New Physics + New Psychology = New Questions

Despite the distractions I legitimately had, I have also been procrastinating on writing this one up. I had originally intended to write a follow up to "Bad Apples," which would have been easy, addressing questions of how to manage internal and interpersonal conflicts. Instead, I am going to share an anecdote in the life of a new career academic psychologist (me) that I hope will be interesting and some day lead to some more formalized work on my part. In other words, this post will not include polished, useful information for any readers. Sorry about that. In fact, it will be unpolished and incomplete - living up to the spirit of a web "log" I hope.

The story begins at Chapman University, where I am an assistant professor, at the start of this new semester. Chapman has made some big hires lately in order to step up in quality from the top 10 of smaller western region universities into the elite schools at the national level. The latest of their grand acquisitions was picking up an entire physics department and more from George Mason University. The move is not unlike a basketball team purchasing marquee players through free agency. Because chaos and related theories are used across each of the sciences, and because I am a big fan of popular physics books, I assigned myself the summer reading of a book by one of these new professors, most likely our new Dean of the newly forged College of Science at Chapman (parenthetically we had a cantankerous 30+ minute discussion on whether "science" should have an "s" on it or not at our first faculty meeting of the year - 20% frustrating, 30% sad, and 50% hilarious IMO).

The book is called: "The non-local universe: The new physics and matters of the mind" by Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos (Kafatos is the new professor). The book is small, but is a tough read - very dense and very smartly written. It combines philosophy of science with the latest experimental physics results on the wave-particle duality of matter and as the title suggests, non-local interactions found in physics experiments. Here is where I may butcher the physics, and wander into "new age" thinking. So since this is a public forum - (a) scientists please forgive me for technical errors; and (b) New-ager's please do not try to recruit me. I am an open minded scientific psychologist who read an interesting book, nothing more or less than that.

These caveats in mind, "Non-locality" refers to a number of well replicated studies in mainstream physics that have demonstrated that particles that were once united continue to remain united, even when separated by great distances - many miles apart. Imagine splitting a particle and sending the two halves off miles and miles apart. In principle, these studies demonstrate that these connections would occur even if the distances were infinite. If you do some act of measurement on one part of the particle, the other part will show an effect from this measurement. And the effect will occur instantaneously. There can be no signaling, no information sent from one particle to the other, not without going faster than the speed of light, at infinite speed in fact. It is like the distance between the two parts is not really there.

In many dense pages, they connect these results to other similar lines of evidence from mathematics and physics. Most of the examples came from nonlinear dynamics theories (chaos, complexity, self-organization, and so on covered in my prior blogs). You see, the new systems theories carry heavy philosophical implications, and they knock classical science (reductionism, Newton's clocklike universe, and so on) on its butt. This is why I keep saying with so much certainty that the psychology of the bell curve (independent events) and linear relationships (strait line one directional cause and effect) is so uninteresting and insignificant.

Anyway, they got into the "wave-particle dualities" from Schrodinger and Heisenberg, in which the act of observing a wave turns it into a particle, and in which it is impossible to ever know the position AND the momentum of a particle at the same time. They also got into a bit of "fuzzy set theory," in which one may prove mathematically that A may be equal to B and also not equal to B at the same time, violating the foundation of classical mathematics dating back to Aristotle. Overall, their focus was on the longstanding debate between Einstein and Bohr. Einstein famously argued that ‘God does not play dice' with the universe, while Bohr argued that accumulating experimental results in quantum physics were correct, indicating that there are hard and fast limitations to the ability to ever understand the entire universe objectively.

I remained slightly on Einstein's side while reading the book, to be honest, even though he was wrong it seems. And I became interested in what I thought was a possible solution to wave-particle duality. Essentially, very small bits of matter (particles, strings, whatever) are best described mathematically as waves. But when they are observed, they appear as a particle. My proposed solution was that time depends not only on velocity (i.e., Einstein's "theory of relativity"), but also on size, or scale. So very fast moving matter relatively would slow time down, and very big things relatively would have slower time. The solution here would be that on the quantum level of the very small, matter would exist as a wave, a particle moving very quickly across some attractor space. But at our big human elephant size scale, quantum time would appear to freeze when we try to observe this wave, leaving us only ever to detect experimentally a frozen, static particle. The metaphor is a movie, which looks like it is moving only when moving quickly. If you grab a film reel and it stops, you see that it is just a single frame. Waves are animated particles.

So when I saw that our new physics department chair, Jeff Tollaksen, was talking about this stuff in a lunch presentation last week at our start of the year faculty conference I was excited to grab him afterward and ask if I had solved the Einstein Bohr debate or not, and figuring I had not (I'm not quite that cocky actually), why not? I got even more excited when Jeff started presenting on non-locality occurring not just over great spans of space, but also across different periods of TIME. He was suggesting that you could change the outcome of some physical measurement at the quantum scale at a time in the past, based upon how you did some measurement at a later point in time. Paraphrasing him: ‘It appears that on the quantum scale, not only does the present affect the future, but the future has an effect on the past.'

Please keep in mind at this point that these are hard-core mainstream physicists. This is not at all from the fringe. And their results are based on repeated experiments, even technology already in use that uses such time warps. All of this seemed to fit well with my thinking: that size "scales" with time. Essentially, our act of observation at this very slow scale we live in has already happened long ago at the speedy quantum level. If anyone ever watched the Speedy Gonzalez cartoons as a kid, it's like when speedy gets El Gato (the cat) to hit himself in the face by repositioning things while the slower El Gato is preparing to pounce. Andale!

So I grabbed Jeff by the stack of pizza's we had for lunch (good choice Chapman - yum!) and asked him if I had solved wave particle duality or not. He paused a pretty long time, and tried to find the words to answer telling me it was an interesting question. I don't think he was just stymied by my lack of knowledge, or that he was just trying to be nice. That said, I don't think I have solved the issue. His basic answer, what I could follow, was "yes," this was possible, but that the ultimate truths would be much more far-out than just that.

He said we needed to keep learning about the bounds of time. He then described in greater detail some of the funky time results they were observing in their lab. For example, they have found ways to embed particles in two or more discrete point in time. I think this means the particle does not exist continuously, but sort of magically appears only when you observe it at two or more exact points in time. He said the freakiest version of this is the ‘eternity particle' (either that or the ‘destiny particle' I can't find much on either in google, and I can't remember which he called it). This is a particle that exists only if you include observation at all time points stretching out to infinity. Nice right? But not as goofy as it sounds. Not only is the math fitting and the experiments supporting these time warp ideas. The government, according to Jeff, is paying big bucks to use these phenomena for national security purposes. For example, encoding a message in a combination of up to an infinite number of time points is a great way to hide an important secret.

Besides the implications such as these, and others like time travel, parallel universes, and so on, this brief encounter stimulated many more questions for me, which stretch the bounds of current psychology. I am also immediately hopeful that psychology, in cooperation with the other sciences (sorry Chapman Science faculty - I used the "s" there). Here is a rather lengthy quote from Nadeau and Kafatos (1999) that captures my enthusiasm for the future of the new systems psychology (i.e., chaos, complexity, and self-organization) that lies within this topic:

"If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to higher levels of complexity and if the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system, we can assume that the cosmos is a single significant whole that evinces progressive order in complementary relation to its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts (quanta), one can then argue that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the ground for all emergent complexity. Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain (like all physical phenomena) can be viewed as an emergent property of the whole, it is not unreasonable to conclude, in philosophical terms at least, that the universe is conscious.
But since the actual character of this seamless whole cannot be represented or reduced to its parts, it lies, quite literally, beyond all human representations or descriptions. If one chooses to believe that the universe is a self-reflective and self-organizing whole, this lends no support whatsoever to conceptions of design, meaning, purpose....On the other hand, it is no longer possible to argue that a profound sense of unity with the whole, which has long been understood as the foundation of religious experience, can be dismissed, undermined, or invalidated with appeals to scientific knowledge.
....It now seems clear that this radical separation between mind and world was a macro-level illusion fostered by limited awareness of the actual character of physical reality and by mathematical idealizations that were extended beyond the realm of their applicability."

In a nutshell, they are describing the framework that those of us in chaos and complexity psychology have also been using. Each branch of science (no "s") emerges from the branch at the smaller scales below. Chemistry emerges from physics, biology emerges from chemistry, psychology emerges from biology, sociology emerges from psychology, and so on, with various emergent branches within and across each of the different disciplines. At SCTPLS, we have the tradition of passing nested Russian dolls on to each new society president as a symbol of this outlook. Parts interact to create new irreducible wholes, which serve as parts for new irreducible wholes and so on. Apparently, this occurs not only across scales from small to large - parts of an inseparable whole, but also across great distances of apparent space - where the here is connected to there; and finally across time, where one finds that future and past are also inseparable.
Perhaps toward the middle or end of my career, and on after that, the lines will continue to be blurred in science. Then psychological science may examine bigger questions than most of our usual self-help topics. We can begin to consider quantum consciousness, conscious processes at the various scales, larger and smaller, than our brains. We could examine whether and how influences at one scale influence other scales (i.e., can the quantum change consciousness and vice versa).

We can examine here-to-fore religious concepts like reincarnation, pre-lives, and afterlives. I'm not saying whether such things exist or not, only that they would be fun to study. I've mused for a long time that if perception of time slowed down increasingly as a function of proximity to biological brain death, then one would never perceive his or her own demise: A biologically-based afterlife. Once we understand the neural substrates of time perception, these systems could be observed in dying individuals, looking for just such a lawful mathematical relation.

Or perhaps the sync that occurs near brain death goes much smaller, past the biology of the brain, all the way down the quantum scale, where some important subset of our physical particles disappear into eternity, existing only at infinite points in time? Perhaps we are not just reincarnated into the future, but could be "re-born" as some living creature living thousands of years in the past. Maybe I'm my own great-great-great grandmother? Who knows? I'd like to find out if it's possible or not.

And what about the stretching the bounds of human consciousness? The little bit we know over the past 100 years of research into the imagination only serves to support what shaman's have known for more than 20,000 years: (a) the imagination is infinite, (b) the imagination is transpersonal and creative, and (c) the imagination has the potential to influence physical healing? How the heck does this work? Yes, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is involved in a proximal and central way, but come on! Perhaps there is a bit more to it?
It is an exciting time I think for science, and within science, psychology (both singular). Who knows what the future, or futures, or pasts, will bring.

Please let us know what you think?

Sincerely,

-Dr. Dave