of quantum theory that we want to use concerns the subset
of pairs such that both members, one in Bellevue the other in Bernex,
take the long path or both take the short path. To distinguish these
pairs from the others, the lengths of the various paths are adjusted so
that, on a nanosecond time scale, the difference between the times it
takes light to traverse the two long paths, one in each village, is
equal to the difference between the times it takes light to traverse the
two short paths. Consequently, the difference in the arrival times of
the two paired pulses, one from each of the two villages, is independent
of whether both of the paired photons take the long path in their
respective villages or both take the short path. This time difference is
measured by fast (nanosecond) electronics. The paired pulses coming from
paired photons that both take the long path or both take the short path
will have the same time difference, but the pairs such that one partner
takes a long path and the other takes a short path will have different
time differences.This effect can be used to identify, and cast aside,
the pairs such that the member in one village takes a short path and its
partner in the other village takes the long path. Retained are those
pairs in which both of the twins (one in each village) take the longer
path or both take the shorter path. This sample is singled out and
analyzed because quantum theory predicts that for the photon pairs in
this subset a strong and interesting correlation exists between what
happens in the two villages.

The rate at which the pairs are detected is slow enough so that each
pair of particles, one detected in Bellevue the other in Bernex, can be
distinguished from all the other pairs by fast electronics. A pair is
classified as \"matched\" if both members are detected in a horizontal
exit channel or both are detected in a vertical channel. They are
\"unmatched\" if one partner is detected in a horizontal exit channel
and its mate is detected in a vertical exit channel.

Quantum theory predicts that the fraction of the pairs that are
unmatched will depend on L minus S, where L is the sum of the two long
paths, one in each village, and S is the sum of the two short paths. For
certain values of L minus S all of the pairs will be unmatched and for
other values of L minus S none of the pairs will be unmatched. For
intermediate values of L minus S a certain fraction f will be unmatched.

Quantum theory gives a precise formula for this fraction f, and the
validity of this formula, for many values of L minus S, was checked by
the Swiss experiment. For ease of explanation, I shall use just one
simple property of this formula: if for some original value of L minus S
none of the pairs are unmatched then for small shifts of L minus S away
from this original value the number of unmatched pairs will grow like
the square of this small shift. In particular, the fraction f of
unmatched pairs will increase faster than linearly, relative to the
change in L minus S!

What is so astonishing about that?

What is puzzling and interesting is this: This faster-than-linear growth
is impossible to reconcile with the classical idea that the choice of
what is done to a twin cannot influence the behavior of its
sibling\-\--before the information about which action performed on the
one partner can reach the other, without traveling faster than light.

How is this remarkable result proved?

In the actual experimental situation the four alternative kinds of
settings come in some random sequence, and the experimenters collect
together the experiments with the four alternative combination of
settings, in order to check, for each of the four different values of L
minus S, that the fraction of unmatched pairs is what quantum theory
predicts.

However, within the context of classical physics one has an underlying
theoretical structure that allows one to consider a set of four
theoretically possible worlds that are identical up until the instant at
which the two random processes act. The random processes are supposed to
be independent of the system being examined: cosmic rays, or any one of
a billion different arbitrary processes could control them. One
implements this idea in classical physics (and also in quantum physics)
by fixing in slightly different ways the external potential energy in
which the system being examined moves. This external potential is set in
a way such that a tiny change triggers the choice between the two
alternative possible experiments in Bellevue. A second independent
potential energy variation is invoked to implement the random choice
made in Bernex.

Einsteinian relativistic classical physics is designed so that every
physical effect of one of these tiny alterations of the potential is
confined to the region of space-time that can be reached by traveling no
faster that light from the region of that tiny change. This is how the
idea of no-faster-than-light influences is made precise in physics.

The random process in Bellevue directs the photon arriving at Bellevue
either into the interferometer BL or into the interferometer BL\'. And
the random process in Bernex directs the photon arriving in Bernex into
either BR or BR\'. The subsequent evolution of each of the four
alternative possible worlds will continue to be identical to each other,
except for the dynamical consequences of these two localized random
choices. In classical physics these consequences propagate no faster
than the speed of light. Hence under the conditions of the Swiss
experiment a change in the random choice made in either region can have
no effect at all in the other region until after the detection is made
and recorded there. \[Recall that the experiment is designed so that the
random choice in each region is followed so quickly by the detection and
recording there that no effect of the faraway choice upon these two
latter processes is possible without superluminal (i.e., faster than the
speed of light) action.\]

To deduce a contradiction between this no-faster-than-light condition
and the predictions validated by the Swiss experiment consider the
following arrangement. Let the first alternative interferometers BL and
BR in Bellevue and Bernex, respectively, be copies of each other, and
let BL\' and BR\' be copies of each other. Let the short paths in BL,
BR, BL\' and BR\' all have the same lengths. But let the longer path in
BL\' (hence also in BR\') be slightly longer than the longer path in BL
(hence also in BR). (This difference is negligible on the nanosecond
time scale mentioned earlier.) Let the path lengths in BL (and hence in
BR) be fixed so that in the case that BL and BR are chosen by the random
processes there will be no \"unmatched\" pairs: i.e., there will be no
pairs such that the twin in one village is detected in a horizontal exit
channel and the twin in the other village is detected in the vertical
exit channel. This original case will be called Case One.

Case Two is the alternative possible world in which everything is the
same as in Case One up until the moment that the two random choices were
made, but in which the random choice in Bellevue goes the other way, and
BL\' is picked by the random process there, rather than BL, but nothing
is changed in Bernex. Now a small fraction f of the pairs will be
\"unmatched\". Since nothing has changed in Bernex, this small fraction
f of unmatched events must arise from a switching of this fraction f of
the events in Bellevue from what they were in Case One. That is, if in a
sequence of, say, ten thousand original pairs the sequence of detection
events is, say (H, V, V, H, H, H, V, H, etc.) in both Bellevue and
Bernex (I shall ignore statistical fluctuations, which do not materially
affect the argument) then the fraction f, say 1%, of these values will
in Case Two be reversed from their Case One values in Bellevue, but none
will be reversed in Bernex. This is the first key consequence of the
no-faster-than-light-influence condition: it ensures that the change
made in Bellevue does not disturb the outcomes in Bernex.

Case Three is the same as Case One in Bellevue, but BR\' is chosen in
Bernex instead of BR. Hence the same fraction f of the detection events,
but now in Bernex, must be opposite to what they were in Case One.

In case Four Case the changes from Case One that were made in Bellevue
alone in Case Two, and in Bernex alone in Case Three, are now made
simultaneously in both Bellevue and Bernex. Hence in this final case,
Case Four, the changes that occur in Bellevue must be the same as the
changes made there in Case Two, since no influence of the choice made in
Bernex can be present in Bellevue. Similarly, in this Case Four, the
changes made in Bernex must be the same as the changes that were made
there in Case Three.

But then the total number of mismatches in Case Four can be no greater
than the sum of the number of mismatches in Cases Two and Case Three.
Thus the fraction f\* of mismatches in Case Four can be no larger than
2f. (Of course, there can be fluctuations, but by taking the numbers of
pairs considered to be very large the fluctuations become unimportant.).

On the other hand, in Case Four the empirically validated theoretical
formula for this fraction f\* is, for small f, proportional to the
square of the shift in L minus S from its value in Case One. This shift
is the sum of these shifts in L minus S for Case Two and Case Three
separately, because L and S are both just sums over the contributions
from Bellevue and Bernex individually. Thus this shift in L minus S is
twice what it was for Case Two. But this value must be squared to give
the empirically validated formula, and 2 squared is 4! Thus theory, and
the empirical evidence, say that the fraction of unmatched pair in this
Case Four is close to 4f, whereas the no-faster-than-light condition
allows it to be no greater than 2f.

This means that both quantum theory and nature are incompatible with the
classical notion that what is done to one twin cannot affect the
behavior of its faraway mate\-\--faster than the speed of light!

In this particular proof the effect is small when f is small. But in
other arrangements the effect can be that locality requires a fraction
to vanish that quantum theory predicts to be, say, 99%. In any case, it
is the principle that counts not the numerical particulars. And the
principle established by this analysis is that the causality concepts of
classical physics fail over macroscopic distances.