BIOCENTRISM

by Robert Lanza

  is true enough—but then, without explanation or elaboration, goes

  on to say that it proves people can travel into the past or “choose

  which reality you want.”

  Quantum theory says no such thing. Quantum theory deals with

  probabilities, and the likely places particles may appear, and likely

  actions they will take. And while, as we shall see, bits of light and

  matter do indeed change behavior depending on whether they are

  being observed, and measured particles do indeed amazingly appear

  to influence the past behavior of other particles, this does not in any

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  way mean that humans can travel into their past or influence their

  own history.

  Given the widespread generic use of the term quantum theory,

  plus the paradigm-changing tenets of biocentrism, using quan-

  tum theory as evidence might raise eyebrows among the skepti-

  cal. For this reason, it’s important that readers have some genuine

  understanding of quantum theory’s actual experiments—and can

  grasp the real results rather than the preposterous claims so often

  associated with it. For those with a little patience, this chapter

  can provide a life-altering understanding of the latest version of

  one of the most famous and amazing experiments in the history

  of physics.

  The astonishing “double-slit” experiment, which has changed

  our view of the universe—and serves to support biocentrism—has

  been performed repeatedly for many decades. This specific ver-

  sion summarizes an experiment published in Physical Review A (65, 033818) in 2002. But it’s really merely another variation, a tweak to

  a demonstration that has been performed again and again for three-

  quarters of a century.

  It all really started early in the twentieth century when physi-

  cists were still struggling with a very old question—whether light

  is made of particles called photons or whether instead they are

  waves of energy. Isaac Newton believed it was made of particles.

  But by the late nineteenth century, waves seemed more reason-

  able. In those early days, some physicists presciently and cor-

  rectly thought that even solid objects might have a wave nature

  as well.

  To find out, we use a source of either light or particles. In the

  classic double-slit experiment, the particles are usually electrons,

  because they are small, fundamental (they can’t be divided into any-

  thing else), and easy to beam at a distant target. A classic television

  set, for example, directs electrons at the screen.

  We start by aiming light at a detector wall. First, however, the

  light must pass through an initial barrier with two holes. We can

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  shoot a flood of light or just a single indivisible photon at a time—

  the results remain the same. Each bit of light has a 50-50 chance of

  going through the right or the left slit.

  After a while, all these photon-bullets will logically create a pat-

  tern—falling preferentially in the middle of the detector with fewer

  on the fringes, because most paths from the light source go more or

  less straight ahead. The laws of probability say that we should see a

  cluster of hits like this:

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  When plotted on a graph (in which the number of hits is ver-

  tical, and their position on the detector screen is horizontal) the

  expected result for a barrage of particles is indeed to have more hits

  in the middle and fewer near the edges, which produces a curve

  like this:

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  But that’s not the result we actually get. When experiments like

  this are performed—and they have been done thousands of times

  during the past century—we find that the bits of light instead create

  a curious pattern:

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  Plotted on a graph, the pattern’s “hits” look like this:

  In theory, those smaller side peaks around the main one should

  be symmetrical. In practice, we’re dealing with probabilities and

  individual bits of light, so the result usually deviates a bit from the

  ideal. Anyway, the big question here is: why this pattern?

  Turns out, it’s exactly what we’d expect if light is made of waves,

  not particles. Waves collide and interfere with each other, causing

  ripples. If you toss two pebbles into a pond at the same time, the

  waves produced by each meet each other and produce places of

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  higher-than-normal or lower-than-normal water-rises. Some waves

  reinforce each other or, if one’s crest meets another’s trough, they

  cancel out at that spot.

  So this early-twentieth-century result of an interference pattern,

  which can only be caused by waves, showed physicists that light is

  a wave or at least acts that way when this experiment is performed.

  The fascinating thing is that when solid physical bodies like elec-

  trons were used, they got exactly the same result. Solid particles

  have a wave nature too! So, right from the get-go, the double-slit

  experiment yielded amazing information about the nature of reality.

  Solid objects have a wave nature!

  Unfortunately, or fortunately, this was just the appetizer. Few

  realized that true strangeness was only beginning.

  The first oddity happens when just one just photon or electron

  is allowed to fly through the apparatus at a time. After enough have

  gone through and been individually detected, this same interference

  pattern emerges. But how can this be? With what is each of those

  electrons or photons interfering? How can we get an interference

  pattern when there’s only indivisible object in there at a time?

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  A single photon hits the detector.

  A second photon hits the detector.

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  A third photon hits the detector.

  Somehow, these individual photons add up to an interference

  pattern!

  There has never been a truly satisfactory answer for this. Wild

  ideas keep emerging. Could there be other electrons or photons

  “next door” in a parallel universe, from another experimenter doing

  the same thing? Could their electrons be interfering with ours? That’s

  so far-fetched that few believe it.

  The usual interpretation of why we see an interference pattern

  is that photons or electrons have two choices when they encoun-

  ter the double slit. They do not actually exist as real entities in real

  places until they are observed, and they aren’t observed until they hit

  the final detection barrier. So when they reach the slits, they exer-

  cise their probabilistic freedom of taking both choices. Even though actual electrons or photons are indivisible, and never split themselves under any conditions whatsoever, their existence as probability waves

  are
another story. Thus, what go “through the slit” are not actual enti-

  ties but just probabilities. The probability waves of the individual photons interfere with themselves! When enough have gone through, we see the overall interference pattern as all probabilities congeal into actual

  entities making impacts and being observed—as waves.

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  Sure it’s weird, but this, apparently, is how reality works. And

  this is just the very beginning of quantum weirdness. Quantum

  theory, as we mentioned in the last chapter, has a principle called

  complementarity, which says that we can observe objects to be one

  thing or another—or have one position or property or another, but

  never both. It depends on what one is looking for and what measur-

  ing equipment is used.

  Now, suppose we wish to know which slit a given electron or

  photon has gone through on its way to the barrier. It’s a fair enough

  question, and it’s easy enough to find out. We can use polarized

  light (that is, light whose waves vibrate either horizontally or verti-

  cally or else slowly rotate their orientation) and when such a mixture

  is used, we get the same result as before. But now let’s determine

  which slit each photon is going through. Many different things have

  been used, but in this experiment we’ll use a “quarter wave plate” or

  QWP in front of each slit. Each quarter wave plate alters the polarity

  of the light in a specific way. The detector can let us know the polar-

  ity of the incoming photon. So by noting the polarity of the photon

  when it’s detected, we know which slit it went through.

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  Now we repeat the experiment, shooting photons through the

  slits one at a time, except this time we know which slot each pho-

  ton goes through. Now the results dramatically change. Even though

  QWPs do not alter photons other than harmlessly shifting their

  polarities (later, we prove that this change in results is not caused

  by the QWPs), now we no longer get the interference pattern. Now

  the curve suddenly changes to what we’d expect if the photons were

  particles:

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  Something’s happened. It turns out that the mere act of measure-

  ment, of learning the path of each photon, destroyed the photon’s

  freedom to remain blurry and undefined and take both paths until it

  reached the barriers. Its “wave-function” must have collapsed at our

  measuring device, the QWPs, as it instantly “chose” to become a par-

  ticle and go through one slit or the other. Its wave nature was lost

  as soon as it lost its blurry probabilistic not-quite-real state. But why

  should the photon have chosen to collapse its wave-function? How did

  it know that we, the observer, could learn which slit it went through?

  Countless attempts to get around this, by the greatest minds of

  the past century, have all failed. Our knowledge of the photon or electron path alone caused it to become a definite entity ahead of the pre-

  vious time. Of course, physicists also wondered whether this bizarre

  behavior might be caused by some interaction between the which-

  way QWP detector or various other devices that have been tried, and

  the photon. But no. Totally different which-way detectors have been

  built, none of which in any way disturb the photon, yet we always

  lose the interference pattern. The bottom line conclusion, reached

  after many years, is that it’s simply not possible to gain which-way

  information and the interference pattern caused by energy waves.

  We’re back to quantum theory’s complementarity—that you

  can measure and learn just one of a pair of characteristics but never

  both at the same time. If you fully learn about one, you will know

  nothing about the other. And, just in case you’re suspicious of the

  quarter wave plates, let it be said that when used in all other con-

  texts, including double-slit experiments but without information-

  providing polarization-detecting barriers at the end, the mere act of

  changing a photon’s polarization never has the slightest effect on the

  creation of an interference pattern.

  Okay, let’s try something else. In nature, as we saw in the last

  chapter, there are entangled particles or bits of light (or matter) that

  were born together and therefore share a wave-function according

  to quantum theory. They can fly apart—even across the width of

  the galaxy—and yet they still retain this connection, this knowl-

  edge of each other. If one is meddled with in any way so that it

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  loses its “anything’s possible” nature and has to decide instantly

  to materialize with, say, a vertical polarization, its twin will then

  instantaneously materialize too, and with a horizontal polarity. If

  one becomes an electron with an up spin, the twin will too, but with

  a down spin. They’re eternally linked in a complementary way.

  So now let’s use a device that shoots off entangled twins in dif-

  ferent directions. Experimenters can create the entangled photons

  by using a special crystal called beta-barium borate (BBO). Inside

  the crystal, an energetic violet photon from a laser is converted to

  two red photons, each with half the energy (twice the wavelength)

  of the original, so there’s no net gain or loss of energy. The two out-

  bound entangled photons are sent off in different directions. We’ll

  call their path directions p and s.

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  We’ll set up our original experiment with no which-way infor-

  mation measured. Except that now we add a “coincidence counter.”

  The role of the coincidence counter is to prevent us from learning

  the polarity of the photons at detector S unless a photon also hits

  detector P. One twin goes through the slits (call this photon s) while the other merely barrels ahead to a second detector. Only when both

  detectors register hits at about the same time do we know that both

  twins have completed their journeys. Only then does something

  register on our equipment. The resulting pattern at detector S is our familiar interference pattern:

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  This makes sense. We haven’t learned which slit any particular

  photon or electron has taken, so the objects have remained prob-

  ability waves.

  But let’s now get tricky. First, we’ll restore those QWPs so we

  can get which-way information for photons traveling along path S.

  As expected, the interference pattern now vanishes, replaced

  with the particle pattern, the single curve.

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  So far, so good. But now, let’s destroy our ability to measure the

  which-way paths of the s photons but without interfering with them in any way. We can do this by placing a polarizing window in the

  path of the other photon P, far away. This plate will stop the second detector from registering coincidences. It’ll measure only some of the

  photons, and effect
ively scramble up the double-signals. Because a

  coincidence counter is essential here in delivering information about

  the completion of the twins’ journeys, it has now been rendered

  thoroughly unreliable. The entire apparatus will now be uselessly

  unable to let us learn which slit individual photons take when they

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  travel along path S because we won’t be able to compare them with

  their twins—because nothing registers unless the coincidence coun-

  ter allows it to do so. And let’s be clear: we’ve left the QWPs in place

  for photon S. All we’ve done is to meddle with the p photon’s path in a way that removes our ability to use the coincidence counter to gain

  which-way knowledge. (The setup, to review, delivers information

  to us, registers “hits” only when polarity is measured at detector S

  and the coincidence counter tells us that either a matching or non-

  matching polarity has been simultaneously registered by the twin

  photon at detector P. ) The result:

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  They’re waves again. The interference pattern is back. The physi-

  cal places on the back screen where the photons or electrons taking

  path s struck have now changed. Yet we did nothing to these photons’

  paths, from their creation at the crystal all the way to the final detec-

  tor. We even left the QWPs in place. All we did was meddle with

  the twin photon far away so that it destroyed our ability to learn

  information. The only change was in our minds. How could pho-

  tons taking path S possibly know that we put that other polarizer

  in place—somewhere else, far from their own paths? And quantum

  theory tells us that we’d get this same result even if we placed the

  information-ruiner at the other end of the universe.

  (Also, by the way, this proves that it wasn’t those QWP plates

  that were causing the photons to change from waves to particles,

  and to alter the impact points on the detector. We now get an inter-

  ference pattern even with the QWPs in place. It’s our knowledge

  alone with which the photons or electrons seem concerned. This

  alone influences their actions.)