History
Many early quantum physicists held some interest in traditionally Eastern metaphysics. Physicists Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, two of the main pioneers of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, were interested in Eastern mysticism, but are not known to have directly associated one with the other. In fact, both endorsed the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Olav Hammer said that "Schrödinger’s studies of Hindu mysticism never compelled him to pursue the same course as quantum metaphysicists such as David Bohm or Fritjof Capra." Schrödinger biographer Walter J. Moore said that Schrödinger's two interests of quantum physics and Hindu mysticism were "strangely dissociated". [11]
In his 1961 paper "Remarks on the mind–body question", Eugene Wigner suggested that a conscious observer played a fundamental role in quantum mechanics, [12] [13] : 93 a concept which is part of the von Neumann–Wigner interpretation. While his paper served as inspiration for later mystical works by others, [12] Wigner's ideas were primarily philosophical and were not considered overtly pseudoscientific like the mysticism that followed. [14] By the late 1970s, Wigner had shifted his position and rejected the role of consciousness in quantum mechanics. [15] Harvard historian Juan Miguel Marin suggests that "consciousness [was] introduced hypothetically at the birth of quantum physics, [and] the term 'mystical' was also used by its founders, to argue in favor of and against such an introduction." [16]
Mysticism was argued against by Albert Einstein. Einstein's theories have often been falsely believed to support mystical interpretations of quantum theory. Einstein said, with regard to quantum mysticism, "No physicist believes that. Otherwise he wouldn't be a physicist." [16] He debates several arguments about the approval of mysticism, even suggesting Bohr and Pauli to be in support of and to hold a positive belief in mysticism which he believes to be false.
Niels Bohr denied quantum mysticism and had rejected the hypothesis that quantum theory requires a conscious observer as early as 1927, [16] despite having been "sympathetic towards the hypothesis that understanding consciousness might require an extension of quantum theory to accommodate laws other than those of physics". [16]
In New Age thought
In the early 1970s New Age culture began to incorporate ideas from quantum physics, beginning with books by Arthur Koestler, Lawrence LeShan and others which suggested that purported parapsychological phenomena could be explained by quantum mechanics. [13] : 32
In this decade, the Fundamental Fysiks Group emerged. This group of physicists embraced quantum mysticism, parapsychology, Transcendental Meditation, and various New Age and Eastern mystical practices. [17]
Inspired in part by Wigner's exploration of the von Neumann–Wigner interpretation, [12] Fritjof Capra, a member of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, [17] wrote The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (1975), [18] which espoused New Age quantum physics; the book was popular among the non-scientific public. [13] : 32 In 1979, Gary Zukav, [19] a non-scientist and "the most successful of Capra's followers", published The Dancing Wu Li Masters. [13] : 32 The Fundamental Fysiks Group and Capra's book are said to be major influences for the rise of quantum mysticism as a pseudoscientific interpretation of quantum mechanics. [17]
Modern usage and examples
In contrast to the mysticism of the early 20th century, today quantum mysticism typically refers to New Age beliefs that combine ancient mysticism with the language of quantum mechanics. [20] Called a pseudoscience and a "hijacking" of quantum physics, it draws upon "coincidental similarities of language rather than genuine connections" to quantum mechanics. [9] Physicist Murray Gell-Mann coined the phrase "quantum flapdoodle" to refer to the misuse and misapplication of quantum physics to other topics. [21]
An example of such use is New Age guru Deepak Chopra's "quantum theory" that aging is caused by the mind, expounded in his books Quantum Healing (1989) and Ageless Body, Timeless Mind (1993). [21] In 1998, Chopra was awarded the parody Ig Nobel Prize in the physics category for "his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness". [22] In 2012, Stuart Hameroff and Chopra proposed that the "quantum soul" could exist "apart from the body" and "in space-time geometry, outside the brain, distributed nonlocally". [23]
The 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know!? dealt with a range of New Age ideas in relation to physics. It was produced by the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, founded by J.Z. Knight, a channeler who said that her teachings were based on a discourse with a 35,000-year-old disembodied entity named Ramtha. [24] Featuring Fundamental Fysiks Group member Fred Alan Wolf, [17] the film misused some aspects of quantum mechanics—including the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the observer effect—as well as biology and medicine. [25] Numerous critics dismissed the film for its use of pseudoscience. [26] [27]
The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts that the universal wavefunction is objectively real, and that there is no wave function collapse. This implies that all possible outcomes of quantum measurements are physically realized in different "worlds". The evolution of reality as a whole in MWI is rigidly deterministic and local. Many-worlds is also called the relative state formulation or the Everett interpretation, after physicist Hugh Everett, who first proposed it in 1957. Bryce DeWitt popularized the formulation and named it many-worlds in the 1970s.
Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger, sometimes written as Schroedinger or Schrodinger, was a Nobel Prize–winning Austrian and naturalized Irish physicist who developed fundamental results in quantum theory. In particular, he is recognized for postulating the Schrödinger equation, an equation that provides a way to calculate the wave function of a system and how it changes dynamically in time. He coined the term "quantum entanglement", and was the earliest to discuss it, doing so in 1932.
Eugene Paul Wigner was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who also contributed to mathematical physics. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles".
In quantum mechanics, Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment concerning quantum superposition. In the thought experiment, a hypothetical cat may be considered simultaneously both alive and dead, while it is unobserved in a closed box, as a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur. This experiment viewed this way is described as a paradox. This thought experiment was devised by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 in a discussion with Albert Einstein to illustrate what Schrödinger saw as the problems of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
An interpretation of quantum mechanics is an attempt to explain how the mathematical theory of quantum mechanics might correspond to experienced reality. Quantum mechanics has held up to rigorous and extremely precise tests in an extraordinarily broad range of experiments. However, there exist a number of contending schools of thought over their interpretation. These views on interpretation differ on such fundamental questions as whether quantum mechanics is deterministic or stochastic, local or non-local, which elements of quantum mechanics can be considered real, and what the nature of measurement is, among other matters.
Wigner's friend is a thought experiment in theoretical quantum physics, first published by the Hungarian-American physicist Eugene Wigner in 1961, and further developed by David Deutsch in 1985. The scenario involves an indirect observation of a quantum measurement: An observer observes another observer who performs a quantum measurement on a physical system. The two observers then formulate a statement about the physical system's state after the measurement according to the laws of quantum theory. In the Copenhagen interpretation, the resulting statements of the two observers contradict each other. This reflects a seeming incompatibility of two laws in the Copenhagen interpretation: the deterministic and continuous time evolution of the state of a closed system and the nondeterministic, discontinuous collapse of the state of a system upon measurement. Wigner's friend is therefore directly linked to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics with its famous Schrödinger's cat paradox.
Fritjof Capra is an Austrian-born American author, physicist, systems theorist and deep ecologist. In 1995, he became a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California. He was on the faculty of Schumacher College which was disestablished in 2024.
Brian David Josephson is a British theoretical physicist and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Cambridge. Best known for his pioneering work on superconductivity and quantum tunnelling, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 for his prediction of the Josephson effect, made in 1962 when he was a 22-year-old PhD student at Cambridge University. Josephson is the first Welshman to have won a Nobel Prize in Physics. He shared the prize with physicists Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever, who jointly received half the award for their own work on quantum tunnelling.
What the Bleep Do We Know!? is a 2004 American pseudo-scientific film that posits a spiritual connection between quantum physics and consciousness. The plot follows the fictional story of a photographer, using documentary-style interviews and computer-animated graphics, as she encounters emotional and existential obstacles in her life and begins to consider the idea that individual and group consciousness can influence the material world. Her experiences are offered by the creators to illustrate the film's scientifically unsupported ideas.
The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism is a 1975 book by physicist Fritjof Capra. A bestseller in the United States, it has been translated into 23 languages. Capra summarized his motivation for writing the book: “Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science. But man needs both.”
Fred Alan Wolf is an American theoretical physicist specializing in quantum physics and the relationship between physics and consciousness. He is a former physics professor at San Diego State University, and has helped to popularize science on the Discovery Channel. He is the author of a number of physics-themed books including Taking the Quantum Leap (1981), The Dreaming Universe (1994), Mind into Matter (2000), and Time Loops and Space Twists (2011).
Evan Harris Walker, was an American physicist and parapsychologist.
The quantum mind or quantum consciousness is a group of hypotheses proposing that local physical laws and interactions from classical mechanics or connections between neurons alone cannot explain consciousness, positing instead that quantum-mechanical phenomena, such as entanglement and superposition that cause nonlocalized quantum effects, interacting in smaller features of the brain than cells, may play an important part in the brain's function and could explain critical aspects of consciousness. These scientific hypotheses are as yet unvalidated, and they can overlap with quantum mysticism.
There is a diversity of views that propose interpretations of quantum mechanics. They vary in how many physicists accept or reject them. An interpretation of quantum mechanics is a conceptual scheme that proposes to relate the mathematical formalism to the physical phenomena of interest. The present article is about those interpretations which, independently of their intrinsic value, remain today less known, or are simply less debated by the scientific community, for different reasons.
The Fundamental Fysiks Group was founded in San Francisco in May 1975 by two physicists, Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann, at the time both graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. The group held informal discussions on Friday afternoons to explore the philosophical implications of quantum theory. Leading members included Fritjof Capra, John Clauser, Philippe Eberhard, Nick Herbert, Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, Henry Stapp, and Fred Alan Wolf.
Elizabeth A. Rauscher was an American physicist and parapsychologist.
The von Neumann–Wigner interpretation, also described as "consciousness causes collapse", is an interpretation of quantum mechanics in which consciousness is postulated to be necessary for the completion of the process of quantum measurement.
Quantum Reality is a 1985 popular science book by physicist Nick Herbert, a member of the Fundamental Fysiks Group which was formed to explore the philosophical implications of quantum theory. The book attempts to address the ontology of quantum objects, their attributes, and their interactions, without reliance on advanced mathematical concepts. Herbert discusses the most common interpretations of quantum mechanics and their consequences in turn, highlighting the conceptual advantages and drawbacks of each.
Jagdish Mehra was an Indian–American physicist and historian of science.
