What The Heck Is Really Happening?

Over the past few weeks we’ve been exploring quantum physics and how, when understand the power we have to exceed our human potential; we will become empowered in our life.

Orthodox quantum theory is pragmatic: it is a practical tool based on human potential and ‘knowings’. It takes our experiences as basic, and judges theories on the basis of how well they work for us, without trying to attribute any reality to the entities of the theory, beyond the reality for us that they acquire from their success in allowing us to find rational order in the structure of our past experiences, and to form sound expectations about the consequences of our possible future actions.

But the opinion of many physicists, including Einstein, is that the proper task of scientists is to try to construct a rational theory of nature that is not based on so small a part of the natural world as human knowledge. John Bell opined that we physicists ought to try to do better than that.

The question thus arises as to what is ‘really happening’.

Heisenberg (1958) answered this question in the following way:

“Since through the observation our knowledge of the system has changed discontinuously, its mathematical representation also has undergone the discontinuous change, and we speak of a ‘quantum jump’.”

“A real difficulty in understanding the interpretation occurs when one asks the famous question: But what happens ‘really’ in an atomic event?”

“If we want to describe what happens in an atomic event, we have to realize that the word ‘happens’ can apply only to the observation, not to the state of affairs between the two observations. It (the word ‘happens’) applies to the physical, not the psychical act of observation, and we may say that the transition from the ‘possible’ to the ‘actual’ takes place as soon as the interaction of the object with the measuring device, and therefore with the rest of the world, has come into play; it is not connected with the act of registration of the result in the mind of the observer. The discontinuous change in the probability function, however, occurs with the act of registration, because it is the discontinuous change in our knowledge in the instant of recognition that has its image in the discontinuous change in the probability function.”

This explanation uses two distinct modes of description. One is a pragmatic knowledge-based description in terms of the Copenhagen concept of the discontinuous change of the quantum-theoretic probability function at the registration of new knowledge in the mind of the observer. The other is an ontological description in terms of ‘possible’ and ‘actual’, and ‘interaction of object with the measuring device’.

The latter description is an informal supplement to the strict Copenhagen interpretation. The term ‘informal supplement’ is used because this ontological part is not tied into quantum theoretical formalism in any precise way. It assuages the physicists’ desire for an intuitive understanding of what could be going on behind the scenes, without actually interfering with the workings of the pragmatic set of rules.

Heisenberg’s transition from ‘the possible’ to ‘the actual’ at the dumb measuring device was shown to be a superfluous and needless complication by von Neumann’s analysis of the quantum process of measurement (von Neumann, 1932, Chapter VI). Von Neumann introduced the measuring instruments and the body/brains of the community of human observers into the quantum state, which is quantum theory’s only representation of “physical reality”.

He then showed that if an observer experiences the fact that, for example, ‘the pointer on a measuring device has swung to the right’, then this increment in the observer’s knowledge can be associated exclusively with a reduction (i.e., sudden change) of the state of the brain of that observer to the part of that brain state that is compatible with his new knowledge.

No change or reduction of the quantum state at the dumb measuring device is needed: no change in “knowledge” occurs there. This natural association of human “knowings” with events in human brains allows the ‘rules’ of the Copenhagen interpretation pertaining to “our knowledge” to be represented in a natural ontological framework.

Indeed, any reduction event at the measuring device itself would, strictly speaking, disrupt in principle the validity of the predictions of quantum theory. Thus the only natural ontological place to put the reduction associated with the increases in knowledge upon which the Copenhagen interpretation is built is in the brain of the person whose knowledge is increased.

The intention here is to reconcile the insight of the founders of quantum theory, namely that the mathematical formalism of quantum theory is about our knowledge, with the demand of Einstein that basic physical theory be about nature herself. This reconciliation will be achieved by incorporating human beings, including both their body/brains and their conscious experiences, into the quantum mechanical description of nature.

The underlying commitment here is to the basic quantum principle that information is the currency of reality, not matter: the universe is an informational structure, not a substantive one. This fact is becoming ever clearer in the empirical studies of the validity of the concepts of quantum theory in the context of complex experiments with simple combinations of correlated quantum systems, and in the related development of quantum information processing. Information-based language works beautifully, but substancebased language does not work at all..

Hum????

Reference:

Attention, Intention, and Will in Quantum Physics – Henry P. Stapp, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory