The mental Universe

 The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things. 

Historically,  we  have  looked to  our religious leaders to  understand the meaning of  our lives; the nature  of  our world.  With Galileo Galilei,  this changed.  In  establishing that  the Earth goes around the Sun, Galileo not only  succeeded in believing the unbelievable himself, but also  convinced  almost everyone else  to do the same. This was a stunning  accomplishment  in ‘physics outreach’ and,  with  the subsequent work of Isaac Newton, physics joined religion in seeking to  explain our place in the Universe. The more  recent  physics revolution  of the past 80 years has yet to  transform general public understanding in a similar way. And yet a correct understanding of physics was accessible even to  Pythagoras. According to Pythagoras, “number is all things”,  and numbers are mental, not mechanical. Likewise, Newton called light  “particles”, knowing the concept to  be  an ‘effective  theory’ — useful, not true.  As  noted  by  Newton’s biographer Richard Westfall: “The ultimate cause of  atheism, Newton asserted, is ‘this notion of  bodies having, as it  were, a complete, absolute  and independent reality in themselves.’” Newton  knew  of  Newton’s rings and was untroubled by  what  is shallowly  called ‘wave/particle  duality’. The 1925 discovery of  quantum mechanics  solved  the  problem  of  the  Universe’s nature. Bright  physicists were  again led to  believe the unbelievable — this time, that  the Universe  is mental. According to Sir James Jeans: “the stream  of  knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality;  the  Universe  begins  to  look  more  like  a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be  an  accidental intruder into  the realm of  matter... we ought rather hail it  as the creator and governor of  the realm of  matter.”  But physicists have  not yet followed Galileo’s example,  and convinced everyone of  the wonders of  quantum mechanics. As  Sir Arthur Eddington  explained: “It is difficult  for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept  the view  that  the substratum of everything  is of  mental  character.” In  his  play  Copenhagen, which brings quantum mechanics to a wider audience, Michael Frayn gives these word  to  Niels Bohr: “we discover that... the Universe exists... only  through the understanding lodged inside the human head.”  Bohr’s wife  replies, “this man you’ve  put at  the centre  of  the  Universe  —  is  it  you,  or  is  it Heisenberg?”  This is what  sticks in the craw of  Eddington’s  “matter-of-fact” physicists. Discussing the play, John H. Marburger III, President George  W.  Bush’s  science adviser,  observes  that  “in  the  Copenhagen interpretation  of  microscopic nature, there are neither waves nor particles”, but then frames his remarks in terms of  a non-existent  “underlying stuff”. He  points out that it  is not true that  matter “sometimes behaves like a wave and sometimes like a particle... The wave is not in the underlying stuff; it is in the spatial pattern of detector clicks... We cannot help but think of the clicks as caused by little localized pieces of stuff that we might as well call particles. This is where the particle language comes from. It does not come from the underlying stuff, but from our psychological predisposition to associate localized phenomena with particles.” In place of “underlying stuff” there have been serious attempts to preserve a material world — but they produce no new physics, and serve only to preserve an illusion. Scientists have sadly left it to nonphysicist Frayn to note the Emperor’s lack of clothes: “it seems to me that the view which [Murray] Gell-Mann favours, and which involves what he calls alternative ‘histories’ or ‘narratives’, is precisely as anthropocentric as Bohr’s, since histories and narratives are not freestanding elements of the Universe, but human constructs, as subjective and as restricted in their viewpoint as the act of observation.”

Physicists shy from  the truth because the truth is so  alien to  everyday  physics. A common  way to  evade the mental Universe is to  invoke  ‘decoherence’ — the notion  that  ‘the  physical environment’  is sufficient  to  create  reality,  independent of the human mind. Yet the idea  that  any irreversible act of  amplification is necessary  to  collapse the wave function is known to  be  wrong: in ‘Renninger-type’ experiments, the wave  function  is collapsed  simply by  your human mind seeing nothing. The Universe  is entirely  mental. In the tenth century,  Ibn al-Haytham  initiated the view  that  light  proceeds from  a source, enters  the eye,  and is perceived.  This picture is incorrect but is still what  most people think occurs, including, unless pressed,  most physicists. To  come  to  terms  with  the Universe,  we  must  abandon such views. The world is quantum mechanical: we  must learn to  perceive  it  as  such. One benefit of  switching humanity to  a correct perception  of  the world is the resulting joy of  discovering the mental nature of  the Universe. We  have no  idea  what  this  mental  nature implies, but — the great thing is — it  is true. Beyond the acquisition  of  this  perception, physics can no longer help. You may descend into solipsism, expand to  deism, or  something else  if you can justify it  — just don’t ask physics for help. There is another benefit of  seeing  the world as quantum mechanical: someone who has learned to  accept  that  nothing exists but observations  is far ahead of peers who stumble through physics hoping to  find out ‘what things are’. If  we  can ‘pull a Galileo,’ and get people believing the truth, they  will find physics a breeze. The Universe  is immaterial — mental and spiritual.  Live, and enjoy.

 ■ Richard Conn Henry is a Professor in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy, The Johns Hopkins University,  Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA. FURTHER READING Marburger, J.  On the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics www.ostp.gov/html/Copenhagentalk.pdf (2002). Henry, R. C.  Am. J. Phys.  58, 1087–1100 (1990). Steiner, M.  The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem  (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998).