science's greatest mystery:
its history, nature, and meaning 

'the truth is not a fragile thing and will eventually rise to the top of a heap of competing ideas'

Physicist Tom Campbell, in clear language, explains the history and significance of the quantum mechanics revolution of 100 years ago, how its implications were denied by materialists, and why, as Tom sees it, its proper explication might lead to a better world, free from the power-control-force paradigm afflicting all of us today.

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the end of determinism 

from the BBC documentary “The Search For Reality”

does the moon pop out of existence when we turn our heads

Editor’s note: While “matter has no stand-alone reality” and is a “function of how we are put together to observe the world” (see Kastrup below), it is also true that matter, having entered the realm of shared observation, becomes part of the “rule set,” accessible and manifesting with a degree of uniformity to “all players of the game.” See Tom Campbell’s lectures below.

Albert Einstein, in a lecture at Princeton. READ MORE

all facts are important

J. Arthur Hill: "Facts differ in importance, but it is a fundamental article of ... science that all facts are important in some degree.

all facts are important for, as they gather, an underlying tapestry of reality is revealed

"The import of some of them may not be clear at first, but continued collection brings about the possibility of valuable inferences. An orbit cannot be computed from one or two points given; many are necessary.

all facts are important and none of it is 'minor', for all knowledge is connected, Nature is of a piece and unfurls seamlessly, but only to the mind patiently assembling the data

"Similarly a number of facts — the more the better — may be required before we see their meaning. But there is a meaning, and it is worth our while to amass details patiently. This is the modern spirit [of science] — to inquire of Nature instead of building philosophic word-structures into the blue. Observation and record are the watchwords.”

in the 1920s, Alfred North Whitehead was among the first to grasp the underlying significance of quantum mechanics

The following is a paraphrase of a portion of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s lecture which can be accessed on youtube beginning at 15:45.

In the 1920s, when quantum physics was just getting started, Alfred North Whitehead was one of the first to understand it. Other philosophers didn’t have the math background, but Whitehead was also a mathematician and so he grasped the significance immediately.

Because light and matter are wavelike, and because waves spread out, both in time and area, Whitehead realized that you couldn’t have a wave at an instant; you can’t have a small slice or particle of a wave and say here it is, because it’s spread out. A wave takes both time and space to move about. And so you can’t define it in a particular time or place, and this is the subsuming reason for Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle because fundamental particles are wavelike.

'matter is a process', not made of hard little bee-bees

And so, what Whitehead showed was that matter is not “stuff,” as the nineteenth century Newtonian physicists had insisted. Matter wasn’t like little billiard balls, hard, impenetrable stuff that persisted. Whitehead said that, instead, matter is a process, because it’s like a wave, and if it’s a wave, and if it’s a process, then it takes place in time, and if it takes place in time, then it has a polarity of time, a past and future ‘pole.’ And this completely transforms our view of matter...

READ MORE on the "consciousness" page

a sudden inspiration - 'the most profound insight in the entire history of science'

This is the view of physics Professor Jim Al-Khalili, as offered in the documentary “Atom.” What was this shattering revelation?

In 1926 Werner Heisenberg was working as an assistant to Niels Bohr at his mentor’s institute in Copenhagen.

Almost every night they would enter into fierce debate concerning the nature of the quantum world. Everyone was searching for a model, a guiding matrix, an underlying pattern by which to understand the atom and the new theory.

what Heisenberg saw

Early on it was thought, “When we get better measuring devices, when our instrumentation is more precise, we’ll be able to know both position and momentum.” But Heisenberg finally realized that lack of information was not due to faulty scientific hardware, nor is this elusiveness the result of the atom being quirky or tricky.

In a burst of hot creative moment, Heisenberg understood what no human being had ever perceived. The implications were utterly radical, profoundly upsetting to traditional Newtonian physics.

there is no model: the atom, essentially, is unknowable

There is no model, no familiar picture, no visual aid for the atom. It cannot be tethered and corralled, in terms of arriving at final understanding. The atom, in its core essence, essentially, is unknowable. Reality – at its deepest level – is fundamentally built upon principles of chance and probability and cannot be strictly defined or determined.

READ MORE on the "theory of everything" page

Bohr versus Einstein 

'the central point and lesson of twentieth century physics' 

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'matter is completely mutable, can be created from energy and vanish into energy'

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the night sky, the vastness of outer space, not a vacuum of emptiness but a plenum of infinite possibility

Dr. David Bohm was walking with one of his grad students, the future Dr. David Schrum, who recounts:

“It was night and we were walking under the stars, a black sky. David looked up at the stars and said: ‘Ordinarily, when we look to the sky and we look at the stars, we think of the stars as objects far out and that they have space in between them. But there is another way we can look at it. We can look at the vacuum, the emptiness, as a plenum, as infinitely full rather than infinitely empty, and that the objects are like little bubbles – little vacancies – in that vast sea.’ So he had me look at the night sky in a different way – as one living organism.”

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the Bohr-Einstein argument offered competing views of reality

Dr. David Bohm comments:

“I think our recent past, the last few hundred years, has been such to condition us heavily to the notion of unambiguous reality. And I think this was Bohr’s basic point that Einstein never appreciated. The disagreement between Bohr and Einstein was that Bohr talked of ambiguity and Einstein talked of a signal which means unambiguity. And that was what they were fighting about.”

see the interview

Big Religion became the most powerful institution in the Western world by manipulating the fear of death, thereby controlling whole continents and civilizations

Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, PhD philosophy, PhD computer science, interviewed by Beshara Magazine:

“[Scientific] materialism didn’t become mainstream without reason. One of its biggest advantages is that in one fell swoop it eliminated the biggest fear humanity has had throughout its history, which is: what are we going to experience after we die? In Christian terms, are we going to go to hell? This fear has dominated human life to the point that the Church could control whole continents and civilizations and became the most powerful institution in the Western world. It is this fear that makes us feel guilty, which imbues us with anxiety and a sense of responsibility for what we do. But if we don’t believe in anything beyond material existence, we don’t need to worry.”

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passionate search into the nature of things

“Unlike other professors [at Princeton], Bohm was noncompetitive in his approach. Once, after Bohm had spent time developing an aspect of his plasma theory, [Eugene] Gross came across a paper on the same topic by the great Russian physicist Lev Landau [publication delayed in the aftermath of war]. Bohm was not at all perturbed … rather, he admired the elegance and incisiveness of Landau’s approach. In Gross’s opinion, ‘Dave’s essential being was then, and still is, totally engaged in the calm but passionate search into the nature of things. He can only be characterized as a secular saint. He is totally free from guile and competitiveness, and it would be easy to take advantage of him. His students and friends, mostly younger... felt a powerful urge to protect such a precocious being.”

Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm, Dr. David Peat

Sheldrake and Bohm

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake and Dr. David Bohm discuss morphic fields and the implicate order.

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an atom can oscillate between two states, wave-form and actuality

Dr. Lothar Shafer: An electron or atom, in a vacuum, goes back to a state of wave-form, loses all mass, has no specific position in space, becomes mere invisible potentiality. But, when interacted with, enters a new state of visible actuality.

• QM reveals a part of the world we can’t see
• it doesn’t consist of things but of forms
• the forms are mind-like, thought-like, patterns of information
• they display a character of wholeness
• this could indicate the existence of a cosmic mind
• which is connected to our minds

see the lecture

'a continual popping into existence from the void'

Dr. Jim Al-Khalili: English physicist Paul Dirac in 1928 predicted the existence of the positron and anti-matter. His famous “Dirac Equation” is sometimes called “the most beautiful equation in the world.”

Dirac’s mathematics predicted a continual virtual popping into existence, from the seeming void, matter and anti-matter particles, most of which would almost instantly annihilate each other. However, one in a billion of these particles would not be destroyed but remain. These survivors become the matter of the universe, the material stuff of which all things consist.

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the universe as mechanical clockwork precision

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'the substratum of everything is of mental character'

Sir James Jeans (1877-1946)
Cambridge professor of mathematics and physics

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Direct-Voice medium Emily French, with Edward Randall, brings through a scientist from the other side who offers the basic concepts of quantum mechanics. This testimony was given before Heisenberg, Bohr, Dirac, and Schrodinger made their discoveries.

We met Randall and French in item #5 of the afterlife evidence, “direct-voice mediums.” They worked together for about 20 years in the early 1900s. While they brought through hundreds or thousands of voices from the other side, one in particular offers most astonishing scientific information – before it was discovered by the fathers of quantum mechanics.

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Schrodinger's Moon

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‘matter is how the world appears when we measure it… if we abandon the intuition that matter has a stand-alone existence, then the paradoxes resolve; there is no great mystery here [only] our stubbornness in trying to hold on to a failed intuition’

Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, PhD philosophy, PhD computer science, for many years worked at CERN, the large hadron collider in Geneva.

Interviewer: "[Concerning Kant’s insight that space and time are not objective scaffolding of the world but cognitive categories] How do you relate this to what we know about quantum mechanics, which seems to be a different layer from our ordinary physical reality?"

Kastrup: "The key difference is between the thing in itself – the world as it is in itself – and the world as it presents itself to our observation. The world as it is in itself is pure: it’s a function of itself. But the world as it presents itself to our observation is not only a function of the world as it is in itself; it’s also a function of us and how we are put together to observe the world.

"In quantum mechanics we have the idea of the wave function – Schrödinger’s equation – which is an expression of all the states that are possible, and when we take a measurement, we say that it collapses… But a measurement is already a representation – an appearance. It is what happens when the world as it is interacts with us. What we can measure is never going to be the world as it is in itself.

"So what quantum physics is telling us is that matter has no stand-alone reality. Matter is how the world appears to us when we measure it, when we interact with it, when we observe it … As to what is behind that appearance, we cannot visualize it as anything material or physical because all the parameters used to exhaustively describe what we call material things are observables. The best we can know about the world as it is, is the quantum wave function, which is a statistical thing – a wave of possibilities.

"This is what we have to get through our heads. Quantum mechanics has been around since the early 20th century, but we have been stubbornly refusing to accept what it is showing us. If we abandon the need to preserve the intuition that matter has a stand-alone existence, then everything that we consider a great puzzle in quantum mechanics – the great paradoxes of non-locality and indeterminacy, etc. – immediately resolve. There is no great mystery here. The mystery is our stubbornness in trying to hold on to a failed intuition."

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Dr. Frederico Faggin, inventor of the silicon chip in 1971, is today advocating a new revolution in science: the primacy of consciousness over matter

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Dr. Federico Faggin: consciousness, computers, and quantum fields 

How the inventor of the first microprocessor was led to study consciousness

A materialist is suddenly plunged into a mystical experience

The One seeks to know itself

Matter is a form of information transmitted among conscious spin-off entities of the One

The urge toward self-knowledge distinguishes human beings from machines

Is the quantum realm just a mathematical description or is it something real with its own ontology?

What is quantum information?

More than the sum of its parts

Quantum computers

Quantum fields vs quantum states

Consciousness and quantum fields

Characteristics of quantum fields mirror those of consciousness

What is consciousness?

The future is not predictable

Two forms of knowledge, only one is accessed by a computer

The 'big obstacle' in building a conscious computer

Semantic knowledge is not a property of a machine

The randomness of quantum physics is fundamentally different from the randomness of classical systems

Heisenberg: “Physics is not a representation of reality but our way of thinking about it.”

Reductionism and logical positivism

What supports quantum states and fields?

David Chalmers and the “hard problem” of consciousness

What is consciousness? part 2

Why are there exaggerated claims about the abilities and future of AI?

Can computers learn?

Can a computer supervise its own learning, and can computers teach each other?

Do AI computers pose a threat to humankind?

Applications to the teachings of Krishnamurti

Quantum entanglement implies entities with free will

The universe is a chaotic, not a deterministic, system

Why computers have no higher-level creativity

Is nature, and quantum mechanics, absurd?

Consciousness, not matter, discovered to be elemental by the Kogi people of South America

In the “creativity” article, we spoke of the famous painting wherein Isaiah is listening.

Isaiah listening versus Isaiah questioning

We in the West are proud of the scientific method; and, rightly so, as it’s produced an awesome array of technological advancement.

However, there’s another, entirely different, but absolutely valid, approach to knowledge production of which we tend to be oblivious. It is the realm of intuition, of creativity’s “discontinuous” leaps forward, the quantum realm of the mind’s infinite possibilities, the child of Universal Consciousness.

In this latter world, Isaiah does best just to listen and will refrain from asking questions. Why this diminishment of questioning? Questioning does fine when allied with the scientific method but gets in the way when we enter the intuitive realm. The problem with questioning is that it presumes an intellectual framework into which we desire new information to fit. In a sense, we've already decided what the answer ought to be. But what if the answer is far above our present paradigms of knowledge with no correspondence to present understanding; in such case, it would be best to maintain silence and simply listen, as “The Wedding Song” uses the phrase, to “something never seen before.”

What I’m about to introduce must be presented in severe elliptical fashion. Brevity must rule as the subject is too large, but worthy of extensive study and consideration. I hope that you will learn more by searching the linked references.

the Kogi people have learned to listen

For some decades British journalist-anthropologist Alan Ereira has investigated the high-mountain tribal Kogi people who live in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the north of Colombia.

The Kogi have learned to listen to the whispering messages of Universal Consciousness, as expressed in Nature, to a degree that might be unrivaled in the world, save for the best medicine men of North American indigenous peoples.

We have discussed this form of "listening", this "going within" to access Universal Intelligence, on the "true self" page. But the Kogi are masters, far ahead in this, and take it to high art-form.

How can we confirm their expertise? The Kogi know things, and are able to do things, for example, in terms of environmental cleansing, reforesting, of healing the land, that we in the West are not able to do.

immediately picks out the one star in a blizzard of galaxies

During a trip to London, this Kogi master met with a leading astronomer. A photograph was brought out of the Hubbell “deep field,” a tiniest postage-stamp, and apparently empty, section of the inky blackness which, under intense magnification, revealed some few thousand galaxies. As confirmed by the astronomer in the video, the Kogi immediately pointed to the single star – not a galaxy – amidst the blizzard array and, in Kogi language, referred to it by name; as if it were a close friend! All this is sensational enough, but, let's keep in mind, this star resided in a section of the heavens totally hidden and unknown, totally inaccessible to human eyes, until just a few years ago.

Much of the Kogi wisdom remains cloaked to us. They refer to us in the West as their “younger brothers.” Prodigal brothers, we take it. They don’t fully trust us to do the right thing, as the memories still linger of the RCC-Conquistador brutalities and genocide.

But the Kogi understanding of Universal Consciousness (UC) is right in line with what physicists such as Prof. Amit Goswami tell us about the quantum realm: UC represents infinite possibility but has pared down the choices so as to direct reality toward prescribed goals and destinies. In this vein, Alan Ereira reports that Kogis have a view of “Mother [Consciousness] as memory and possibility.” This is Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s “the mind is a quantum field of possibility.”

Out of this primordial essence of Mother Consciousness -- which is the ground of reality, not matter -- all things were created. However, before she created, she “explored, almost infinitely” the various possibilities to arrive at just the right mix for those of us who would inhabit Earth. This is the answer to Leibniz’s question of the “best of all possible worlds.”

See Beshara Magazine's article on the Kogi.

See Alan Ereira's report.

View Alan Ereira's video.

Newtonianism sees the world, including human beings, as deterministic, predictable, mechanical; but quantum uncertainty allows for creative impulse, change, evolving sentience

God as geometer

The ancient Greeks taught that geometry not merely describes but is built into the very structure of nature. An inscription at the entrance of Plato’s Academy declared, ‘You are not allowed to enter here unless you know geometry’, denoting that geometry represents eternal precept. This is why Plato posited, ‘God is a geometer’, that mathematics constitutes divine revelation. Euclid’s Elements devolved to more than math textbook but veritable religious treatise. This spirit of unyielding exactitude heavily influenced Western thought, producing the "laws" of the great Newton, deemed to echo God's own voice. It would take an iconoclast Einstein, with his relativity and quantum theories, to liberate the world from rigid concepts of a quasi-religious geometry. There is no inherent geometrical structure, no commanding certainty, no immovable precision, embedded within nature, rather, such view is imposed upon reality by the errant mind.

Interviewer: “What’s wrong with the old worldview?”

Dr. Amit Goswami: “The old worldview was Newtonian. In that worldview, everything is deterministic, we are machines, and cannot change.”

Victor Zammit reports on the Open Sciences organization:

530+ SCIENTISTS, PROFESSORS, MDs, AND THOUGHT LEADERS HAVE SIGNED THE MANIFESTO FOR A POST-MATERIAL SCIENCE
"We believe that the sciences are being constricted by dogmatism, and in particular by a subservience to the philosophy of materialism, the doctrine that matter is the only reality and that the mind is nothing but the physical activity of the brain. We believe that the sciences would be more scientific if they were free to investigate the natural world in a truly open way – without the constraints of materialism and the prejudice of dogma – while adhering to the scientific methods of data collecting, hypothesis testing, and critical discussion."

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Dr. Rupert Sheldrake discusses the present crisis of fraud and deception afflicting peer-reviewed scientific journals:

'The peer-review system is falling into disrepute... [that] so many unreliable papers are [now] published shows that the system is not working... [an] investigation by the American journal Science revealed ... shocking results... a spoof paper, riddled with scientific and statistical errors, [with] 304 versions [sent to] peer-reviewed journals [and were] accepted for publication by more than half of them.'

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