1.	SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES.

This book is about what you are, and how you are connected to that which 
you are not. It is about the impact of the revolutionary developments in 
physics during the twentieth century upon science’s idea of you as a thinking 
and acting entity, and your linkage to `the other’.
These questions might appear to belong more to philosophy, metaphysics, or 
religion, rather than to physics, which is usually assumed to deal only with 
such tangible items as machines, rockets, transistors, and atomic bombs. But 
the radical change in our understanding of the physical world that occurred 
during the twentieth century has transformed connections that formerly had 
been matters of pure philosophical speculation into issues covered by basic 
physical theory. The aim of this book is to explain this new idea of the nature of 
human beings and their causal role in the unfolding of reality to readers with 
no prior understanding of the quantum character of the world.
 
Science has improved our lives in many ways. It has lightened the load of 
tedious tasks and expanded our physical powers, and thereby contributed to 
a great flowering of human creative energy. On the other hand, it has also 
given us the capacity to ravage the environment on an unprecedented scale 
and obliterate our species altogether. Yet along with this fatal power it has 
provided a further offering which, though subtle in character and still hardly 
felt in the minds of men, may ultimately be its most valuable contribution to 
human civilization, and the key to human survival.
Science is not only the enterprise of harnessing nature to serve the practical 
needs of humankind. It is also part of man’s unending search for knowledge 
about the universe and his place within it. This quest is motivated not solely 
by idle curiosity. Each of us, when trying to establish values upon which to 
base conduct, is inevitably led to the question of one’s role in nature. The 
linkage of this philosophical inquiry to the practical question of personal 
values is no mere intellectual abstraction. Martyrs in every age are vivid 
reminders of the fact that no influence upon human conduct, even the instinct 
for self preservation, is stronger than beliefs about one’s relationship to the 
power that shapes the universe. Such beliefs form the foundation of a 
person’s self image, and hence, ultimately, of that person's values.
It is often claimed that science stands mute on questions of values: that 
science can help us to achieve what we value once our priorities are fixed, 
but can play no role in fixing these weightings. That claim is certainly 
incorrect: science plays a key role in these matters. For what we value 
depends on what we believe, and what we believe is increasingly determined 
by science.
A striking example is the impact of science upon the system of values 
promulgated by the church during the Middle Ages. That structure rested on 
a credo about the nature of the universe, its creator, and man’s connection to 
that creator. Science, by casting doubt upon that belief, emasculated the 
system of values erected upon it. Moreover, it put forth a credo of its own. 
In that `scientific' vision we human beings were converted from sparks of 
divine creative power, endowed with free will, to automatons---to cogs 
in a giant machine that grinds inexorably along a preordained path in 
the grip of a blind mechanical process. Gone from this `scientific' picture 
of our species is any rational basis for the notion of a person’s 
responsibility for his own actions. Each of us is asserted 
to be a mechanical extension of what existed prior to his birth. Over that 
earlier situation one has no control. Hence for what emerges, preordained, 
from that prior state one can bear no responsibility.
Given this conception of man, the collapse of moral philosophy is inevitable. 
This notion of human beings provides no rational basis for any value but self 
interest: behavior promoting the welfare of others, including future 
generations, becomes rational only to the extent that such behavior serves 
one’s own interests. Hence science becomes doubly culpable: it not only 
undermines the foundations of earlier value systems, but also strips man of 
any vision of himself and his place in the universe that could be the rational 
basis for any elevated set of values.
This mechanical picture of man is the image created by the science that 
reigned early in the twentieth century. According to that view the physical 
universe is composed of tiny separate bits of reality, and the unfolding, or 
evolution in time, of nature is completely fixed by direct contact interaction 
between these localized microscopic parts. Human beings, insofar as they 
belong to this physical aspect of nature, are simply conglomerations of these 
elemental material bits.
During the twentieth-century this simple picture of nature was found to be 
profoundly wrong: it failed not just in its fine details, but at its fundamental 
core. In place of the old idea Heisenberg, Bohr, Pauli, and their companions 
erected a vastly different conceptual framework. They were forced to a 
radical alteration of the very subject matter of physical theory itself by the 
strange character of the new mathematical rules, which were invariably 
validated by reliable empirical data.
The new theory accounts in a uniform manner for all the successes of the 
earlier physical theories, plus the immense mass of new data where the 
earlier methods fail abysmally. However, it describes a world built not out of 
bits of matter, as matter was understood in the nineteenth century, but rather 
out of bits of information. Straightforwardly interpreted, the quantum rules 
describe a universe composed of a new kind of stuff, whose properties 
combine features formerly conceived to be imbedded in the physical world 
with aspects that belong to our streams of conscious thoughts.
The laws that govern the evolution of the world over the course of time differ 
significantly from the pre-twentieth century idea of these rules. According to 
the new physics, this evolution is specified not by a single causal process 
but rather by an interplay between two very different ones. The first of these
is analogous to the operation that fixes the development of the material 
world in classical physics, and it is `locally deterministic': what 
occurs at any point is completely fixed by what has just happened at nearby 
points. But that local rule is not the whole story. At certain instants a 
second kind of process intervenes: a `quantum jump' occurs. This intervention 
is highly non-local: it involves, in a well specified way, coordinated changes
in regions that can lie far apart. The structure of these abrupt changes are 
mathematically similar to sudden increases in knowledge or information. 
Indeed, the original, and still orthodox, `Copenhagen interpretation' 
of quantum theory associates each quantum jump with an actual increase in 
somebody’s knowledge. Thus our basic scientific theory of the physical world, 
in its orthodox formulation, has become intrinsically entwined with our 
streams of conscious knowings. The existence of this `second process' 
provides a reprieve from the classical-physics verdict that human thoughts 
and feelings can make no difference in the flow of physical events. 

The new theory involves choices that are not 
determined by any currently known law of nature, but can nevertheless 
strongly influence the course of physical events. This means that 
contemporary science accommodates causally efficacious free will. The new 
physics allows, and in fact demands, the occurrence of happenings that, on 
the one hand, are fixed by no known law, yet, on the other hand, can 
influence in mathematically determined ways, both the unfolding of our 
thoughts and the course of our actions. The details of how this influence 
works match beautifully with the empirical findings that have accumulated 
over the past few decades in the field of The Psychology of Attention.
The potency and novelty of the new dynamics both stem directly from the 
property of `quantum entanglement', and the closely related feature called 
`quantum nonlocality'. Entanglement is the property of two (or more) systems 
that have strongly interacted with each other but then moved far apart, to 
become, according to the theory, a single unified entity until observations 
are made that re-establish independent properties for the spatially 
separated parts.

This entanglement feature leads to the remarkable property of non-locality: 
no theory of nature can both accommodate the predictions of quantum theory 
and confine all influences of free choices to regions that can be reached by 
traveling no faster than light. The upshot of these radical changes is this: 
Taken at face value, the new mathematical description of the universe portrays 
a world in which your mind can by free-willed actions influence, although 
not completely control, what happens in your body/brain. This participatory 
view contrasts starkly with the earlier science-based image of the human 
person as a conglomeration of atoms being mindlessly buffeted about by the 
chance collisions of atoms.

What impact, if any, can this altered idea of what you are have upon your 
life? Does not a completely rational approach still lead you to value only 
your own well being?  Perhaps so! But this leads to the further question: 
What is the self whose well being one values?

Values arise from self-image. Generally one is led by training, teaching, 
propaganda, or other forms of indoctrination, to expand one’s conception of 
the self: one is encouraged to perceive oneself as an integral part of some 
social unit such as family, ethnic or religious group, or nation, and to 
enlarge one’s self-interest to include the interests of this unit. If this 
training is successful your enlarged conception of yourself as good parent, 
or good son or daughter, or good Christian, Muslim, or Jew, causes you to 
give weight to the welfare of the unit as you would yourself. In fact, if well
conditioned you may give more weight to the well-being of the group than to 
that of your bodily self. 

In the present context it is not relevant whether this human tendency to 
enlarge one’s self image is a consequence of natural malleability, instinctual 
tendency, spiritual insight, or something else. What is important is that we 
human beings do in fact have the capacity to expand our image of "self", and 
that enlarged concept can become the basis of a drive so powerful that it 
becomes the dominant determinant of human conduct, overwhelming every 
other factor, including even the instinct to survive. 

But where reason is honored, belief must be reconciled with empirical 
evidence. If you seek evidence for your beliefs about what you are, and how 
you fit into nature, then science claims jurisdiction, or at least relevance. 
Physics presents itself as the basic science, and it is to physics that 
you are told to turn. Thus a radical shift in the physics-based conception of 
man from that of an isolated mechanical automaton to that of an integral 
participant in the nonlocal process that gives form to the evolving universe 
is a seismic event of potentially momentous proportions. 

The quantum concept, being based on objective science equally available to 
all, rather than arising from special personal circumstances, has the 
potential of providing a universal system of values suitable to all people, 
without regard to the accidents of their origins. With the diffusion of this 
Quantum Conception of Human Beings, science may fulfill itself by adding to 
the material benefits it has already provided a philosophical insight of 
perhaps greater ultimate value.

This issue of the connection of science to values can be put into perspective 
by seeing it in the context of a very brief historical account. For this 
purpose let human intellectual history be divided into five periods: 
traditional, modern, transitional, post modern, and contemporary. 
During the `traditional' era our understanding of ourselves and our relation  
to nature was based on `ancient traditions' handed down from generation to 
generation: `Traditions' were the chief source of wisdom about our 
connection to nature. The `modern' era began in the seventeenth century 
with the rise of what is still called `modern science'. That approach was 
based on the ideas of Bacon, Descartes, Galileo and Newton, and it provided 
a new source of knowledge that came to be regarded by many thinkers as 
more reliable than tradition.

The basic idea of modern science was `materialism': the idea that the 
physical world is composed basically of tiny bits of matter whose contact 
interactions with adjacent bits completely control everything that is now 
happening, and that ever will happen. According to these laws, as they 
existed in the early twentieth  century, a person’s conscious thoughts and 
efforts can make no difference at all to what his body/brain does: whatever 
you do was deemed to be completely fixed by local interactions between tiny 
mechanical elements, with your thoughts, ideas, feelings, and efforts being a 
strictly determined high-level consequence of the low-level mechanical 
process.

This materialist conception of reality began to crumble at the beginning of 
the twentieth century with Max Planck’s discovery of the quantum of action. 
Planck announced to his son that he had, on that day, made a discovery as 
important as Newton’s. That assessment was certainly correct: the 
ramifications of Planck’s discovery were soon to cause Newton’s materialist 
conception of physical reality to come crashing down.  Planck’s discovery 
marks the beginning of the `transitional' period.

A second important transitional development soon followed: 
In 1905 Einstein announced his Special Theory of Relativity. It denied the 
validity of our intuitive idea of the instant of time `now', and 
promulgated the thesis that even the most basic quantities of physics, 
such as the length of a steel rod, and the temporal order of two events, 
had no objective `true values', but were well defined only `relative' to 
some observer’s point of view. Planck’s discovery led by the mid twenties 
to a complete break-down, at the fundamental level, of the material 
conception of nature. A new basic physical theory was developed, principally 
by Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and Max Born, and it 
brought `The Observer' explicitly into physics. The earlier idea that the 
physical world composed in part of tiny particles was abandoned in favor 
of a theory of natural phenomena in which the consciousness of the human 
observer is ascribed an essential and independent role. This successor to 
classical physical theory is called `Copenhagen quantum theory.'

This turning away by science itself from the tenets of the objective 
materialist philosophy lent support to Post-Modernism. That view, which 
emerged during the second half of the twentieth century, promulgated, 
in essence, the idea that all `truths' were relative to one’s point of view, 
and were mere artifacts of some particular social group’s struggle for 
power over competing groups. Thus each social movement was entitled to its 
own `truth', which was viewed simply as a socially created pawn in the 
power game. The connection of Post-Modern thought to science is that both 
Copenhagen Quantum Theory and Relativity Theory had retreated from the idea of 
observer-independent objective truth: science in the first quarter of the 
twentieth century had not only eliminated materialism as a possible 
foundation for objective truth, but had discredited the very idea of objective 
truth in science. Yet if the community of scientists have renounced the idea 
of objective truth in favor of the pragmatic idea that `what is true for us 
is what works for us,' then every group becomes licensed to do the same, and 
the hope evaporates that science might provide objective criteria for 
resolving contentious social issues.

This philosophical shift has had profound social ramifications. But the 
physicists who initiated this mischief were generally too interested in 
practical developments in their own field to get involved in these 
philosophical issues. Thus they failed to broadcast an important fact: 
already by mid-century, a development in physics had occurred that provides 
an effective antidote to both the `materialism’ of the modern era, and 
the `relativism’ and `social constructionism’ of the post-modern period. 
In particular, John von Neumann developed, during the early thirties, 
a form of quantum theory that brought the physical and mental aspects of 
nature together as two aspects of a rationally coherent whole. This theory 
was elevated, during the forties---by the work of Tomonaga and 
Schwinger---to a form compatible with the physical requirements of the 
Theory of Relativity. Von Neumann’s theory, unlike the transitional ones, 
succeeded in integrating into one coherent idea of reality the empirical 
data of subjective experience with the basic mathematical structure of 
theoretical physics. Von Neumann’s formulation of quantum theory is the 
starting point of all efforts by physicists to go beyond the pragmatically 
magnificent but ontologically incoherent Copenhagen form of quantum theory.
Von Neumann capitalized upon the key Copenhagen move of bringing 
human knowings into the theory of physical reality. But, whereas the 
Copenhagen approach excluded the bodies and brains of the human 
observers from the physical world that they sought to describe, and 
renounced the aim of describing reality itself, von Neumann demanded 
logical cohesion and mathematical precision, and was willing to follow where 
this rational approach led. Being a mathematician, fortified by the rigor and 
precision of his thought, he seemed less intimidated than his physicist 
brethren by the sharp contrast between the nature of the world called for by 
the new mathematics and nature of the world that the genius of Isaac Newton 
had concocted. 

The common core feature of Copenhagen and von Neumann quantum theory 
is the incorporation of human knowings into the structure of basic physical 
theory. How this is done, and what the consequences are, is the subject of 
this book. But before plunging directly into this topic I shall say a 
little more about `knowings'.

2. Knowings

What are you made of? What is reality made of? What does 
intuition say about this? What does science say?

The deliverance of intuition on these matters is not unambiguous. 
Western science and philosophy begins with Thales of Miletus, who 
proclaimed "All is Water!". Other Greeks believed the primordial 
stuff to be "Air", or "Earth", or "Fire", and Empedocles settled on all 
four. On the other hand, Leucippus and Democritus thought 
everything was composed of tiny invisible, immutable atoms. Two 
millennia later, it looked like the two atomists had gotten it right: 
Isaac Newton built his sixteenth-century theory of the universe on 
the idea of enduring miniscule particles, and John Dalton's atomic 
hypothesis explained many facts of chemistry.

This notion that everything is composed of small bits of matter 
encountered, however, a serious difficulty. The earlier idea that "air" 
was a primary ingredient allowed soul or spirit to be construed as 
constructed out of one of the primitive substances. But it was hard 
to see how such a thing as a sensation of the color "red" or "green", 
or a feeling of ''pain" or "joy" could be fully described in terms of a 
collection of tiny immutable bits of matter careening through space. 
Given even supreme knowledge and comprehension, how could 
the motions of billions of particles in a person's brain/body be 
understood to be the very same thing as a conscious sensation, or 
the feeling associated with the grasping of an idea? One can 
understand all manner of motions of objects, and of their changing 
shapes, in terms of the motions of their constituent parts, but there 
is a rationally unbridgeable gap between the purely geometrical 
concepts of motions of particles in space and the psychological 
realities of conscious sensations, feelings, and ideas. 

Isaac Newton built his theory upon the ideas of the French 
philosopher Rene Descartes, who resolved this dilemma 
concerning the psychological realities by conceiving nature to be 
built out of two sorts of substances: "matter", which was located in 
and occupied space, and the "mental stuff" that our thoughts, 
sensations, and feelings are made of. 

This sundering of nature worked well in science for more than two 
hundred years, but was abandoned by physicists during twentieth 
century. The old idea that the material part of nature is made out of 
tiny bits of reality whose changes are completely fixed by the prior 
state of the nearby physical stuff---independently of mind---was 
replaced by a very different picture. Once it became clear that the 
old notions could not account for the growing mountain of data 
concerning the properties of the atoms and their parts the focus 
shifted to what the experiments were actually telling us. This 
opened the door to a new approach that dealt directly with what we 
could find out about the systems being examined, rather than with 
the system itself. An incredibly beautiful and rationally coherent 
new kind mathematical structure eventually revealed itself, but this 
new mathematics was understood to describe not a self-sufficient 
physical reality that can exist independently of all minds, but rather 
our human knowledge of a reality in which our mental activities 
reside. 

This original way of conceiving and applying the quantum 
mathematics was created by a group of physicists working closely 
with the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, and is called the "Copenhagen 
interpretation". This approach was closely tied to actual 
experimental procedures, which involve in the end the human 
experimenters who design the experiments with some purpose in 
mind, and later record and interpret the results of their 
investigations. This practical formulation of the theory defines the 
way the mathematical structure is used operationally, and is the 
touchstone of all later efforts to retain the original predictive power 
of the quantum rules, while expanding their scope into the domains 
of cosmology and neuro-dynamics. 

The foundation of all attempts to increase the scope of the theory is 
the work of the great Hungarian mathematician and logician John 
von Neumann. But before going on to describe von Neumann's 
contribution it will be helpful, and also fascinating, to appreciate the 
tremendous change in outlook instituted already by Werner 
Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and the other founders. 
For their insights are preserved and expanded in the work of von 
Neumann.

In the introduction to his book "Quantum theory and reality'' 
the philosopher of science Mario Bunge (1967)  said: 
"The physicist of the latest generation is operationalist all
right, but usually he does not know, and refuses to believe, that 
the original Copenhagen interpretation---which he thinks he 
supports---was squarely subjectivist, i.e., nonphysical.''

Let there be no doubt about this point. The original form of quantum 
theory, which is still alive today, is subjective: it is about 
relationships among conscious human experiences, and it 
expressly recommends to scientists that they resist the temptation 
to try to understand the underlying  processes of nature that are 
responsible for the connections between our experiences that the 
theory correctly describes. The following brief collection of 
quotations by the founders give a conspectus of the Copenhagen 
philosophy:

Heisenberg (1958a): "The conception of objective reality of the 
elementary particles has thus evaporated not into the cloud of 
some obscure new reality concept but into the transparent clarity of 
a mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of particles 
but rather our knowledge  of this behavior.''

Heisenberg (1958b):  "...the act of registration  of the result in the 
mind of the observer. The discontinuous change in the probability 
function…takes place with the act of registration, because it is the 
discontinuous change in our knowledge in the instant of  
registration that has its image in the discontinuous change of the 
probability function.'' 

Heisenberg (1958b:) "When the old adage `Natura non facit saltus' 
is used as a basis of a criticism of quantum  theory, we can reply 
that certainly our knowledge can change suddenly, and that this 
fact justifies the use of the term `quantum jump'. ''

Wigner (1961): "the laws of quantum mechanics cannot be 
formulated...without recourse to the concept of consciousness.''

Bohr (1934): "In our description of nature the purpose is not to 
disclose the real essence of phenomena but only to track down as 
far as possible relations between the multifold aspects of our 
experience.''

Bohr (1963): "Strictly speaking, the mathematical formalism of 
quantum mechanics merely offers rules of calculation for the 
deduction of expectations about observations obtained under well-
defined classical concepts.''
 
Bohr (1958): "...the appropriate physical interpretation of the 
symbolic quantum mechanical formalism amounts only to prediction 
of determinate or statistical character, pertaining to individual 
phenomena appearing under conditions defined by classical 
physics concepts.''

The references to `"classical physics concepts'' is explained in Bohr 
(1958): "...it is imperative to realize that in every account of physical 
experience one must describe both experimental conditions and 
observations by the same means of communication as the one 
used in classical physics.''

Bohr (1958) "...we must recognize above all that, even when 
phenomena transcend the scope of classical physical theories, the 
account of the experimental arrangement and the recording of 
observations must be given in plain language supplemented by 
technical physical terminology."

Bohr is saying that scientists do in fact use, and must use, the 
concepts of classical physics in communicating to colleagues the 
specifications on how the experiment is to be set up, and what will 
constitute a certain type of outcome. He in no way claims or admits 
that there is an actual reality out there that conforms to the precepts 
of classical physics.

In his book "The creation of quantum mechanics and the Bohr-Pauli 
dialogue'' (Hendry, 1984) the historian John Hendry gives a 
detailed account of the fierce struggles by such eminent thinkers as 
Hilbert, Jordan, Weyl, von Neumann, Born, Einstein, Sommerfeld, 
Pauli, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Dirac, Bohr and others, to come 
up with a rational way of comprehending the data from atomic 
experiments. Each man had his own bias and intuitions, but in spite 
of intense effort no rational  comprehension was forthcoming. 
Finally, at the 1927 Solvay conference a group including Bohr, 
Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, and Born come into concordance on a 
solution that came to be called "The Copenhagen Interpretation'', 
due to the central role of Bohr and those working with him at his 
institute in Denmark. 

Hendry says: "Dirac, in discussion, insisted on the restriction of the 
theory's application to our knowledge  of a system, and on its  lack 
of  ontological  content.'' Hendry summarized the concordance by 
saying: "On this interpretation it was agreed that, as  Dirac  
explained, the wave function represented our knowledge  of the  
system, and the reduced wave packets our more precise 
knowledge after measurement.''

Certainly this profound shift in  physicists' conception of the basic 
nature of their endeavor, and the meanings  of their formulas, was 
not a frivolous move: it was a last resort. The very idea that in order 
to comprehend atomic phenomena one must abandon physical  
ontology, and construe the mathematical formulas to be directly 
about the knowledge of human observers, rather than about the 
external real events themselves, is so seemingly preposterous that 
no group of eminent and renowned scientists would ever embrace it 
except as an extreme last measure. Consequently, it would be 
frivolous of us simply to ignore a conclusion so hard won and 
profound, and of such apparent direct bearing on our effort to 
understand the connection of our knowings to our bodies.

Einstein never accepted the Copenhagen interpretation. He said: 
"What does not satisfy me, from the standpoint of principle, is its  
attitude toward what seems to me to be the programmatic aim of all 
physics: the complete description of any (individual) real situation 
(as it supposedly exists irrespective of any act of observation or 
substantiation).'' (Einstein, 1951, p.667: the parenthetical word and 
phrase are part of Einstein's statement.); 

and  "What I dislike  in this  kind of  argumentation is the basic 
positivistic attitude, which  from my  view is untenable, and which 
seems to me to come to the same thing as Berkeley's principle, {\it 
esse est percipi}. (Einstein, 1951, p. 669). [Transl: To be is to be 
perceived]

Einstein struggled until the end of his life to get the observer's  
knowledge back out of physics. But he did not succeed! Rather he  
admitted that: "It is my  opinion that the contemporary quantum 
theory constitutes an optimum formulation of the [statistical] 
connections.'' (ibid. p. 87). 

He also referred to: "the most successful physical theory of our 
period, viz., the statistical quantum theory which, about twenty-five 
years ago took on a logically consistent form. This is the only theory 
at present which permits a unitary grasp of experiences concerning 
the quantum character of micro-mechanical events.'' (ibid p. 81). 

One can adopt the cavalier attitude that these profound difficulties 
with the classical conception of nature are just some temporary  
retrograde aberration in the forward march of science: one may 
imagine, as some do, that a strange confusion has confounded our 
best minds for seven decades, and that the strange conclusions of 
physicists can be ignored because they do not fit our classical-
physics-based intuitions. Or one can try to claim that these 
problems concern only atoms  and molecules, but not the big things 
built out of them. In this connection Einstein said: "But the 
`macroscopic' and `microscopic' are so inter-related that it appears 
impracticable 
to give up this program [of basing physics on the `real'] in the 
`microscopic' domain alone.'' (ibid, p.674). 

Philosophers have tried for three centuries to understand the role of 
mind in the workings of a brain conceived to function according to 
principles of classical physics. We now know no such brain actually 
exists: neither the brain nor the body nor anything else in the world 
of nature is composed of those tiny bits of matter that Democritus 
and Newton imagined the universe to be made of. Hence it is 
hardly surprising that those endeavors of philosophers have been 
beset by enormous difficulties, which have led to such positions as 
that of the `eliminative materialists', who hold that our conscious 
thoughts do not exist; or of the `epiphenomenalists', who admit that 
human experiences do exist but claim that they play absolutely no 
role in how we behave; or of the `identity theorists', who claim that 
each conscious feeling is exactly the same thing as a motion of the 
particles that nineteenth century science thought brains and 
everything else in the universe to be made of. The difficulties in 
reconciling mental realities with pre-quantum physics is dramatized 
by the fact that for many years the mere mention of 
"consciousness" was considered evidence of backwardness and 
bad taste in most of academia, including, incredibly, even the 
philosophy of mind. 

Given these difficulties with the earlier approach, coupled with the  
further fact that human experience is now understood to be a 
central player in our best theory of all purely physical phenomena, 
the question naturally arises: why not try to understand the role of 
mind in the workings of the thinking brain?

Success in this endeavour is augured by the fact that the 
mathematical structure uncovered by quantum physics, although 
highly counter-intuitive to minds indoctrinated in classical concepts, 
has an amazing internal logical cohesion, as well as the capacity to 
correctly predict numbers that can be measured to accuracies of 
one part in a hundred million. This inner consistency, combined 
with that incredible precision, means that quantum theory must 
embody some deep truth about the structure of reality. And this 
truth brings human experiences into the description of atomic 
processes. Can one then expect to ignore it in the description of the 
organ of experience itself?


3. FASTER THAN LIGHT?

"Nonlocality gets more real". This is the provocative title of a 
bulletin in the December `98 issue of "Physics Today." It reports the 
completion of experiments performed at Innsbruck, Los Alamos, and Geneva 
that all confirm to high accuracy some predictions of quantum theory that 
appear to entail superluminal action at a distance. 

The work done in Switzerland is the most spectacular of the three efforts. It 
got wide press coverage because it confirms the validity of this mysterious 
holistic quality of nature, not merely at the atomic scale of a billionth of a 
meter, nor even over a laboratory scale of meters, but now over a geographic 
scale of more than ten kilometers.

Many experiments of this general kind, but involving shorter distances, have 
been carried out over the past thirty years. The popular and technical 
accounts of these works invariably stress that they imply an 
interconnectedness of the physical universe that contradicts the simple 
conception of nature that ruled science from the time of Isaac Newton until 
the dawn of the twentieth century. However, those accounts never provide 
both a sufficient description of the experiment together with the detailed 
argumentation that demonstrates their action-at-a-distance implications, and 
hence the rational need to adopt new ideas about the nature of the world. 
These experiments do show conclusively that the old notions fail, and fail 
decisively far beyond the realm of atomic-scale distances. 

Surely, no reasonable person should accept on hearsay a radical new idea of 
reality that overturns everything that has been believed for generations, and 
is, moreover, wildly counter-intuitive: the physicists who are setting forth 
this "craziness" might be carried away by enthusiasm, or be so beguiled by 
the power of their mathematical tools that they lose touch with reality. This 
abrogation of the formerly well established science has such far-reaching 
consequences that serious thinkers need to understand for themselves the 
empirical evidence and its logical implications. Accordingly, I shall now 
describe in non-technical terms, first very schematically and later in more 
detail, the experiment performed in Switzerland by members of the Applied 
Physics Group of the University of Geneva, and then explain how their 
results contradict the classical-physics principle that bans faster-than-light 
action at a distance.

Very briefly, the overall general form of the Swiss experiment is this. 
First, a pair of highly correlated "twin-particles" is created by a special 
procedure performed in downtown Geneva. One of the two twins is sent to a 
laboratory in Bellevue, and the other is sent to a laboratory in Bernex. 
In each lab the arriving twin is sent into one or the other of two devices, 
which subjects it to one or the other of two alternative possible actions. 
The choice between these two alternative devices is made in a random fashion. 
Each twin is then examined in a way that produces one or the other of two 
alternative possible observable outcomes. The random choices made in the two 
far-apart regions, and the subsequent actions, are all performed so quickly 
that no information about which action is chosen in either lab has time to 
get to the other lab before the experiment there is completed---unless the 
information travels faster than light. 

Classical physics forbids faster-than-light transfer of information. If that 
condition were satisfied then the behavior of neither twin could depend upon 
which of the two actions was randomly chosen and performed upon his 
faraway sibling. However, that condition of non-dependence cannot be 
reconciled with the predictions validated in this experiment. 

Before expanding this cryptic synopsis of the experiment and its implications 
into a more generous offering it will be helpful to review the theoretical 
background.

According to Einstein's theory of relativity, any faster-than-light action 
would, from some point of view, be instantaneous. But instantaneous action 
at a distance is anathema to many scientists, on aesthetic and intuitive 
grounds. Of course, Newton's theory of gravity postulated an instantaneous 
action at a distance over a planetary scale, without any explanation of what 
was transmitting this action, and Newton's theory was severely criticized on 
that account. Even Newton himself was troubled by this feature. In a letter 
to his friend Bentley, he expressed his own skepticism about the notion of 
non-mediated action at a distance, and by implication, I think, about any 
instantaneous action at a distance:

"that one body may act upon another at a distance 
through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by 
and through which their action and force may be conveyed 
from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I 
believe no man, who has in philosophical matters a 
competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it. Gravity 
must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to 
certain laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial 
I have left to the consideration of my readers."

More than two centuries later Einstein's general theory of relativity 
explained gravity as being due to the warping of space-time by the 
presence of matter. According to this theory, the gravitational effect is 
indeed conveyed from point to point by a local-contact kind of interaction 
that transfers information no faster than the speed of light. Thus Einstein 
accomplished what Newton had intuited, the abolition of instantaneous action 
at a distance. He also enunciated the closely connected principle of no 
faster-than-light action. But this demand was imposed upon, and was directly 
relevant to, a conception of nature in which the continuous history of the 
physical world for all time was determined by certain simple immutable 
laws from the state of the world at early times.

When quantum theory was created Einstein objected forcefully to the 
"mysterious action at a distance", which is explicitly built into the normal 
computational procedures, and which, as we shall now see, directly infects 
also the predictions derived from those calculations. 

The initial phase of the Swiss experiment occurs at a lab in downtown 
Geneva. That is where the twins are born. This birthing is achieved by 
directing a laser beam at a crystal. Most of the laser light goes through the 
crystal, but each laser photon in a small subset is split into a pair of 
photons, with each member of the pair carrying about half the energy of 
its laser-photon parent. 

For some of these pairs one partner is sent by optical fiber to a lab in the 
village of Bellevue, while the other partner is sent to a lab in the town of 
Bernex. These two labs lie more than ten kilometers apart.

At each lab the arriving twin is sent into an "interferometer". 

Interferometers are, themselves, very interesting devices, and they need to 
be understood if the experiment is to be made clear.

These instruments exhibit in a striking way one essential aspect of the 
quantum mystery: wave-particle duality. What they reveal is similar in 
principle to what is shown by the famous double-slit experiment. But the 
double-slit experiment involves many detectors of photons and many 
possible trajectories that they might traverse. Only two detectors and two 
paths are needed for an interferometer, and the whole situation is 
consequently much clearer.

There are different kinds of interferometers. For ease of explanation I shall 
describe one that is slightly different from what was used in the Swiss 
experiment. But the principle is the same.

This interferometer involves two ordinary (i.e., fully silvered) mirrors, 
each of which reflects all the light falling on it, and two half-silvered 
mirrors, each of which reflects (like a mirror) half the light incident 
upon it, and transmits (like a plate of clear glass) the other half.

Suppose the beam entering one of these devices is traveling horizontally. 
Upon entering the interferometer this beam strikes a half-silvered mirror that 
is slanted at 45 degrees. Half the light goes straight though, while the other 
half is deflected vertically upwards. The half that goes straight through 
travels a short distance and then strikes the second half-silvered mirror, 
which is cocked at 45 degrees in the opposite direction, so that half of that 
beam goes straight through, and exits the device horizontally, whereas the 
other half is deflected vertically downward, and exits vertically.

A photon detector is placed in each of these two exit beams. Let the detector 
placed in the horizontal exit beam be called the horizontal-beam detector H, 
and the photon detector placed in the vertical exit beam be called the 
vertical-beam detector V.

The half-beam that was deflected vertically upward at the first half-silvered 
mirror takes a round-about path, via the two fully silvered mirrors, to the 
second half-silvered mirror: it is reflected by the first of these two mirrors
into a horizontal beam that runs parallel to the original horizontal beam, and
is then reflected back downward to the second half-silvered mirror. Thus half 
of the original beam travels a short route between the two half-silvered 
mirrors along the bottom side of a rectangle whereas the other half takes 
a longer path along the other three sides. 

At the second half-silvered mirror both halves of the beam, the one traveling 
the shorter direct route, and the one taking the longer round-about route, 
both split 50-50, with half going out along the horizontal exit beam and the 
other half exiting along the (downward-directed) vertical exit beam. 

Because there are two interferometers in each village, and each one has two 
photon detectors, there are four detectors in each village, and hence eight 
altogether. But for each particle pair the two independent random processes 
will select only one or the other of the two interferometers in each village. 

                 The figure missing in this plain text version.

It shows the initial beam stiking a divider D that divides the beam into two
beams, one going to Bellevue, the other to Bernex. The beam entering the lab
in Bellevue strikes a random deflector R which randomly sends the photon to 
either one or the other of two interferometers. Each of these interferometers 
has two half-silvered and two fully silvered mirrors, which send half the 
light along the bottom horizontal side of a rectangle (the short leg) and half
along the other three sides of that rectangle (the long leg). The light going 
along these two paths is recombined at the second half-silvered mirror, and 
exits the interferometer either horizontally or vertically downward. The 
detectors on the horizontal and vertical exit beams are labeled H and V
for the first interferometer and H' and V' for the second interferometer
in Bellevue. There is a mirror-image diagram for Bernex. (One picture is worth
one hundred and forty-nine words.)  



                        The Experimental Set up.

[The laser beam is split at D. The two R's indicate the two random processes, 
each of which randomly sends the photon that arrives in its laboratory to one 
or the other of the two interferometers. H and V label the photon detectors in 
the horizontal and vertical exit channels, respectively. The primes indicated 
alternative possibilities.]



Some of the photons get lost along the way and do not reach a detector. But 
there are many pairs whose two members both reach detectors, one in 
Bellevue, the other in Bernex. Signals from those two detectors are sent back 
by ordinary wires to a central processor in Geneva. 

[There is one fine point, which needs mention, but which is not central to the 
main argument.

The prediction of quantum theory that we want to use concerns the subset of 
pairs such that both members, one in Bellevue the other in Bernex, take the 
long path or both take the short path. To distinguish these pairs from the 
others, the lengths of the various paths are adjusted so that, on a 
nanosecond time scale, the difference between the times it takes light to 
traverse the two long paths, one in each village, is equal to the difference 
between the times it takes light to traverse the two short paths. 
Consequently, the difference in the arrival times of the two paired pulses, 
one from each of the two villages, is independent of whether both of the 
paired photons take the long path in their respective villages or both take 
the short path. This time difference is measured by fast (nanosecond) 
electronics. The paired pulses coming from paired photons that both take 
the long path or both take the short path will have the same time difference, 
but the pairs such that one partner takes a long path and the other takes a 
short path will have different time differences. This effect can be used to 
identify, and cast aside, the pairs such that the member in one village 
takes a short path and its partner in the other village takes the long path. 
Retained are those pairs in which both of the twins (one in each village) 
take the longer path or both take the shorter path. This sample is singled out
and analyzed because quantum theory predicts that for the photon pairs in this
subset a strong and interesting correlation exists between what happens 
in the two villages. 

The rate at which the pairs are detected is slow enough so that each pair of 
particles, one detected in Bellevue the other in Bernex, can be distinguished 
from all the other pairs by fast electronics. A pair is classified as 
"matched" if both members are detected in a horizontal exit channel or both 
are detected in a vertical channel. They are "unmatched" if one partner is 
detected in a horizontal exit channel and its mate is detected in a 
vertical exit channel.

Quantum theory predicts that the fraction of the pairs that are unmatched will 
depend on L minus S, where L is the sum of the two long paths, one in each 
village, and S is the sum of the two short paths. For certain values of 
L minus S all of the pairs will be unmatched and for other values of 
L minus S none of the pairs will be unmatched. For intermediate values of 
L minus S a certain fraction f will be unmatched.

Quantum theory gives a precise formula for this fraction f, and the validity 
of this formula, for many values of L minus S, was checked by the Swiss 
experiment. For ease of explanation, I shall use just one simple property of 
this formula: if for some original value of L minus S none of the pairs are 
unmatched then for small shifts of L minus S away from this original value the 
number of unmatched pairs will grow like the SQUARE of this small shift.


What is so astonishing about that? 

What is puzzling and interesting is this: This kind of growth is 
impossible to reconcile with the classical idea that the choice of what is 
done to a twin cannot influence the behavior of its sibling---before the 
information about which action performed on the one partner can reach the 
other, without traveling faster than light. 

How is this remarkable result proved?   

In the actual experimental situation the four alternative kinds of settings 
come in some random sequence, and the experimenters collect together the 
experiments with the four alternative combination of settings, in order to 
check, for each of the four different values of L minus S, that the 
fraction of unmatched pairs is what quantum theory predicts.

However, within the context of classical physics one has an underlying 
theoretical structure that allows one to consider a set of four theoretically 
possible worlds that are identical up until the instant at which the two 
random processes act. The random processes are supposed to be independent of 
the system being examined: cosmic rays, or any one of a billion different 
arbitrary processes could control them. One implements this idea in classical 
physics (and also in quantum physics) by fixing in slightly different ways the 
external potential energy in which the system being examined moves. This 
external potential is set in a way such that a tiny change triggers the choice 
between the two alternative possible experiments in Bellevue. A second 
independent potential energy variation is invoked to implement the random 
choice made in Bernex.
 
Einsteinian relativistic classical physics is designed so that every physical 
effect of one of these tiny alterations of the potential is confined to 
the region of space-time that can be reached by traveling no faster that 
light from the region of that tiny change. This is how the idea of 
no-faster-than-light influences is made precise in physics.

The random process in Bellevue directs the photon arriving at Bellevue either 
into the interferometer BL or into the interferometer BL'. And the random 
process in Bernex directs the photon arriving in Bernex into either BR or BR'. 
The subsequent evolution of each of the four alternative possible worlds will 
continue to be identical to each other, except for the dynamical 
consequences of these two localized random choices. In classical physics 
these consequences propagate no faster than the speed of light. Hence 
under the conditions of the Swiss experiment a change in the random choice 
made in either region can have no effect at all in the other region until after 
the detection is made and recorded there. [Recall that the experiment is 
designed so that the random choice in each region is followed so quickly by 
the detection and recording there that no effect of the faraway choice upon 
these two latter processes is possible without superluminal (i.e., faster than 
the speed of light) action.]
  
To deduce a contradiction between this no-faster-than-light condition and the 
predictions validated by the Swiss experiment consider the following 
arrangement. Let the first alternative interferometers BL and BR in Bellevue 
and Bernex, respectively, be copies of each other, and let BL' and BR' be 
copies of each other. Let the short paths in BL, BR, BL' and BR' all have the 
same lengths. But let the longer path in BL' (hence also in BR') be slightly 
longer than the longer path in BL (hence also in BR). (This difference is 
negligible on the nanosecond time scale mentioned earlier.) Let the path 
lengths in BL (and hence in BR) be fixed so that in the case that BL and BR 
are chosen by the random processes there will be no "unmatched" pairs: i.e., 
there will be no pairs such that the twin in one village is detected in a 
horizontal exit channel and the twin in the other village is detected in the 
vertical exit channel. This original case will be called Case One. 

Case Two is the alternative possible world in which everything is the same as 
in Case One up until the moment that the two random choices were made, 
but in which the random choice in Bellevue goes the other way, and BL' is 
picked by the random process there, rather than BL, but nothing is changed 
in Bernex. Now a small fraction f of the pairs will be "unmatched". Since 
nothing has changed in Bernex, this small fraction f of unmatched events 
must arise from a switching of this fraction f of the events in Bellevue from 
what they were in Case One. That is, if in a sequence of, say, ten thousand 
original pairs the sequence of detection events is, say (H, V, V, H, H, H, V, H, 
etc.) in both Bellevue and Bernex (I shall ignore statistical fluctuations, 
which do not materially affect the argument) then the fraction f, say 1%, 
of these values will in Case Two be reversed from their Case One values 
in Bellevue, but none will be reversed in Bernex. This is the first key 
consequence of the no-faster-than-light-influence condition: it ensures that 
the change made in Bellevue does not disturb the outcomes in Bernex.

Case Three is the same as Case One in Bellevue, but BR' is chosen in 
Bernex instead of BR. Hence the same fraction f of the detection events, but 
now in Bernex, must be opposite to what they were in Case One. 

In case Four Case the changes from Case One that were made in Bellevue 
alone in Case Two, and in Bernex alone in Case Three, are now made 
simultaneously in both Bellevue and Bernex. Hence in this final case, Case 
Four, the changes that occur in Bellevue must be the same as the changes 
made there in Case Two, since no influence of the choice made in Bernex 
can be present in Bellevue. Similarly, in this Case Four, the changes made in 
Bernex must be the same as the changes that were made there in Case 
Three. But then the total number of mismatches in Case Four can be no greater 
than the sum of the number of mismatches in Cases Two and Case Three. 
Thus the fraction f* of mismatches in Case Four can be no larger than 2f. (Of 
course, there can be fluctuations, but by taking the numbers of pairs 
considered to be very large the fluctuations become unimportant.). 

On the other hand, in Case Four the empirically validated theoretical formula 
for this fraction f* is, for small f, proportional to the square of the 
shift in L minus S from its value in Case One. This shift is the sum of 
these shifts in L minus S for Case Two and Case Three separately, because L 
and S are both just sums over the contributions from Bellevue and Bernex 
individually. Thus this shift in L minus S is twice what it was for Case Two. 
But this value must be squared to give the empirically validated formula, 
and 2 squared is 4! Thus theory, and the empirical evidence, say that the 
fraction of unmatched pair in this Case Four is close to 4f, whereas the 
no-faster-than-light condition allows it to be no greater than 2f.

This means that both quantum theory incompatible with the classical notion 
that what is done to one twin cannot affect the behavior of its 
faraway mate---faster than the speed of light! 

In this particular proof the effect is small when f is small. But in other 
arrangements the effect can be that locality requires a fraction to vanish 
that quantum theory predicts to be, say, 99%. In any case, it is the 
principle that counts, not the numerical particulars. And the principle 
established by this analysis is that the classical-physics causality concept 
of no-faster-than-light-action fails over distances of at least ten kilometers.