Written by Gary Osborn 2002.

Extract taken from The Stargate Chronicles. Book 1. Limited Experiences of the Infinite.

“Imagine if Max Planck pottering around in his mathematical chalk-board had access to a video-arcade game! He'd see right away that the blips on Centipede and the zaps of Space Invaders could represent the movement of the very particles that he tried to describe in the dusty symbols of his blackboard.”

  Timothy Leary and Eric Gullichsen

It’s true that most people who write about the paranormal cannot help squeezing in a few brief chapters about quantum physics – (much to the scorn and disdain of many physicists) – as phenomena at the quantum level is, well . . . highly paranormal.

  Anyway, to go further and to get a good idea of what reality is all about and exactly what seems to be going on within the old noggin at our perceptive level, it’s necessary that we delve into these things. So I would advise the reader to take a deep breath, because from here on in – and for most of us – things are going to get a little more technical; a little more difficult, more serious and a little less humorous.

  This is a long article. For those who are not familiar with even the basics of Quantum Theory, you might find yourself scratching your head and going over the same paragraph again and again and calling the author a “bastard” and exclaiming “I didn’t know I was reading a text book!” I warn you that all the different terms are enough to confuse us, but it will be worth it just to take a look at what's under the "blanket" and what really underlies our experience of reality.

The Quantum Leap in Physics

It was in the mid-1920’s that a new branch of science called quantum mechanics was being developed by a few noted physicists. Since that time quantum mechanics or ‘particle physics’ has become firmly established as the new cornerstone of today’s science.

  ‘Quantum theory’ has been described as the most comprehensive and accurate theory known to man and concentrates primarily on the nature of light, the atom, and even smaller objects called ‘subatomic’ or ‘elementary particles’ (the building blocks of matter.) The success and popularity of ‘particle physics’ is due to the fact, that in many ways, our belief in particles as objective things has directly and indirectly helped us to realise our technological achievements.

  The practical application of quantum theory is known as Solid-State Physics and it has helped to bring us things like transistors, semiconductors, integrated circuits, lasers, computers and Television – although I don’t know whether the TV is a good thing these days, what with today’s society and its almost obsessive dependence on Soap dramas and Channel 4's Big Brother.

  For a long time I have been amused with the thought that if we had actually discovered time travel, and a time traveller went back in time to Medieval England to have a chat and maybe some tea and biscuits with a common villager, I wonder what the time traveller would say if he was asked how we pass the time here in the 21st century? If he thought deeply about it he would probably respond with:

  “Well, most of the time we sit in front of a viewing box in the corner . . . er, watching people act out a life instead of getting on with our own I’m afraid!”

  “Well, that be sad!” the villager would reply in his native vernacular – and he would be right. However, the time traveller might add that there is a good reason why most of us sit in front of a “viewing box” eating microwave snack-dinners and watching some 80-plus channels of shite and recycled shite . . . it sidetracks the majority of the population and stops them from thinking about the really important things – like thinking about who really killed JFK . . . or maybe even building a time machine? – After all, we don’t want everybody “flitting” about from “here” to “there” in time would we? – We wouldn’t know where or ‘WHEN’ we are – and more importantly, who would be on the assembly line fitting the damn things together?

  There is one saving grace. When some capricious Caligula-god decides to drop the atom bomb on our city, and just because he can, we won’t know it, as we will have spent our last moments watching Emerdale, interspersed with adverts about Life Insurance and loans.

  Unbeknownst to the medieval villager – but “knownst” about to some extent by the Greek philosophers a millennium earlier – is the idea that reality is made-up of “atoms” . . . tiny “ball-bearings” of matter. In his ignorance, the villager is better off than the person who believes this – especially when the truth remains that there is nothing solid about reality at all. But alas, we are slowly coming to this realisation through the discoveries made in quantum physics – things that were known many millennia before those clever ancient Greeks who had no TV and no Coronation Street, Eastenders, the ITV Soap Awards and the life of Jordan and Peter Andre, to sidetrack their thoughts, or to practically squash them flat, making them virtually brain dead.

Discoveries that have so far been conclusive in the quantum arena describe the behaviour of things at the level of the infinitely small . . . and we are not talking about my brain here – but they also reveal many paradoxes and many inconsistencies, as indeed they should. During the time of its early development, many eminent scientists were uncomfortable with its discoveries and some were even shocked by what these discoveries were telling us as regards the nature of our reality.

  You see from where we stand in a “touchy-feely” material realiteeee, “matter” seems as distinct and as definable as each of our five senses that interact with it and all its well-defined forms. From our material perspective – and if we were none the wiser – we would tend to think that everything is made up of tiny solid “particles” of matter – each occupying a definite place during a specific time.

  This picture satisfies our rational mind which has its development in our sense perceptions and so from the time of the ancient Greek philosophers, this had been the view for hundreds of years – and although many people still like to think of the atomic and subatomic world as consisting of lots of tiny, solid, hard, “ball-bearings,” this picture has been out of date since the development of quantum mechanics.

  Physicists are now saying that a so-called “particle” is nothing but a tiny swirling mass of confined energy and that as regards the atom, there is nothing substantial about it at all – in fact it is mostly empty space . . blink! blink! . . Uh?

  Yeah – certainly not something that would be announced by Trevor McDonald on ITV’s News at Ten. “Ere, he's lost his blinking marbles.” No, on the contrary, you have . . . there are no marbles - but I would agree that everything is 'blinking'.

  Let’s run that by you again . . .

  Just like the eddy’s and whirlpools which are tiny activities of water made in water – atoms and subatomic particles have been described as just tiny activities of nothing in “nothing . . . empty space.” In other words, we could say that our visible world is composed of a totality of invisible tiny sparks (blinks) and swirls of energy . . . like the digital sparks of energy/information in the ‘non-local nowhere’ we call cyberspace!

  “Uh? . .”

  Yeah, frightening isn’t it? . . It kinda leaves you feeling like you’re up “shit creek” without your pants on and without a paddle. I’ll leave you to ponder on that for a moment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mmm . . . Mmm . . . Ok.

  Anyway, one of the most damning observations associated with Quantum theory – which altered our sense of reality and made one want to go outside for a “reality-check” – was Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle.”

Certainty and Uncertainty

It was in 1927 that a German physicist named Werner Heisenberg introduced the apparent reality of an unknown phenomenon to the scientific world. Since then it has become known as ‘Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.’ This principle is quite simple to understand when we look at the world around us:

  The thing is what we see as a subatomic “particle” – like an electron for instance – can also express itself as a “wave” – hence the term 'Wave-Particle Duality'. This of course is a paradox.

  For instance, a ‘subatomic entity’ like an electron is a “cross-dresser” in that it can behave like a “particle” and a “wave” and both at the same time. But the most important thing – as regards the context of this enquiry – is that this phenomenon is really telling us something about our own perception.

  You see, although we can perceive the electron as either a “particle” or a “wave” . . . we cannot observe both these properties of the electron at the same time. This is the paradox that has become known as the ‘Uncertainty Principle.’

  Alas, to observe the measurement of one of the electron’s properties would mean the uncertainty of the other.

  To highlight further the problems this gives our physicists, I would like to include here a couple of extracts from John Gribbin’s book In Search of the Double Helix:

‘So Heisenberg deduced two things: for a small particle like an electron, it is impossible to measure its position precisely, and it is impossible to measure its momentum precisely. In theory we can measure either property as accurately as we like, just short of absolute precision. But we cannot measure both of them with great precision at the same time. Measuring position very accurately corresponds to squeezing the wave packet, and the smaller the wave packet the bigger the spread in wavelength, and therefore in momentum.

  Measuring momentum very accurately corresponds to selecting out a very precise wavelength, or velocity, for the electron, and that means that the wave train stretches out over a great distance.’

  ‘We cannot know simultaneously exactly where a particle is and exactly where it is going. The law is very closely linked to the dual wave/particle nature of things, but it is telling us something at once both more subtle and more profound.

  Notice the way I said that by measuring momentum precisely we are selecting a wavelength for the electron. It is no longer merely the case that the answers we get from nature depend on the questions we ask. What the uncertainty relation is telling us is that what nature is depends on the questions we ask. By choosing to measure the momentum of an electron, or beam of electrons, very accurately, we are creating uncertainty in the position of the electrons; by measuring the position of an electron very precisely, our experiment itself produces uncertainty about the wavelength, or momentum, of the electron.

  This is just the edge of the deepest and most mysterious of quantum mechanical pools, a glimpse of the way in which the experimenter, or observer, becomes part of what he is observing. In fact it makes more sense to say that neither the position nor the momentum of an electron has any meaning at all until one of them is measured. And this uncertainty extends to other pairs of properties, such as the time a fundamental event takes and the amount of energy involved in the event.’ [1]

I can tell you that this ‘uncertainty’ extends much further afield:

  As we know, everything is a composite of both opposites. However, the crux of this quantum paradox remains: that although we can observe the properties of each opposite of a thing . . . we cannot observe or measure both opposites of a thing at the same time. Again, this dual perception of things at the subatomic level actually shows us something about our perception of things at the normal, everyday level of our senses. For instance many of us are shocked when we see a transvestite – we cannot really understand how a man can also be a woman or want to act like one.

  It is a fact that most of us have a black and white, ‘dual perception’ of reality, and our dual perception corresponds to everything we both physically or mentally create, perceive and experience.

  In this dimension of reality, human thought cannot reconcile the opposite nature of two things simultaneously. It seems we have a dual perception – meaning that our experience is that we tend to perceive opposites in everything.

  However in general, the problem is that the world we perceive around us will often conform to our likes and dislikes and so as regards all perceived things and ideas that are always dual in nature – i.e., containing two opposites – it is indeed true that most of us tend to concentrate on one opposite, or will favour just one of these opposites at any one time and to the exclusion of the other.

Anyway, even Einstein found quantum theory hard to accept because he couldn’t allow himself the thought that ‘uncertainty’ plays a role in the universe. Einstein’s famous quote “God does not play dice” reveals this. But Einstein was confusing the ‘uncertainty’ of sub-atomic behaviour with the uncertainty found in our everyday perception of ‘cause and effect’ – which many believe is governed by the laws of chance. This showed that Einstein believed in a hidden meaning behind our everyday reality and that our materialistic perception regarding the “chance events” – which stem from ‘cause and effect’ – was inherently wrong.

  Einstein was too mature in years to devote himself to the new physics of quantum mechanics. At his age, he had been open to the influence of too many dogmas which had built up in him and which he could not break free from.

  After the laurels of success, comes the illusion of authority . . . and this always checks the progress of further discovery.

  A young Einstein struggling against conventional thought would have lent himself and his energy to resolving some of these quantum paradoxes by making a synthesis between these quantum paradoxes and his own fresh ideas concerning Relativity and Gravity . . . but it was not to be, and so the young quantum physicists went chasing after the truth in their own way, and without him.

  Metaphorically speaking, maybe Einstein had stopped at a certain 'resting-place of the mind', where only the accepted and therefore ‘crystallised impression’ of the truth remained with him. The young quantum physicists, full of energy, went chasing after the truth which had since escaped the accepted “mould” which people had made of Einstein’s discoveries. But in succession as always, the quantum physicists have also come to a 'resting-place of the mind' where they can only play with the “empty shell” or “shed-skin” – an impression of the truth, which like an allusive butterfly has since moved on again.

  No one could dispute the apparent validity of Einstein’s insights and the enormous effect they had regarding our picture of the universe. But once we begin to fit these insights into a framework regarding the consensus perception of reality and accept them as the truth, then something in these insights which was once creative, is sadly lost . . . and the same is now happening with quantum physics.

  The quest of the quantum physicist has not yet ended, and is still on-going. Many know this, and still they search for the truth. But they also know that they have to keep within the guidelines already set down by earlier quantum physicists. Most physicists would blindly accept this, but some would be aware that the foundation they have to build upon may be totally wrong – being just a reflection of our ‘dual perception’ which is a fundamental consequence of our limited senses. But again, not many are going to risk their jobs or reputation by putting forward a revolutionary new idea which identifies this problem so that we may overcome it and maybe find a totally new picture regarding the nature of the quantum world and what it is really telling us.

  As we know, there are many scientists who have accepted certain conclusions and have already laid down certain rules and regulations regarding them.

  For example, many believe that they now have a determinate picture of the atom. But this is a picture which is based on the physical paradigm, and can only be based on the physical paradigm – again, because of our limited perception.

  To see how limited our perceptions are, we will now take a look at these two different aspects of reality known as ‘wave’ and ‘particle’ phenomena.