Abstract
Quantum mechanics (QM) is the physics of atoms and their constituents. Under reductionism, QM should provide the solid reality for our world, as Einstein insisted. Instead, quantum properties depend strongly on their observer; they are empty (śūnya) until co-dependently created. So physics provides a time-dependent, co-emergent reality (which I designate realitty) reminiscent of śūnyatā.
Yet physicists justify QM because “It works,” begging for the questions: works for whom? to do what? Responding to these questions and similar ones in many fields, I helped start a small organization, the Institute for Science and Interdisciplinary Studies. Its philosophical program aims to help reconstruct knowledge for progressive purposes. The Institute’s analysis provided insight into quantum teleportation and helped me invent a variant that US-NASA currently develops for communication from space.
The author is also a Buddhist Dzogchen practitioner. This essay speculates on the relation of śūnya and śūnyatā to scientific knowledge. Does the union of emptiness, cognizance, and compassion within dharmakāya [as the trikāya of dharmakāya, saṃbhogakāya, nirmāṇakāya] imply that Eastern concepts from Hinduism and Buddhism can provide a second source of inspiration for reconstructive knowledge?
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Notes
- 1.
This was done in a conscious way to parallel French philosophical wordplay on alterité and realitté. The French works a little better, but I hope the allusion to that more exact anagram and our elaboration of it do the job, too.
- 2.
Bohm Dialogue was developed in collaboration with Jiddu Krishnamurti, who once—as boy from Andhra Pradesh—was set to be anthroposophists’ “world teacher.” Physicist-philosopher David Bohm’s method reveals the operation of Thought as a System.
- 3.
The Willies is a colloquial American expression meaning frightened qualms or something more difficult to put in words, a bit like “undefinable moral chills or qualms.”
- 4.
If the particles were spinning on their axes, how much spin did they have, and in what direction was the axis pointing? These were originally particularly interesting and paradoxical questions, but today their answers form the simple example used below to discuss teleportation.
- 5.
I have intentionally called this indeterminacy: Uncertainty seems to imply a knowing subject’s limitation. But experiments show these limits are inherent in the very definition of the properties that are complementary. To indicate the objective character of quantum disturbance, without implying a subjective lack of knowledge, the better name is Heisenberg indeterminacy principle.
- 6.
Bohr is quoted as saying “There is no quantum world. […physics isn’t about] how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature” [3].
- 7.
A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N Rosen “Can Quantum Mechanical Description of Reality Be Considered Complete?” Physical Review, Vol. 47, (May 15, 1935), p. 777. Even before publication, a New York Times headline read “Einstein Attacks Quantum Theory” 5/4, 1935.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Ibid, emphasis in the original.
- 10.
The work was co-authored by Greenberger, Horne, and Zeilinger, my three long-term collaborating principal investigators for the National Science Foundation’s grant to Hampshire College on “quantum Interferometry.” The clearest reduction to 3 particles and contradiction is by N David Mermin.
- 11.
Einstein’s EPR paper implies there should be completely deterministic explanation for the quantum phenomena including those that seem probabilistic. In the same year, in the very same journal as the EPR paper, he published a co-authored work showing how two very remote places could be connected by a topological structure: the Einstein-Rosen bridge. Today it’s famous for introducing “wormholes” to general relativity. But in a remarkable passage, they suggest it could be a structure of quantum particles, taking the model so seriously as to remark that inside of protons each would need at least two bridges to account for their electrical repulsion, since like charges repel. Positive mass bridges—as gravitational structures—can only attract. Clearly Einstein was beginning to search for unified theories already in the mid-1930s [4].
- 12.
The great final irony would come if a nonlocal but geometric theory of general relativity actually entailed quantum mechanics, or both needed quantum mechanics and explained it through some self-consistent advanced geometry. The current string theory or the M-theories of quantum field theory may someday lead beyond the current amazing mathematical connections and close back in on quantum mechanics itself—a history-bending, time-twisting outcome if it ever happens. Only time will tell.
- 13.
They are necessarily opposite in all three dimensions. Photons coming from a suitably excited atom would also be polarized in exactly such a singlet state.
- 14.
I emphasize “as if” in honor of John Bell because what is actually happening with the particles is something that he placed in the domain of the Unspeakable. The “Problem then,” as he once put it, “is this: how exactly is the world to be divided into speakable apparatus…that we can talk about…and unspeakable quantum system that we cannot talk about?” [5].
- 15.
Random luck still operates as in most quantum effects, so the first particle lines up with field (Heads) half of the time. But when it does, the two others have identical luck in the perpendicular field. When the first comes up tails, the other two have opposite luck. See appendix for full details. Calling the first direction a copper penny and the second silver shilling makes the contradiction easy to see. Appendix to Muddling Through & on request from the author, hbernstein@hampshire.edu
- 16.
Charlie chooses a direction for his spin-selecting magnet and sends a single particle to Alice. Charlie’s state is reproduced by her partner Bob with perfect fidelity. Alice only needs to tell Bob which of four things to do. He can get the correct chosen state using a very short message, only two bits long. That’s thousands of possible settings of Charlie’s magnet condensed into only four possibilities, How? The trick is that Bob and Alice have previously shared an EPR pair between them. [The appendix to MT has a simple explanation of QT.]
- 17.
In all the correlations and “passions at a distance” of quantum weirdness, this prohibition on the speed of information transfer is always respected.
- 18.
The story of my father and his absolute joy at narrowly having declined Edward Teller’s call to join the project in Oak Ridge appears in New Ways of Knowing, Marcus Raskin and Herbert Bernstein (Totowa, NJ: Rowman& Littlefield, 1987), Chap. 2.
- 19.
Trevor Pinch, [at note 11, p. 186].in The Social Production of Scientific Knowledge (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1977), E. Mendelsohn et al., eds. Other famous scientists had similar moral qualms: see, e.g., Lanouette/Szilard’s bio, Genius in the Shadows.
- 20.
Skillfully drawn by our former student Usha Lingappa, now a CalTech PhD student in exobiology.
- 21.
I originally thought of it as semi-teleportation since only half the state parameters were sent; Charlie Bennett dubbed it SdT after a previous effect, superDense coding, which carried twice as much classical information per photon as classical binary coding.
- 22.
Early quantum physicists were perhaps drawn to Buddhism more by the intellectual popularity of Schopenhauer’s versions than by their own direct experience or practice.
- 23.
Pauli’s correspondence with Carl Jung was so mystical that a committee of overseers feared it might tarnish his scientific reputation: VF Weisskopf on K. von Meyenn’s archival work (private communication, circa 1987). See also “The Innermost Kernel” by Suzanne Gieser. Weisskopf’s forward to the Pauli Letters points out that he had contributed to every initial advance in quantum theory.
- 24.
New York: Morrow, 1979.
- 25.
London: Wildwood House Ltd., 1975.
- 26.
These include an American quantum field theorist who presides over a Kagyu Sangha in Santa Fe, NM, a Zen meditator who serves as the principle investigator of the most relevant experiments for SuperDense quantum protocols, and a solid state/condensed matter theorist at the University in our local consortium, who practices Vipassana. In addition of course to East Asian, Indian, and other Himalayan national/native meditators like our former colleague, a student co-author in several of our papers, now in industry, to many—perhaps most—of those in our undergraduate classes who meditate, and many more, both of Asian and of western extraction.
- 27.
In my case, first recognition and being in rigpa was followed by over 24 h of heightened compassion, confirmed by a high lama.
- 28.
Some suggestions and precedents readily occur: benefitting all beings points to an ecological focus. Arthur Waskow’s Shalom center models how to draw on (Jewish) religious values and practices to implement political action. Could there be similarly, motivated science research? How would one square the aim to show one’s enemies and friends equal compassion with the reconstructive knowledge impetus toward alliances, judgments, and politics?
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Bernstein, H.J. (2019). Śūnya, Śūnyatā, and Reality in Modern Physics. In: Bhatt, S.R. (eds) Quantum Reality and Theory of Śūnya. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1957-0_7
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