Beyond solipsism

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, cosmology, theories, biocentrism

Near the end of the book I reviewed last week (here), the possibility that the observer creates the universe was discussed. The next book I read, The Grand Biocentric Design: How Life Creates Reality, by Robert Lanza, MD and Matej Pavšič, PhD, with Bob Berman, presents the theory in detail.

Quite a number of physicists have said things like, "We are the opening through which the universe examines itself." While this is typically uttered as a self-referential metaphor, some, including Drs Lanza and Pavšič, take it more literally, and in this case in particular, attempt to offer proof.

The authors take their time building up to the real meaning of Biocentrism. Things seem to proceed by easy stages, then in mid-book, they get more explicit. On page 145 I find this: "There remains a certain fluidity—a certain degree of uncertainty—to anything that is not actually observed." They go on to explain that whatever has not been observed, such as most of the Earth beneath our feet, exists in "a range of possible states, and it's not until observed that they take on real properties."

At that point, I thought, "As a kid I hunted fossils in a limestone stream bank near our house. Were those fossils 'not there' until I went looking for them?" Later on the authors write of "the consensus world we're aware of during the day" (p 183), discussing the seeming unreality of many dreams, supposedly not constrained by that "consensus world." So now, the world is whatever we all agree it is? Wow! Soon (p 186) I read, "By observing your world, you keep collapsing probability waves, and thus you effortlessly create an ever-more detailed world that includes reinforcing memories," and a few sentences later, with no irony at all: "It is amazing how far we've come by following the implications of quantum mechanics in an unbiased way." At this point, it is clear that their view is so biased there is no meeting of minds with realists like me. They go on in the following chapter to posit this (my paraphrase): All the past, all 14 billion years of it, is brought into existence by observations in the present and near-present.

They have the gall to claim that this is not solipsism. By a strict definition ("The view or theory that the self is all that is known to exist"), they are right. But they turn it on its head, making the universe not just "in our head", but created ex nihilo because of our observations. All of this supposition (and that is all it is) is based on a few experiments that seem to prove that an observation taken now can affect something that happened in the past. Here I must dwell a little.

The starting point for all this is the Copenhagen Interpretation, propounded and promoted by Neils Bohr. Werner Heisenberg had determined the limits of accuracy of measurement, particularly as applied to quanta (elementary particles such as electrons and force-carrier particles such as the photons of light). Thousands, perhaps millions, of versions of the two-slit experiment have made this clear. If one allows a beam of light or of low-energy electrons (electrons with an energy more than about 10 eV have a wavelength too short to be useful here) to pass through a pair of narrow slits, separated by a small distance, ideally between 10x and 100x the wavelength, a suitable detector or screen will show an interference pattern. This experiment shows that not just light but also electrons (and more recently buckyballs and even larger molecules) express a wave nature. Much is made of "collapsing the wave" to get the particle that is finally detected when it strikes the detector.

(An aside: photons act as waves as they enter your eye, being diffracted by the pupil and refracted by the lens, something particles can't do, then within 18-19 millimeters, express particle behavior when they deposit their energy onto the opsin proteins in the retina so they can be "seen".)

The fun comes when we get to Bohr's expression, "Each particle must pass through both slits and interfere with itself." We don't know that. No experiment yet done has shown that, because any attempt to discern where a photon or electron or whatever "is going" between the emitter and the detector, messes up the pattern and there is no interference. Many physicists, including me, would say that the measurement cannot discern where or how fast the particle is moving without disturbing it so much that the measurement's accuracy is limited. In this case, it is limited such that the uncertainty of position is large compared to the separation between the slits.  Bohr claimed that the particle was really "fuzzed out" to be bigger than that, and "really goes through both slits". Baldly put, that is the Copenhagen Interpretation. For photons, maybe; for electrons, I am not so sure. For buckyballs, the idea is ludicrous. I think Bohr was wrong.

Consider this: all matter has an electronic nature, and is always accompanied by electromagnetic (EM) fields. The slits are holes in a material. They disturb the symmetry of the EM field of the otherwise smooth material membrane or plate (frequently a metallic foil or thin ceramic sheet). The moving particle is affected by the EM field. The disturbed EM field in the vicinity of two slits is different from that near a single slit. I haven't seen any attempting to calculate what effect that EM field may have on the moving particle, all by itself.

Do you know what is the Airy disc of a star image in a telescope's focal plane? It is the expression of the diffraction of the telescope's diameter. The wider the mirror or lens, the smaller the Airy disc. That is why one needs a really wide telescope to see small or distant things. Resolution (angular accuracy) is inversely proportional to the diameter of the aperture. That's why the new Webb telescope's mirror is 21 feet (6.5m) in diameter. Big area to gather a lot of light, but even more importantly, big diameter so see tiny things far away. The Airy disc seems to indicate that the incoming photons can sense how big the mirror is. Taken to an extreme, the phenomenon of diffraction indicates that the path a photon takes is affected by the presence of everything in the universe. If you don't mind doing the calculations to a few thousand decimals, you could probably calculate how the shape of the Airy disc of any particular telescope would be modified by the presence of the Moon or any of the other planets, in the general direction the telescope is pointed. That's probably true.

Some physicists get around the Copenhagen view by considering "observer" to be anything that is "close enough" to affect a particular particle. Bohr claimed the observer had to be "intelligent". So what? (Neils, Baby, sayin' it don't make it so.) It is a claim, and a claim only. A huge superstructure of physics calculations has been built upon it, including the nonsense in this book.

I took the trouble to closely read the two articles at the end of the book, in its Appendices. They contain a ton of calculations. It was hard because it's been fifty years since I last worked with Hamiltonians (a type of obtuse mathematical expression, needed to do anything useful with Schrödinger's equation). The articles are intended to prove that an intelligent observer is needed to bring the universe into being. The authors truly believe that, before there was a living mind to think about it, the entire universe, and all its billions of years of history, existed as a great lot of potentiality, a universal wave function (a really complex version of Schrödinger's Equation, with a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion—I think that's enough trillions—partial differential equations). The first eye with a brain behind it "collapsed the wave function" so that at least a few trillion trillions of particles, making up that animal or person, and its surroundings, could exist in a more concrete form. (By the way, one gram of matter consists of about 1.2 trillion trillion particles).

I eventually saw a pattern in all the math. A few equations would be presented, then there would be a statement such as, "Equation 12a is similar to the Jim-Dandy formula, when expressed thus", and a rather similar equation would follow, numbered 13. Then a little later, a reference to "the formalization of Glock and Winchester", turning Equation 24 into Equation 25. And so forth and so on. There were several such shifts of perspective. I consider each to be a potential disconnect in the logic. I didn't dig deeply enough to discern which ones are true disconnects…but I am sure there are several!

Here is my analogy: A friend asked her neighbor for the recipe for her wonderful German chocolate cake. It required many ingredients, and numerous steps. Later she invited the friend over to taste it. The new cake tasted very good, but the neighbor said, "It's not quite the same, is it?" "Oh, no!" my friend said, "Of course, I substituted <brand D> chocolate for <brand A>, and I boiled some milk and added a little brown sugar in place of the evaporated milk, but it's really the same cake." The neighbor was diplomatic and didn't complain further. We all could tell, it wasn't the same. When you get down to it, with enough substitutions, you can start with the recipe for cherry pie and wind up with pineapple upside-down cake.

What we have in this book and the carefully crafted documents it contains is upside-down physics.

Sadly, the godlike powers that lie behind the authors' supposition are useless without volition. If the universe has to be created by us, why did we have to create one so full of frustration? If I create the universe by observing it, why is my wife always late? If you want to be a god, be prepared for theodicy: "if God is good, why is there pain?"

I'll be careful not to use the term "believe" here, because of its religious overtones. Here is my view of the universe. The fossils I found as a child were there millions of years before I was. Could a Trilobite be an "observer" in terms satisfactory to Bohr, or to these authors? Could a coral, or a sponge? The universe existed for at least nine billion years before the Sun and Earth and the rest of the Solar system came into being. They were as real then as they are now. Their existence was not affected, either then or since, by the "observing" animals that arose on Earth about one billion years ago, or by the "observing" humans that arose perhaps a million years ago, or at the very latest, 200,000 years ago. Nor were they affected by supposed aliens that may have arisen five or ten billion years ago.

Every article I have read that describes an experiment on a photon or electron or whatever, being "entangled" with another, and somehow "deciding" to point its spin axis "up" because a scientist forced its entangled partner to point "down", is flawed by circular reasoning. From their creation (emission), the pair of particles had opposed spins, which may have been detected at different times and places, but were there already. Period. Oh, and speaking of time: the authors claim that time is a construct of our perception, and doesn't otherwise exist. It's interesting that so many of the equations in their articles are time-dependent!

I've exhausted my interest in pursuing this matter. I'll read about real stuff in the future.

Errata: 

• On page 39, in a footnote, we read of the size of an atom, "It's 0.0529 nanometer, or about 1/200th of an angstrom in width." There are three errors in this statement:
• A nanometer is 10 angstroms, so the fraction should be 1/2.
• The Bohr radius of neutral Hydrogen is 0.0529 nm; the Bohr radius is the mean distance of the electron from the proton. This isn't just "any atom".
• The word "width" implies diameter, not radius.
• Bonus error (because this should have been specified): every neutral atom has a different radius, and hydrogen is one of the smallest; only atomic oxygen, fluorine and neon are smaller. The radius of a neutral, isolated carbon atom (this rarely occurs!) is 0.067 nm, and that of gold is 0.174 nm. Gold atoms are by no means the largest.
• On page 50 it is stated, "Longitudinal (vertical) waves can pass through liquids and gasses while transverse (sideways) waves require the material to be solid." Remove the parentheses, and this is a correct statement. However, "longitudinal" is not "vertical"; it is a compression-rarefaction wave that varies in the direction of travel, while "vertical" is just transverse on the vertical axis as compared to the horizontal axis.
• On page 128 we read, "…unlike all the other major moons in the solar system—our moon doesn't orbit around its planet's equator." (The point of the paragraph is that the moon's off-equator orbit helps stabilize Earth's axis of rotation.) A more accurate way to state this is that most (not all) other natural satellites orbit nearer their planet's equator, as compared to the Moon. Most of the major satellites' orbits are inclined within a degree of the host planet's equator. However, Triton and Nereid, satellites of Neptune, are inclined 130° (or -50° retrograde) and 27.6°. The inclination of the Moon's orbit is 5.1°. The real issue here is the Moon's large size relative to Earth; 1/80th of the Earth's mass. A tiny satellite, whatever its orbital inclination, would have little effect on the axial direction of Earth.