A Scientists Congress in 2008

Subtopics

1 – Science was born in Greece

2 – The metaphysical assumptions of Western science

3 – The expulsion of Paradise

4 –  The crisis settles down

5 – The quantum sabbath

6 – The vanishing reality

Further reading

05 – The Old Reality

The case of the missing objective reality

Adam F. Newman – University of Texas at Austin – United States of America

1 – Science was born in Greece

On the matters of Western scientific/philosophical thought everything started with the Greeks, as we know. We are not far from the truth when we state scientific thought was born in Jonia, a Greek colony in the east coast of Aegean Sea, a place where some of the most creative men of all times have lived in sixth and fifth centuries before Christ. At the time science appeared, it was called philosophy and wasn't far from poetry and the arts, however rather distant from religion, since it had its own explanations to subjects religion used to regard as its exclusive dominion. In that particular period of history, tolerance with dissidents was certainly well greater than in some places of our contemporary world. In such space and time of relatively free thought, human knowledge has grown and thrived as never before, and only a few occasions afterwards.

First of all, the sages of Jonia tried to understand the mystery of the origins and how the world was created. Each philosopher had his own proposal on the primordial element everything was made of and trusted more their intelligence and reasoning than the teachings of priests or beliefs of tradition. They fostered disciples and created the first philosophical schools, gathering those who honor acquired knowledge, rejecting erudition displayed by some authority who claimed to be the heirs of all learning.

Thales of Miletus, considered the first scientist, used to say water was the primordial substance of physis – which means nature, in the comprehensive sense Greeks ascribed to this concept. Anaximenes, also from Miletus, disagreed and proposed air as the first element. Democritus from Abdera – a Greek colony in Tracia – together with Leucippus, said everything was made of minute indivisible particles floating in a vacuum. Others suggested something more abstract as the primordial substance: Pherekydes propounded time as the raw material of everything that exists; Heraclitus sustained that fire was the essential component of nature but also emphasized time and transformation, intuiting the Taoist conception of his contemporary Chinese, in the other side of the planet. Anaximander of Miletus, said that apeiron, the unbounded realm, is the principle of everything and Pythagoras, who wasn't from Jonia but can be considered one of the most seminal thinkers of that period, saw numbers as the principle of the cosmic organization. Euclid appraised geometry as something fundamental; otherwise he wouldn't name his treaty The Elements. So, at that time and place came out the first intellectual worries on the primal components of reality and the principles which govern the world.

It would be tiresome and impracticable to scrutinize the long way thought has gone since Ancient Greece, with Plato and Aristotle establishing the main Western philosophical lineages for the centuries to come, till the world views of the Middle Ages and the sprouting of modern scientific thought. However, it's worthwhile to stress this concern on basic investigation, born two and a halt thousand years ago among the pre-Socratics and latent along the centuries to come, while thought remained under religious dominion, subdued to the official sages' authority. It survived in a covert and stealthy form among the dissidents, initially called Gnostics and later alchemists. Scholastic thought, grounded in Aristotle's, Aquinas' or Augustine's sway, stayed hegemonic till 19^th century, in spite of its later clashes with science – arisen from the ashes with Galileo Galilei, in 17^th century. Such confrontations, by Galileo and his successors, were repeated many times, demanding strategic withdrawals or even to pay with their own lives the daring views some of them sustained.

In the same way it still happens in some areas of this manifold planet, thought based on religious authority, on the word of a leader, or an official doctrine restrained scientific thinking stagnated and creativity asphyxiated inside the narrow boundaries of the established canon. This plight have led to segregation and cultural sterility, hostility against disagreeing voices and heinous crimes in the name of a god, a book, or a belief. We all remember the Inquisition horrors, and it's prudent to keep in mind that something similar can happen again. It's worrisome to verify that even in our days, when worldwide communication became instantaneous and knowledge is more democratized then ever, there still remain dark areas in the world, smudges of obscurantism and ignorance aggressive to free thought and hostile to other peoples and cultures. I don't refer only to those countries under the domination of fundamentalist religious groups or zealot sects; rather, I see under the same view recent political phenomena like nazism, communism and variegated ideological dictatorships – larger as well as minor – which cast their shadows over the unfortunate nations subdued.

The revival of scientific thought actually has come out a century after the artistic Renaissance, notwithstanding Leonardo's multiform genius anticipated contribution. Scientific thought inherited – and it couldn't be otherwise – a large part of the Greek legacy and medieval metaphysics, although this is rarely disclosed. With Galileo experimentalism – unknown to the Greeks – was introduced the use of mathematics as a fundamental tool to scientific knowledge, giving birth to contemporary Western science, responsible for unheard advances that yielded a prodigious outcome of highly positive results in diverse areas that affect directly our lives, such as sanitary resources, transportation, information processing and communication. Today's world would be unthinkable without technology, which sprouted directly from the Western way of making science.

Among the natural sciences, physics have been considered emblematic as to the rigor of its methods, to the formulation of comprehensive theories concerning reality and developing an arsenal of instruments progressively more expensive, sophisticated and precise to be used in empirical research. This way, physics scrutinizes the foundations of matter and energy, persevering in our days with the Greek ideal of discovering the basic materials that constitute the world and how it does function.

Workers in scientific fields, mostly physicists, are very cautious and restrictive about their criteria and rigorous on their methods, in order to eliminate any seemingly strange influences on the investigations of a scientific practice intended to be objective. Views and standpoints suspected of being "mystical" or "subjective" are severely criticized, and those acquiescent in incursions outside the areas demarcated as "serious science" are seen distrustfully and as such discriminated, if they persevere in that behavior. Trying to defend itself from superstition, science mistakes serious mysticism for irresponsible mystification. It delimits a constricted area of legitimacy to the concept of knowledge, and punishing renegades with disdain and intellectual segregation.

Reports include many names of formerly respected scientists who dared to cross these limits and are victims of anathema among their peers today. Some science workers needed to swiftly retreat to the orthodox premises in order to preserve their colleagues' respect and the funds for their researches. The cases of Prof. Charon, in France, and Prof. Taylor, in England, are examples of this situation we can label Giordano Bruno's syndrome and Galileo's syndrome. It's true today dissidents are not killed lately, but for a man of science, convinced of his work value and the accuracy of his research, to have his name discriminated and his image tarnished by his former colleagues and most of the intellectual community he belongs can be as cruel as death. The late David Bohm, to whom we credit much advancement of quantum physics, spent many years of his life trying to escape from political obscurantism which engaged in witch-hunts wherever rebels were supposed to be. Later, his worry was to escape from the orthodoxy of some of his coworkers, angry with the concept of wholeness he introduced in physics that included "non-physical" aspects in his inclusive account of the world.

Uncountable examples of such persecutions in recent history can be found, mainly if we look for them in other sciences. In my view, these are clear symptoms of the inherent difficulties to the clash of paradigms that characterizes this transition of century and millennium. The crisis exists and deserves to be inspected very carefully, with open-minded purpose and broad perspective. If we position ourselves strictly inside the boundaries of the established paradigm we hardly will understand what is really happening.

back to top

2 – The metaphysical assumptions of Western science

First of all, it's necessary to admit that the contents and concepts of contemporary science in their essence are still Greek, and the general approaches that outline the investigation field are based on non-scientific metaphysical assumptions. This metaphysical foundation is characteristically Greek-Roman and Judeo-Christian, applying only to Western science. Bewildered with the outcome of technology, science refuses to recognize other forms of knowledge which rest on distinct assumptions. Searching for the fundamental components of reality, trying to find out the bricks that build matter and the universe, physicists proceed with the Jonic saga without a critical analysis and taking for granted that an understanding of the world will emerge from this pursuit.

Thales used to think the world was made of water; today's physicists think it's made of quarks. The belief in atoms that move in emptiness submitted to mathematical laws immanent to nature goes back to Democritus and Leucippus, in the same way it's well aged the Newtonian supposition that mind is something apart of the physical world and reality can be understood without considering consciousness as a part of it. This way, since Greek antiquity till Modern Age, Western scientists try to understand the nature of physical reality as something separated of human experience and lives, segregating the vastness of their inner world and the subjective and imaginary slope of wholeness as something devoid of scientific value. From this standpoint we can infer the first assumption – almost always concealed – of modern science: 

The universe exists apart of human perception, but it can be understood with the proper utilization of the tools and methods science has developed.

 This is a metaphysical outlook inherited from a scientific tradition rooted in Greece, which is not recognized in other advanced cultures such as those of India and China. Furthermore it have been denied by recent research of Western science itself. This point will be explained ahead.

Another article of faith of modern science whose origin is clearly rooted in Ancient Greece can be enunciated this way:

              All reality can be reduced to matter and energy submitted to the blind and immutable laws of nature.

 This petitio principii is the basis of materialism that Western science has assumed since it denied the existence of the psychical-imaginary world, reducing life to a mere byproduct of complex chemical interactions, as well as consciousness to an emergent epiphenomenon of the nervous system organization. It's clearly restrictive, since it discards our most direct experience: the immediate feeling that we are a subjectivity in its own right. Physical reductionism is not an outcome of scientific research; on the contrary it provides the metaphysical background upon which scientific research proceeds and theories are formulated.

There is another principle underlying Western scientific practice we can ascribe a metaphysical content, since it demands a posture of faith in the work of its practitioners. This principle hardly would survive an evaluation of scientific knowledge evolution and some mathematical discoveries of the 20^th century. Its enunciation is as follows: 

In spite of science repeatedly abandon older theories, it advances steadily in the path to an accurate depiction of the universe such as it really is.

 The fallacy of this assumption sounds obvious. It's used by science as a marketing appeal aphorism, unable to withstand an accurate survey of the facts in recent history of science. This principle is clearly promotional even in the most utilitarian sense of obtaining funds for research and construction of larger and more expensive equipment and machinery. It doesn't show to be entirely convincing any more: in 1993 the Congress of the United States killed, once and for all, the project to build the mammoth particle accelerator Superconducting Super Collider – ssc, that would have cost the soaring sum of 11 billion dollars. This can mean a full stop in the hallucinated process of constructing equipment always bigger and bigger to study particles more and more minuscule. Underlying that principle there's another assumption hardly comprehensible or acceptable in other culture than our own:

             Reality as a whole is a vast unified system that can be grasped by reason and presented by our theories.

 These rules are of metaphysical nature; they are not self-evident axioms nor are deduced or can be proved. They are not ubiquitously adopted principles, such as the universals of language are, according to Noam Chomsky's discoveries. Moreover, they are under serious contention in the laboratories experiments and had been rejected by demonstrated theorems of contemporary mathematics. The epistemological crisis triggered by the clash of paradigms has arisen and aggravated throughout last century, and the chances are that the new millennium will face a thriving brand-new science where these assumptions are boldly discarded.

Now we will see how that crisis appeared and hardened, hitting contemporary science in its very foundations.

back to top

3 – The expulsion of Paradise

In the beginning of modern science, the world was a paradise made of light and atoms. Everything in it was determinate and predictable, and Isaac Newton was its prophet.

Light, whose refraction was already studied by Newton in 17^th century, had its wave nature established by Thomas Young, in 1803, as his well-known two parallel slits experiment has shown a pattern of bright and dark bands when a passing through light beam hit a screen. Such patterns are clearly distinctive of wave propagation, as we can see in the surface of a placid pond when we throw two pebbles on it, generating interference patterns where the circle waves meet. Till the end of 19^th century it was accepted as a fact that light was a wave propagated in a very subtle medium, named luminiferous ether.

Matter, was known to be made of extremely minute different atoms, according to the different chemical elements; each element had its own kind of atom, distinct of other. It was widely acknowledged that such particles were so small and indivisible that any speculations on their inner nature were not physical questions, but rather a metaphysical topic.

In the last years of 19^th century, it was thoroughly admitted among highbrow scientists that the understanding of reality was almost entirely achieved, and soon a big picture of the universe would be accomplished setting the world free of its mysteries. Everything worth to be fathomed was already known (or nearly) and the remainder were only details or metaphysical topics, off the premises of science. French philosopher Auguste Comte, the father of positivism, wishing to exemplify a kind of subject to be always out of man's reach had the unfortunate idea of exemplifying with the stars composition. The stars were so far away, he reasoned, they could never be examined. This way thee study of the stars physical nature was a matter of metaphysical order, in the same rank of the speculations on the intimacy of atoms. However, a few years after this confident statement some astronomers were applying Fraunhöfer's findings on the absorption and emission spectral bands of star light to identify the chemical elements present in these celestial bodies. Studying the ideological context of science in the end of 19^th century we can uncover several points similar to those in the current view of many scientists.

First, the confusion on the meaning of what a "metaphysical" topic really is. After one hundred years, we see science still favors to conceal the metaphysical basis of its non-explicit assumptions, in the same way it continues to label metaphysical the problems unreachable to presently adopted concepts, putting them outside of the scientific field of study and research. At the closing of 19^th century these subjects were the chemical composition of the stars, the inner constitution of atoms, etc. In the end of twentieth-century the same happened to phenomena involving the presence of a subjective realm as an intrinsic part of the experiment. We must be very careful when a scientist says that some topic has a metaphysical nature; and also to be sure if he's really aware of the metaphysical foundations of his work. Or, moreover, if he uses the word metaphysical as a waste paper basket to throw away the problems he cannot handle with his conceptual apparatus and ideology.

The second analogy point in the two century turns is a curious feeling of several most distinguished physicists, in both periods, that a comprehensive picture of scientific knowledge was almost completed, remaining only a few details of minor importance to be filled. This state of affairs, already commented by Prof. Weisskopf in his brilliant lecture on the nature of time, brings together in the same naive viewpoint 19^th century scientists and our contemporary Stephen Hawkins – who claimed the throughout understanding of the entire universe and its operation is almost attained.

Scientific endeavor proceeded beyond 19^th century's assumed limits to knowledge, and will continue along 21^st century as well. However, by the same token science suffered a major change on its bases from 19^th to 20^th century, these days we are prone to witness the emergence of a new shape to 21^st century's physics, one hardly recognized as science to a 20^th century physicist without causing a deep discomfort, as he verifies that most subjects discarded as metaphysical will be paramount to the new investigations, under a fresh interpretation of cosmic wholeness.

We live now the unfolding of an epistemological crisis that has matured throughout twentieth-century, originated in two scientific facts of the end of 19^th century. The first was the famous experiment by Michelson and Morley, disproving the existence of a luminiferous ether that became the starting point in the way to relativity. The second, christened the ultraviolet catastrophe, revealed through calculations an entirely unexpected profile to the radiation of a black body, which in the higher frequencies appeared so exaggerated its energy had to be infinite. These results, incompatible with empirical experience, were meaningless, opening the path to the investigations that led to quantum theory. From then on several disturbing discoveries and experiments yielding paradoxical results, and also startling mathematical theorems promoted the steady demolition of the scenery established by classical physics.

back to top

4 – The crisis settles down

Rutherford has shown that atoms were not tiny pellets but an immense void modestly occupied by a lonesome nucleus one hundred times smaller, surrounded by still more minute electrons madly circling in relatively distant orbits. Latter, more sophisticated repetitions of the two slit experiment made light brake the barrier of logic, revealing its twofold and contradictory nature of a wave which is also a projectile. Science was banished from the paradise installed by Newton and consecrated by Descartes.

The atom has lost its post of elementary and indivisible constituent of matter: it was made of still minor particles – a nucleus and an electronic crown – shaped somewhat like a minute solar system, the metaphor then used. The atomic nucleus turned to be formed of protons and neutrons and could be broken yielding fantastic energies. By the middle of the century, an astonishing cast of supposedly elementary particles has begun to set foot on stage. They were engendered under special high energy conditions, such as the cosmic rays coming from the depths of the sky or inside powerful machines developed by man to violently penetrate in the intimacy of matter.

The ambiguous nature of light soon extended to all electromagnetic radiation, from long radio waves to the shortest gamma rays, which differ only in the amount of energy conveyed. And more: to deepen the vexation, it was verified that other particles known as elementary, as the electron, the nucleons and all varieties produced in experiments – more than two hundred, then – were also waves, or vibrations, depending on the kind of experiment accomplished. It's important to keep in mind that both electromagnetic radiation and elementary particles have shown to be simultaneously waves and particles. They didn't behave as waves or particles in different situations, rather they incarnate that double personality simultaneously. Only the nature of the experiment carried on would allow the researcher to be aware of one of those faces, but never both at once.

Additional difficulties appeared when scientists tried to know exactly a particle's position and velocity. It was confirmed these two data couldn't be obtained at once: or the position or the speed could be measured separately, but never both at same time. Moreover, the higher the precision of one of those measures, the lesser the other can be known. This hindrance, however, isn't due to the accuracy of the equipment or methods used. Heisenberg has proved this impossibility is an intrinsic property of nature itself in these submicroscopic realms, where all the knowledge we can gather is of statistic and probabilistic nature; it's impossible to learn exactly what happens to a sole particle, even using the most precise instruments. And this was just the beginning of a series of ghostly features that the quantum world has been exhibiting to the astonished researchers.

Perhaps the most incredible is the astounding success of quantum theory in every field where applied, although it's known to rest on paradoxes that challenge logic and bewilder scientists. It's really surprising: technologists and researchers have never found a case to reveal quantum theory is flawed or imprecise. On the contrary, at same time we witness quantum realms vanishing into a bundle of logic paradoxes and cognitive impossibilities, quantum technology lavishly yields wonders like computers, liquid-crystal video screens and holography, brought into being by skilled wizards of electronics and photonics. Technology is still far from exhausted, and the near future will deliver surprises prone to amaze our most daring expectations. It's rather impossible to foresee what's coming ahead.

However, side by side of these joys stood the shadow of a disturbing certainty that's already changing the directions of our philosophical inquiries. It's the proved certitude that solid barriers exist in the path to a rational approach on the intimate organization of matter, energy and the universe. We're wrapped up with an ever increasing variety of communication resources, almost uniting our planet into an integrated interactive information network, unthinkable just a few years ago. Notwithstanding we also must accept our utter cognitive limitations to reach the deepest realms of the universe, in its real, material slope.

The restraint installed by Heisenberg's principle of indetermination is peremptory: it's impossible to know both velocity and position of a particle simultaneously. By the same token our logic mind cannot conceive a vibration which is also a bullet, although every electromagnetic radiation and particle which constitute the stuff of the universe show this is the way they are. After Heisenberg many science warlocks entered the stage, putting their curses on the dreams of absolute knowledge of reality, usually defined as "everything that exists" in the physical universe. Let's hear what they have said.

back to top

5 – The quantum sabbath

The year 1927 was particularly prolific as to insights that induced the turnover of our expectancy of a deeper knowledge on the constituents of matter and reality. In that very year, Heisenberg formulated his principle of uncertainty and Niels Bohr – widely recognized as the grand master of the quanta vision of the world – has pushed ahead that new conception, advancing his principle of complementarity. The new principle acknowledged the dual nature wave/particle in every micro-entity, installing a phlegmatic schizophrenia about the interpretations of quantum phenomena or, in other words, abolishing any ambitions on understanding them. "It's a mistake to suppose the objective of physics is to determine what nature is. Physics only tries to establish what we can say about nature." So, said the master.

Schrödinger and Max Born have shown in 1926 that an elementary particle can never be anywhere until it's measured, or became the object of an observation, an experiment. The most we can say on that particle is that possibly, or probably, it could be here or there. Schrödinger propounded his famous wave function which established that probability, and Bohr has shown it's not a wave of anything we could call matter or energy; rather it's an abstract wave of a mere mathematical possibility that such particle appears in this or that place. The ghostliest property of that abstract wave is that, in spite of its nonmaterial character – we should say imaginary, nonphysical – it's submitted to the same phenomenon of interference that characterize real waves, already studied by physics. Now, we ask: how can mathematical abstractions interfere? What interferes with what? Schrödinger's equation doesn't determine where a particle is, only where it can be, and the probabilities of that occurrence in each point. Only when a measure is taken – or an observation –the so called wave function collapses and the particle "chooses" one point and materialize up there. If the experimental procedure continues and many waves are collapsed, we will see particles arranging themselves according to the calculated probabilities, even if it's impossible to know where each one separately will materialize. In this quantum world logic works differently, and determinism is replaced by random occurrences.

By the end of the twenties the random and probabilistic principles of quantum mechanics were established. Regular logic turned to be subverted, making us live together with uncertainty and paradox. In the beginning, uncertainty and paradox seemed to be confined to the submicroscopic realm, leaving our macroworld quietly ruled by the ordinary principles of logic and causality. Schrödinger himself undertook the grim task of liberating us from that illusion with the help of his famous cat. Surely, being a self-respecting sorcerer, Schrödinger also had a cat. Just an imaginary cat, as a matter of fact.

The proposed experiment is only mental. Imagine a cat in a sealed box where a radioactive source can release a hammer that will break a bottle containing a venomous gas, if in the term of an hour it emits a particle. If this occurs, the cat will die; otherwise he will be alive after that period. That arrangement settles something of the macroworld – the survival of the cat – as dependent of something that happens in the quantum microworld. If the radioactive source is calibrated to a fifty per cent chance of releasing that deadly particle in the period of one hour, the poor cat has fifty per cent possibilities of survival when the box is open. Quantum theory doesn't allow to forecast if the particle will or not be released, it only informs the chances of that event to occur are fifty per cent. In conformity to master Bohr's sentence, until the end of the crucial sixty minutes, we cannot speak of a dead or alive cat, since it wasn't object of an observation, requisite to the particle opt for one of two states: released or not. Only such an option would make the hammer to fall or not, killing or not the unfortunate cat. Before the opening of the box, thus proceeding an observation, the cat should not be alive or dead, according to Niels Bohr's interpretation – also known as the Copenhagen interpretation. Before the opening of the box the state of the cat should be described through a probabilistic wave-equation, unfit to determine if he is dead or alive. Nonetheless, apart of our awareness on his state, how would be the cat objectively? Answer: the cat should be in a state simultaneously alive and dead, since there wasn't the wave-function collapse and he could be in any of these two conditions at the moment the box was open.

Our reason insists the cat's fate should be decided before the box was opened, that would be a verification of a previously occurred fact. "It's not this way!" declares emphatically master Niels Bohr. The experiments, the mathematical calculations and all theoretical formulations of quantum physics assure a wave-function cannot collapse alone, without an observer's participation. Thus a particle is not able to decide if it will or will not be liberated, so the cat cannot turn into a definite state of being, be it dead or alive.

But ultimately what is the existential status of the cat, in that distressing period of one hour? Heisenberg replies with an old concept introduced by Aristotle: the cat remains in a potentially dead and potentially alive condition, unable to turn into a definitive status. Poor Schrödinger's cat! Involved with a warlock he cannot even to know whether he is alive or dead!

What happened to that cat submitted to such a cruel experiment – fortunately only imaginary – usually occurs not only with electrons, photons and every particle of the quantum realm, but also with large portions of our macroscopic reality, granted we are not observing. New experiments, not only imagined as that one with the cat but actually proceeded, have shown in a conclusive form that quantum schizophrenia extends to the world we live in, lurking in disguised nooks of daily life – provided no one is observing!

The unbelievable feature shown by electrons to cross simultaneously two side by side slits is a broadly acknowledged fact among researchers, as well as the crazy property of light to fit out its wave or particle mask, according to the experiment done. In the optical interferometry laboratories, where extremely precise switchers capable of commuting a light beam opening or closing its passage 300 million times per second, it's been verified that light can change its mask still faster, even changing the mask it had shown a nanosecond before, just to fit another experiment that would only work with the other.

Many scientists, bound up in the logic they learned and in prevalent perceptions of objective reality have performed laborious mental and experimental juggling to keep appearances up and make certain that quantum realm lunacy would not extend to everyday world. In vain. Each new experiment, each new mathematical theorem confirms the certitude that reality is a concept we must entirely review, as much as locality of a physical event, what in fact is an observer – which I prefer to name a subjectivity – and also its interaction process within the so-called objective world.

In this quantum sabbat mathematician warlocks are the most dangerous. They usually demonstrate their curses, making them invulnerable to exorcism. German born Kurt Gödel has demonstrated in 1931 his theorem of incompleteness – which in its innocent enunciation states that we cannot build an arithmetic based on a system of axioms both complete and consistent. In the same way of Heisenberg's curse, we need to choose: or that arithmetic is complete or consistent (non contradictory); never both at once. This statement simply implies that our rational knowledge of the world has an upper limit: it will never be complete and devoid of contradictions. Isn't that distressing?

Von Neumann, the mega-sorcerer who created the modern computer, published a portentous treaty named Die Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik in 1932, soon to be worshipped as "the Bible of quantum physics". In that book Von Neumann simply proves that if quantum physics is correct, then the world cannot be made of common, real, objective things. He even said that "physical objects do not have any attributes if a conscious observer is not looking at". This is known as "Von Neumann's proof". Shouldn't it be more properly called "Von Neumann's curse"?

More recently, another perilous mathematician warlock candidly named John Bell has utterly demonstrated that "no local model of reality can correspond to quantum facts". In other words reality, if it expects to exist, must be non-local: its events and phenomena undergo influences from everything in the universe, even from the most remote galaxy*; and that influence is instantaneous, unfettered by the laws of relativity. That achievement has guaranteed him more powerful than Albert Einstein who, displaying that handsome granddad bearing could never become a genuine wizard.

In the 1930's he joined Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen to suggest a mind experiment – he was very fond of mind experiments – which would show quantum theory was flawed or incomplete by way of preposterous outcome. As time went by, thanks to the accomplishments of more powerful sorcerers, the absurd revealed true and the proposed witchcraft has proved the opposite. Sometimes I wonder if this happened to Einstein by reason of his rejection of quantum theory, being one of her founding fathers (he even proposed the term quantum). Till the end of his life, he never pardoned her anarchist ideas and naughty behavior. This could well be a lesson to parents who refuse to understand the new generations.

back to top

 6 – The vanishing reality

Well now, what happened to old objective reality, the stronghold we all used to trust? It's dramatic! Many ingenious scientists continue to investigate its disappearance. Most of them think the quantum mysteries have only one explanation – theirs – and refuse even to discuss deviant opinions. The problem is the many parties existing in this quantum politics; all of them think to be right and there's no agreement on most points. Even the most impartial critics, such as my good friend Nick Herbert, consider as incompatible some views I don't see as contradictory.

In his 1985 book Quantum Reality, Nick lists eight parties in the quantum politics scene. He regards them as mutually discordant, and assigns the responsibility to decide on the correct interpretation to us. Let's see a brief description of each party's approach, who are their leaders and most distinguished members.