#30
Quantum Foaming at the Mouth

The universe began as a quantum event.

We know how freaky quantum events are from the double-slit experiment: in front of an unexposed photographic film sits a screen with two open slits so that when light shines through the slits, the film records where the photons land. When light passes through both slits, the film displays light and dark bands, a pattern generated by interfering waves from each of the slits. It gets freaky when photons are fired at the slits one at a time and the pattern of light and dark bands appears anyway. The physicist Richard Feynman hypothesized that each photon fired at the double slit does not follow a single path (as, say, an arrow or a bullet would) but instead travels through both slits simultaneously and interferes with itself.

There was no beginning at the beginning of the universe. In its first instant, the big bang was smaller than an atom and behaved like all subatomic particles do -- obeying the probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics. The quantum event of the big bang took every possible path available. There are many beginnings. In some, the path of the universe does not produce Earth. In others, Earth exists but you were never born. There is no one history to our universe. There is every possible history. And the history we see depends on how we look at the universe. We demonstrate that with the double-slit experiment when a photon detector installed between the screen and the film eliminates the interference pattern consistent with waves and the film displays a single band of light typical of particles. Observation somehow prevents the photons from interfering with each other. The final state is observer dependent.

Same with the universe. The observations of the present determine the path taken by the quantum event that is our universe - a path we call "the past." Are observations being made in our future determining our present?

Recently in my backyard, as the world turned toward night, I sat in the transformational shadows talking with a large rock that some friends had asked me to hold onto for them. You know how conversations go with rocks. They're very peaceful. One lays down one's life for the smallness that it is whenever one shoots the breeze with a rock - and the frail events of the day fall away. After the past evaporates and the splendid utterance of solid reality sinks in, the futureless now extolled by all the great teachers comes home. That's when I noticed the traveler.

At first, I thought this was a moonshadow in the sublunary dark under the frangipani. But no, the moon wasn't up yet. This was a traveler moving through time, from our future into our past. They sometimes look in daylight like iridescent milkweed floss. Or retinal flares as they journey through the moment, bound for earlier times, the earliest time, the quantum event of the cosmic singularity. That's the big sightseer attraction for time travelers - or maybe it's a kind of grand central routing station to the flexiverse of all possible universes. I'll need a few more conversations to figure that out.

Regrettably, the travelers aren't usually interested in talking with me. When I notice them, I try to engage their interest, and they almost invariably just move on. "What are electrons?" I spontaneously asked aloud, directly at the traveler. Sometimes fundamental questions like that get their attention. They seem to be intrigued by the nature of knowledge. The fact that a timebound gent grasps the fictional basis of physical reality tickles them. In our manufactured age, most people simply believe that what science says is identical with what is. Actually, science just makes models, and our reality is mind-made. We're duped, of course, by the mystery that fictive reality projects so very well onto physical reality so that airplanes actually fly and sewing machines sew, even though they don't always behave as predicted.

"What are electrons? No one has ever seen one. They make tracks in a bubble chamber or clicks in a counter. But what are they?"

"Esse est percipi."

That voice could have been the wind in the frangipani. Bishop Berkeley, the 18th century Irish philosopher, expressed in these three words the connection between the objective "world out there" and our own subjective consciousness. "To be is to be perceived" is the first formal acknowledgment of a concept only now, almost three centuries later, being taken seriously: genesis by observership. Our observations help create and shape physical reality.

"So, if the electron exists only when we perceive it - what is perception?" The sky had gone pink, as stratospheric volcanic haze lit up, and the night's menu opened on the brightest celestial objects. "Perception is not merely sensation but also an act of intellect."

"One cannot measure qualities."

Was that me thinking aloud or the wanderer's voice shining into silence? Either way, good point. Seems obvious but we tend to forget that science is measurement, and measurement can only be accomplished with a tool whose output is always a quantity, a number. Perception is an ontological and not simply quantitative event. Consciousness and intelligence are two important aspects that distinguish the corporeal world of our experience from the physical reality of existence. "I" is a quality as well as an agent. Or, in the famous dictum of the 19th century French Poet, Arthur Rimbaud, "Je est un autre" = I is another.

We - and the universe - are not simply physical systems. The majestic prospect of this night, where local stars pulsed, Saturn glowed, meteors flicked, and a satellite parted the shimmering void, was a scrim for the river curves of galaxies sweeping down the broad bend of spacetime that I, as a 21st century man, know are there, invisible to the naked eye yet apprehended by astronomers.

The traveler from the future lingered in my backyard, wrinkled air under the betel nut palm. The people inside me saw the wanderer more clearly than I, and I felt them pushing outward from behind my face, crushing the present.

"If I understand you," I said aloud to our visitor, giving voice to the curious crowd inside me, "the physical world points to a reality beyond itself. That's what we sense when we try to know physical fundaments like the electron. That's what you're telling me."

"Materia quantitate signata," said the voice out of nothing.

What's with all this Latin? Wanderers from our future appear from our perspective to journey backward, and their voices often times are the whispers of our ancestors. Sounds backward, but that's the nature of this cosmos, where time possesses the same features as space. I recognized this statement in Latin from the Scholastic philosophers of medieval Europe whose DNA enamored me out of the centuries. This is their renowned formula relating matter with quantity. Science does not concern reality per se but, rather, our connection to reality. Our measurement devices establish a query - and that provokes a reply from reality.

On the endless threshold we call time, opportunities to enter the ballroom of Now and dance under that fiery chandelier of our own mortality with tourists from our future don't come along every day. I wanted to know more. What the time traveler had already imparted is that the act of knowing entails fusing the intellect and the object of knowledge. Such a fusion is the materia quantitate signata of the Scholastics. To know any thing requires a fusion of mind and form, and this way of understanding reality presents us with a problem. "Uh, it seems to science that our physical universe exhibits no qualities other than quantities that are mathematical. And in mathematics there is no essence, no 'I,' just the material foundation of things."

The traveler had by now drifted to the rock with which I'd been conversing earlier. Hovering over it like a halo, the wayfarer whispered again with an ancestral voice, "Coincidentia oppositorum." Cold fell with the night, and I shivered. Those two words to the Western mind are equivalent to the yin-yang of our Eastern counterparts - the profound enigma of conjoined opposites at the core of events. Freedom and necessity unite in that mystery.

Clouds closed on the night's splendor, and I listened impassively to the whine of mosquitoes and the neighbors clattering dinner dishes.

The union of opposites - the fusion of knower and thing - the limiting factor of reality that enables us to observe, to perceive, to be aware of things as specific things is, in our age, the quantum discontinuity, the wave function of probability collapsible by observation to actuality, aka the state vector*, the Bestower of Forms … the action that philosophers of former times dubbed natura naturans, the form-endowing agent (a supernatural principle as opposed to natura naturata, the natural world).

[*This account has turned into a pizzicato dance of specialized terms, such as "state vector." What is that? In the math of quantum mechanics, a state vector ciphers probabilities for the outcomes of all possible measurements of any given system, say an electron orbiting a nucleus. What is super-natural about the state vector is exactly what the traveler from the future told me: the coincidentia oppositorum, the fusion of opposites, known in our time as paraconsistency, where the transition from potential to actual, from wave function to manifestation is effected by … consciousness, the Bestower of Forms, natura naturans.]

Clouds drew apart, revealing through the stratospheric mist vast starfields in our own galaxy - a cosmic vision of celestial pastures. It is here that the atoms in our bodies have their homegoing, their reunion with universal existence:

Where this Creation came from, He who has ordained it from the highest heaven, He indeed knows - or He knows not. (Rig Veda: Creation Hymn)

The time wanderer, me and the rock: Just as my observations were collapsing the rock so are observations from the future collapsing me. Of the 'many-me' selves that potentially exist, the observations that ordain this particular me derive not from the natural world but "from the highest heaven," from consciousness that knows and does not know.

The visitor in my backyard seemed to agree that I had arrived at the same latitude of fiction that the visitor occupied, uttered "Nunc stans," and vanished, continuing the journey toward the quantum event of the big bang. Which of the many possible universes will our traveler observe? On this trip, the informing energy includes this me, this rock, this entry and, if you have read this far, this you in the nunc stans, the one instant.

I felt an absurd relief step into my soul. In the untrimmed grass and insect noise not too far from River Styx, a man sits with a rock. Dinner fragrances from several households plunge on the suburban wind. I have told a truth I cannot know. Under star craft and fiery powers of the night, the truly irrational breathes me. And you. Soon the moon will ride high. We are already on the endless threshold. One step more is enough.