Quantum physics and belief

Apropos of “The Biology of Belief” by Bruce Lipton

In 2008 I received a copy of Bruce Lipton’s book The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness , Matter, and Miracles for reviewing in AntiMatters. I never got round to it, for reasons that will become obvious in what follows.

First, though, I completely understand the enthusiasm that quantum physics arouses in some people when they first encounter it. This enthusiasm, however, is of a purely negative kind. It is the excitement one feels at being liberated from reductive, deterministic, or materialistic thought forms. Quantum physics makes room for ideas that couldn’t get a foothold in the framework of classical physics. (It also makes room for a lot of BS.)

One of the first to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the quantum revolution in the first three decades of the 20th century was the physicist Pascual Jordan, who argued that the indeterminism of quantum physics provides a physical basis for free will—the determination of physical events by irreducibly mental ones. This misconception was quickly cleared up by Erwin Schrödinger, who found it “to be both physically and morally an impossible solution” (to the free-will problem).

Setting aside the issue of free will, quantum mechanics does not rule out the possibility that physical events are or can be caused by irreducibly mental events. The arguments most commonly made against mental causation boil down to “I don’t see how.” But when do we ever “see how” at a fundamental level? Isaac Newton didn’t see how gravity works; he “merely” gave us a mathematical tool for predicting its effects. David Hume stressed that we cannot possibly “see how” causation (defined as consistent covariation) works. And quantum physics reduced consistent covariation to statistical correlation, without giving us a clue as to how that works. How can one reproach a mind-body dualist for failing to explain how a physically irreducible mind produces or can produce physical effects, when a quantum physicist cannot explain how the outcome of a measurement performed in one location can influence the outcome of a measurement performed simultaneously in a distant location?

It has been claimed that quantum physics can explain paranormal phenomena (psychokinesis, extrasensory perception, telepathy, remote viewing, you name it). But if quantum mechanics cannot even explain the phenomena that it actually predicts, how could it possibly explain phenomena that it does not predict (even as it does not rule them out)?

Recently I was told by a reader of Aurocafe that I need to watch a documentary claimed to “unveil groundbreaking discoveries about ... the mind’s extraordinary potential to influence the body,” and that I should read Lipton’s book and several others so that skeptical me may see the light (i.e., understand that those groundbreaking discoveries are supported by quantum physics). So now, at last, I feel sufficiently motivated to explain why I found Lipton’s book so off-putting.

But let me first reiterate the all-important difference between merely allowing or making room for something and supporting it. If you tell me that quantum physics allows for the truth of your beliefs, I am fine with that, as long as your beliefs are consistent with the incontrovertible facts (such as that the sky on a sunny and cloudless day is normally blue). But if you tell me that quantum mechanics supports your belief in, say, alternative medicine, or spiritual healing, or the impact of meditation on mind and body, then I must tell you that you are being conned.

Once again: I respect, even share the aforementioned beliefs; I just take issue with the claim that they are supported by quantum physics. What science writer Jim Baggot wrote about fairy tale physics applies here as well: “Virtually every other popular book published on aspects of modern physics is chock-full of fairy stories. It is pseudo-science masquerading as science.”

Lipton himself has fallen for the con. As he tells his readers, the first popular physics book he read was The Cosmic Code by Heinz Pagels. I’ll never forget Pagels’ ridiculous illustration of Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations:

I have always thought that wet seeds from a fresh tomato illustrate the Heisenberg relation. If you look at a tomato seed on your plate you may think that you have established both its position and the fact that it is at rest. But if you try to measure the location of the seed by pressing your finger or a spoon on it the seed will slip away. As soon as you measure its position it begins to move. A similar kind of slipperiness for real quantum particles is expressed mathematically by the Heisenberg uncertainty relations.

Compare this with David Mermin’s masterful illustration (Boojums all the way through, 1990):

If this kind of behavior were scaled up to our level, then it would not, for example, be possible for a police helicopter to radio a patrol car that somebody was going at 75 miles per hour on route 17 at the intersection with exit 106. On the contrary, if the helicopter had ascertained that the speed of the car was exactly 75 miles per hour, then it would be incapable of specifying where the automobile was at all. If it contented itself with establishing that the speed was  between 73 and 77 miles per hour, then it might only be able to say that the car was somewhere between exit 96 and exit 116. To be able to announce that the car was somewhere between exits 105 and 107, it might have to settle for the information that the speed was somewhere between 60 and 90 miles per hour.

Clearly, where you get your information matters not only in politics.

A useful way of testing a popular book’s soundness with regard to physics is to check what it says on the subject of “matter.” According to Lipton, “in the invisible quantum world of Einstein ... matter is actually made up of energy and there are no absolutes.”

For one thing, saying that there are no absolutes is the dumbest possible takeaway from Einstein’s theory of relativity. In any given reference frame, the speed of light c depends neither on the speed of the measurer nor on the speed of the light source. This means that c is absolute—a universal constant. This was the surprising, even revolutionary part of Einstein’s theory. The rest (the relativity of simultaneity and of the lengths of measuring rods and time intervals) is corollary.

For another, saying that matter is “made up of” energy (or whatever) perpetuates the twenty-five centuries old paradigm according to which there is something that matter is made of, even as quantum mechanics is trying its utmost to tell us that said paradigm is way past its expiration date.

Vacuous and contradictory statements abound in Lipton’s book. “Energy and matter are one and the same.” The correct statement would be that energy and mass (not matter) are identical: when measured in kJ it is called “energy,” when measured in kg it is called “mass.” (There are no units for matter since matter it isn’t a physical quantity.) But how can matter and energy be the same when, as Lipton repeatedly asserts, “matter and energy are completely entangled in the world of quantum physics”? Identity and entanglement are patently different things.

It gets worse. To Lipton, the “logical corollary” of the claim that matter and energy are entangled is “that the mind (energy) and body (matter) are similarly bound.” Wherein exactly does the similarity of their being bound consist? Apparently, Lipton picked up the word “entangled” without an inkling as to what it means in the context of physics. (Refer to this post on what entanglement means in this context.)

Again: “Matter can simultaneously be defined as a solid (particle) and as an immaterial force field (wave).” Here Lipton is riffing on the tired notion of wave-particle duality. The reader may ignore the characterization of a particle as solid, which went out of vogue with the “solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles” of Newton (see here). But he or she might want to know in what way an electron (say) can be characterized (or behave) as either a particle or a wave.

It is tempting to think that the electron is a particle whenever it causes a counter to click (or a bubble to form in a bubble chamber, or a droplet to form in a cloud chamber). Yet this way of thinking puts the cart before the horse.

Quantum mechanics provides us with tools for calculating statistical correlations. When a track is observed in a cloud or bubble chamber, these tools allow us to assign a specific type of particle to the track. There is no particle that causes the clicks or the bubbles or droplets that form the track. Neither the category of substance (i.e., the idea of independently existing property carriers) nor the category of causality (i.e., the idea that the clicks or bubbles or droplets have a cause) is applicable to the quantum domain. What is given is the track; the story that the clicks or bubbles or droplets are caused by a passing electron is just that: a story, which we invent to make sense of what we observe—to the detriment of a proper understanding of quantum mechanics and the quantum domain.

What about the wave? If we know where and how a particle has been launched, the quantum-mechanical correlation laws allow us to assign a probability to its being detected at any given location (provided that the experimental arrangement allows the particle’s short-lived identity to be preserved). While the form of the resulting probability algorithm is somewhat similar to the algorithms that describe the propagation of a wave in classical physics, there is nothing that actually propagates from the site of the launch to the location of the detector, whether as a particle or as a wave.

The ploy of reifying a mathematical tool into a physical process or a field of force worked well enough in classical physics, but it doesn’t work in quantum physics and, as Mermin has shown (see the quotation in this post), it didn’t actually work in classical physics either. (See also this post on the remarkable uselessness of the concept of force.) Besides, the moment we are dealing with more than one particle, the corresponding wave propagates in more than the three dimensions of physical space. While reified waves in a multidimensional space make for entertaining sci-fi, it should be clear that the wave we are dealing with is a calculational tool, not a physical process or field of force.

Lipton again: “At the atomic level, matter does not even exist with certainty; it only exists as a tendency to exist.” Setting aside once more the unwarranted reference to “matter,” this statement amounts to a nod to the misguided potentiality interpretation of the quantum-mechanical wave function (see this post). If quantum mechanics assigns probability 1 to finding an observable Q in possession of a value q, it is generally assumed that Q has this value. If this were correct, one could affirm that when the probability of finding q is less than 1, Q has the value q potentially. In actual fact, Q has the value q only if Q is measured and q is the result.

And now for a passage that truly made me shudder:

Quantum physicists discovered that physical atoms are made up of vortices of energy that are constantly spinning and vibrating; each atom is like a wobbly spinning top that radiates energy.... If it were theoretically possible to observe the composition of an actual atom with a microscope, what would we see? Imagine a swirling dust devil cutting across the desert’s floor. Now remove the sand and dirt from the funnel cloud. What you have left is an invisible, tornado-like vortex. A number of infinitesimally small, dust devil–like energy vortices called quarks and photons collectively make up the structure of the atom. From far away, the atom would likely appear as a blurry sphere. As its structure came nearer to focus, the atom would become less clear and less distinct. As the surface of the atom drew near, it would disappear. You would see nothing. In fact, as you focused through the entire structure of the atom, all you would observe is a physical void.

Lipton tops this off with an image showing (on the left) the short-lived Rutherford atom mislabeled “Newtonian Atom” (there is no such thing) and (on the right) a black void labelled “Quantum Atom.”

Where does one even begin?

Let me start with the second part (after the dots). It is customary to metaphorically refer to particle accelerators as enabling one to “see” the subatomic structure of a target as through a microscope. Here quantum contextuality (see below) plays a crucial role, for what we “see” depends on how we “look.” Because the energy of a particle is inverse proportional to its wavelength, the higher the energy the shorter the wavelength used for “seeing,” and the shorter the wavelength, the smaller the structures that can be “seen” (or resolved). While at a certain energy the atomic nucleus “looks” as if it were made up of neutrons and protons interacting by exchanging pions, a closer “look” reveals that the protons, neutrons, and pions are made up of quarks and antiquarks interacting via gluons. A further increase in the energy of the particles used for “looking” increases the number of quarks, antiquarks, and gluons that are “seen.” What won’t be seen is anything like a physical void.

Coming to the first part, a cardinal (but unfortunately not uncommon) mistake is to ignore the contextuality of quantum mechanics. An atom does not exist in itself and does not do what it does all by itself. The proper way to describe it is in terms of correlations between the possible outcomes of unperformed measurements. To illustrate this point, consider a stationary “state” of atomic hydrogen. (The scare quotes serve as a reminder that what physicists call a quantum state is a conditional probability algorithm, not a state in the classical sense of the word.) Such a state is conditional on the outcomes of three measurements—of the atom’s energy, its total angular momentum, and a component of its angular momentum (which is defined by the orientation of the measurement apparatus)—and it serves to assign probabilities to the possible outcomes of subsequent measurements; for instance, a measurement of the electron’s position relative to the nucleus. (See this post for a pictorial representation.)

A non-stationary state of atomic hydrogen changes in the sense that the probabilities is serves to assign to the possible outcomes of a measurement change with the time of the measurement. Since the probabilities assigned by a stationary state are independent of the time of measurement, nothing changes when the atom is “in” such a state. Thus even though a stationary hydrogen atom can (if measured) have a positive angular momentum with respect to a given axis, it isn’t spinning. The angular momentum of an atom relates to the changes its wave function undergoes under rotations of the measurement apparatus. Nor can an atom vibrate. Only molecules and larger structures have vibrational degrees of freedom.

Atoms can of course emit and absorb energy (in the form of photons or quanta of electromagnetic radiation), which is what they do whenever they transition between stationary states. We tend to think of the atoms in, say, an interstellar gas as situated out there waiting to absorb and emit photons, but what is actually situated out there? It is something that can be described correctly only contextually, in terms measurements. What we calculate is the normal modes of a vibrating system and the energies and probabilities associated with transitions between these modes. What we observe is the frequencies (and hence energies) of the emitted or absorbed radiation as well as the corresponding transition probabilities (as statistical frequencies). What we do not observe is an actual vibrating system.

The point I’m trying to make is that quantum physics is a two-pronged affair. Mathematically, it is a calculus of correlations. But since there are no correlations without correlata, quantum physics is also a conceptual system linking the correlations to observations. As Brigitte Falkenburg writes in her excellent monograph Particle Metaphysics: A Critical Account of Subatomic Reality (2007), in order to understand the nature of this conceptual system,

it is helpful to adopt some crucial ideas of Niels Bohr’s quantum philosophy, in particular his view of the language of physics. This has remained valid up to the present day. At the individual level of clicks in particle detectors and particle tracks on photographs, all measurement results have to be expressed in classical terms. Indeed, the use of the familiar physical quantities of length, time, mass, and momentum-energy at a subatomic scale is due to an extrapolation of the language of classical physics to the non-classical domain. [p. 162]

One of the crucial insights of Niels Bohr was that the spatial resolving power of human sensory perception is physically limited by Planck’s constant. As a consequence, the extrapolation of the language of classical physics to the non-classical domain eventually breaks down. In Falkenburg’s words: “our classical construal of physical reality necessarily gives a distorted picture of subatomic structure. It simply makes us look into the atom through the wrong glasses” [p. 160].

In the early days of quantum physics, it was thought by some that classical concepts might eventually be replaced by quantum theoretical ones—by better glasses, so to speak. To this, Bohr replied that “it would be a misconception to believe that the difficulties of the atomic theory may be evaded by eventually replacing the concepts of classical physics by new conceptual forms”.¹ Why? Because the fundamental concepts at our disposal—both the descriptive and the explanatory ones—owe their meanings to the spatiotemporal structure of human sensory perception and to the logical or grammatical structure of human thought or language.

To Bohr, classical concepts were classical not because they are proprietary to classical physics but because we know what they mean, inasmuch as their meanings are rooted in what we all have in common—namely, the spatiotemporal structure of direct sensory awareness and the grammatical structure of a common language. And because the fundamental concepts at our disposal depend, in particular, on the spatial structure of sensory perception, they can only be employed as far as sensory perception can reach. Hence the eventual breakdown of the extrapolation of the language of classical physics to the non-classical domain.

However, the classical picture of reality does not break down at once; it breaks down stepwise. A chain of theoretical models builds semantic bridges between domains of reality that are incommensurable in Thomas Kuhn’s sense.² These models, Falkenburg explains, “bridge the conceptual gaps between classical point mechanics, classical electrodynamics, non-relativistic quantum mechanics, S-matrix theory and relativistic quantum field theory.” Along this chain of models, “more and more classical assumptions are abandoned” [p. 149].

Each link of the chain employs a generalized version of Bohr’s correspondence principle. To the extent this principle holds, “the classical picture of reality may be maintained for all practical purposes. Indeed, the correspondence principle prevents classical realism from breaking down at once in the quantum domain” [p. 193, original emphasis].

All quantum phenomena are eventually described in terms of length, time, and mass. This gives rise to the following question:

How is it possible that the construction of the length, time, and mass scales from the subatomic to the cosmological domain does not give rise to contradiction? The length scale covers the size of the universe, the size of this sheet of paper and the distance of the quarks within a proton or neutron. The size of the universe is obtained from models of general relativity (above all the big bang model) plus many kinds of astrophysical data. The size of this sheet of paper is measured with a ruler. The distance of the quarks within the nucleon has been measured from lepton–nucleon scattering in high energy physics as well as predicted from models of quantum chromodynamics. Similarly, the mass scale embraces the mass of electrons, billiard balls, and black holes. Electrons are subject to quantum electrodynamics, the motions of billiard balls to classical mechanics, black holes to general relativity. According to Kuhn, each theory generates its own world view. If we adopt this philosophy in face of the current theoretical pluralism of physics, we have to conclude that the scales of physical quantities span a fragmented world if they are able to span a world at all. [pp. 198‒99, original emphases]

As stated above, quantum physics is made up of a calculus of correlations and a classical conceptual system. An uncompromisingly classical system features separate material parts as causal agents producing physical phenomena. These are conceived to be independent, i.e., substances in their own right. In the course of the quantum revolution, the degree of independence attributed to the material parts and the causes of particle phenomena shrank. This shrinking independence “corresponds to the way in which the classical models of subatomic scattering centers and the parts of matter break down in a stepwise manner” [pp. 330‒31].

Quantum particles are “experimental phenomena rather than fundamental entities” [p. 209]. The experimental phenomena (which occur in a classically described context), as well as the non-classical particle concepts to which they give rise, depend on how deeply the quantum domain is probed. To each link in the chain of theoretical models there corresponds a different particle concept. With increasing scattering energy of the probe particles, the probed structures change. “They are not like a Cartesian ens per se [thing in itself] which exists independently of any interactions. They are rather like a thin glass target which is probed by billiard balls. At low scattering energy, the glass holds. At high scattering energy, it breaks, showing a completely different scattering behavior” [p. 160].

Glass target breaking. Generated with Copilot/Designer June 22, 2024.

I wrote all this to bring home just how inane such popular distortions of quantum mechanics as Lipton’s are, not to mention the claims that they support such beliefs as are peddled by Lipton.

1. N. Bohr, Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature, p. 16 (Cambridge University Press, 1934).

2. T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962).