Why Einstein Was Wrong About the Moon

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Reality contains many mysteries, some so impenetrable that even the greatest minds are baffled. Albert Einstein was among them. Even though quantum physics had achieved a huge success, Einstein had doubts about its description of reality. These doubts were crystallized in an anecdote. As related the acclaimed modern physicist Lee Smolin, “He once walked back from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton with the late Abraham Pais. The moon was out and Einstein asked Pais, ‘Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?’”

Einstein was defending two of the most basic principles in everyday life, first, that physical objects exist “out there” as real things, second, that they exist independent of an observer. It would seem impossible that these two propositions aren’t true. Of course, we say, the moon exists as a real thing, and it was around for billions of years before the first human gazed at it. But this view, technically known as naive realism, is fatally flawed.

Imagine that you have a red light bulb hanging in a room of your house, and every time you walk into the room, the bulb is on. Does that mean that it is on all the time? The possibility exists that it only turns on when you walk into the room. This sounds far-fetched, but in fact you cannot prove that the red light ever turns off. It would have to turn off when you aren’t looking, and yet the only way to check on it is to walk into the room and look.

Quantum physics has many theoretical arguments that have raged for over a century, but among its greatest pioneers, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg stated that nothing in Nature, not just a red light but all the basic “stuff” in creation, such as electrons and photons, cannot be proven to exist unless someone looks at them. This is only one of the strange behaviors exhibited in the quantum world, but it is probably the most crucial for figuring out the mystery of reality.

Bohr and Heisenberg were pioneering an idea that came to be known as the participatory universe, which holds that human beings, far from being insignificant compared to the vast operation of cosmic laws, are key players. As Heisenberg put it, electrons and other particles are not real but exist only as ideas or concepts. They become real when someone asks questions about Nature, and depending on which question you ask, Nature obligingly supplies an answer.

What exists outside our questions? That is the core mystery. The quantum revolution did away with the common-sense view that physical objects “out there” can be taken for granted. Einstein knew this, of course. Having discovered relativity, he understood that time and space are not actually the time and space of everyday perception. He wanted the moon to be real for a deeper reason: the unity of Nature. He was fairly young when he made headlines around the world with E=mc2, and for the remaining decades of his career he strived to come up with a method, mathematically speaking, that would unify quantum mechanics and relativity.

In that project he failed, and no one has succeeded to this day. Why should this matter to the average person? Because right now quantum reality behaves in its strange way and the everyday world behaves in a mostly common-sense way. The two are in flat contradiction, as evidenced very close to home in the human brain.

The brain, like all physical objects, can be broken down, layer by layer, until you reach the level of the quantum. At that point, it basically vanishes. Seemingly solid matter diffuses into clouds of energy, these clouds spread out as ripples in the quantum field, and the ripples cannot be conceived except as mathematical configurations in hyperspace. It doesn’t matter whether you start at the top or the bottom of the heap. You can’t make mathematical configurations learn to think, and you can’t keep the brain intact as a solid physical object.

To bring the issue even closer to home, your brain is like the red light bulb in the room. You can’t prove that it exists without you to observe it. If Heisenberg was right and electrons are merely ideas that Nature turns into particles when human being dream up questions about electrons, then the brain is also an idea. It happens to be a huge, complex idea. The brain is Natures’ answer when someone asks, “what does the mind look like?”

Once you ask this question, the whole field of neuroscience pops into existence. Nature has tons of tiny answers about neurons, synapses, serotonin, and so on to fill out the one big answer. But the brain doesn’t become real just because it provides lots of facts. These facts are linked to the basic rule that nothing can be real without an observer. To put it simply, every experience needs three things: an observer, the thing observed, and the process of observation. Einstein wanted to reduce the three parts to one: the thing observed (in this case, the moon).

His contention doesn’t hold up, however, because as with the red light bulb, the whole universe can’t be separated from an observer and the act of observation. You have to back up quite a few steps to reach this conclusion, too many steps for the average person, including the vast majority of scientists. But physics is still haunted by Einstein’s question: Is anything “out there” real by itself?

Physics is in a funk today because it can’t make this question go away. Two or three decades ago, physical “stuff” was real, and this whole business about the observer could be ignored, at least for workaday purposes like building high-speed particle accelerators. But the ground has shifted. “Stuff” has become “our current model of matter and energy,” and no one can agree on what this model should be.

A sizable quotient of very smart physicists believes that consciousness is an innate part of creation. This idea comes from thinkers who were backed into a corner. They couldn’t, no matter how hard they tried, show how mind came about—all physical explanations failed and continue to fail. Secondly, they couldn’t take out the pesky need to include the observer and process of observation—the universe has to be participatory.

Revolutions often occur when old thought and received opinions are backed into a corner. That is happening right now, and in the next post we’ll discuss why Einstein being wrong about the moon actually changes everything.
(to be cont.)

 


DEEPAK CHOPRA MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. He is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. Chopra is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book and national bestseller, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential (Harmony Books), unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”

2020 Wellbeing Predictions with Deepak Chopra

“The future of wellbeing is bioregulation and homeostasis through self-regulation.”‘ – Deepak Chopra

Deepak recently participated in Virgin Pulse’s 2020 Vision: Wellbeing Industry Predictions where leading experts in health and wellbeing, HR and business share insights on emerging trends that will impact your employee experience in 2020 and beyond. You can explore the predictions in detail and get related resources to turn your vision into action, or download a complete eBook of the 2020 predictions at Virgin Pulse Website.

Deepaks predictions along with additional wellness resources for the new year can be found here.

 

There Is No chaos, There Is Only Creativity

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The human mind is addicted to opposites, but it turns out that Nature isn’t. This statement becomes important in a deep way when it comes to chaos. In our minds chaos, or disorder, is the opposite of order. By thinking like this, we oblige the human tendency to prefer order over disorder. Leading an orderly life supports every kind of organized activity from making a meal out of raw ingredients assembled in an orderly way to making an iPhone or any other technological tool in an orderly way.

Chaos is the messiness that disrupts order and can cause it to fall apart. In Victorian times mental illness was often referred to as a disordered mind, and it is the mind that we rely upon to keep life organized and rational. But what if this whole discussion is simply wrong? As long as we believe in chaos, it serves as a potent threat. Cancer causes chaos in the regulation of the body; earthquakes shake up cities; riots in the street threaten civil society.

The threat of chaos changes when we shift our perspective. Expand your viewpoint, and chaos is the mask worn by creativity. To die of cancer returns your orderly body to a disorderly state known as decay, but the material of your body continues to contribute to the life of fungi, bacteria, and other micro-organisms. Good for them, you might grumble, but without them, human DNA could not have evolved. Earthquakes topple buildings, but without seismic shifts, the present-day continents wouldn’t exist, or the life forms that inhabit Asia instead of Africa or North America instead of Europe.

Creation cannot exist without destruction. This much is clear even in our thoughts. Your last thought has to vanish in order for a new thought to arise. The same is true of chemical reactions and electromagnetic charges that makes the brain operate. No process in Nature can exist eternally, and many of the most crucial, from the viewpoint of being on planet Earth as a living creature, last only a few thousandths of a second at the level of the quantum.

Science has favored an imbalance by favoring destruction over creation. For a long time the model of Nature physics operates under gives precedence of randomness, chaos, accident, and entropy, as if we are back in the 18th century when the cosmos was seen as a windup mechanism like a clock perpetually running down. The cosmic mechanism was set up with everything it needed at the Big Bang, and it has been decaying ever since, with exceptions.

The exceptions are big ones—all the orderly forms in Nature from atoms and molecules to stars, galaxies, and planets. It has never been clear why this imbalance favoring destruction looks upon creation as the exception when just as easily we could see creation as the rule and the dominant force in Nature.

It actually makes sense to see Nature as absolutely creative, with destruction simply being a construct of the human mind. It is impossible to think of any destructive process that isn’t actually a step toward a new creative outcome. Since this is undeniable, from the quantum to the cosmic level, it is better to drop the opposition of chaos and order. From a creative standpoint, disorder mixes things up to open the way for something new to happen.

This new perspective isn’t just a mental game. As long as human beings are just physical entities sitting on a speck of a planet lost among trillions of stars, destruction has the upper hand and randomness rules. But if we are part of eternal creation instead, then our participation changes, and the change is radical. If we live in a participatory universe where our thoughts, desires, and intentions matter, human beings turn into powerful creative agents.

That can only happen when we give consciousness priority over the physical. At bottom, science views chaos as a dominant feature because of physicality—tiny bits of matter can be viewed bouncing around mindlessly everywhere. Yet the bouncing around of tiny bits of matter in our brains doesn’t dominate at all. Those tiny bits are serving the mind and its infinite creative potential. Outside the brain, any given cell in the body is a riot of tiny bits bouncing around, yet our bodies operate with exquisite intelligence, precision, and knowledge. The wisdom of the body sounds like a faddish phrase, but that wisdom is real, and without it we wouldn’t exist.
Physics is currently in a funk due to the unraveling of almost every accepted model based on pure physicality. Look at the rash of current articles in any branch of physics, and you find headlines about quarks (the tiniest building blocks in nature) not really existing, causation going backwards in time, photons being teleported from one location to another, dark matter and energy subverting the whole scheme of atoms and molecules, and much, much more in the way of anomalies piling up to disprove previous assumptions that only a few decades ago seemed all but iron-clad.

The reality is that Nature is totally creative. There are no anomalies contradicting set laws of nature. The laws are provisional at best, constantly open to change. Nor is this change destructive. A new process is always bubbling up to create new forms. A higher order of creation is always possible, which is why physics now credits the existence of trillions of universes, each employing its own laws and its own version of space, time, mater, and energy.

We live in a state of fermenting creativity, and nothing else matters. In the flux of creative dynamism, the only force that oversees everything is consciousness. I don’t have the space to detail why this is true (interested readers can consult my book, Metahuman, for the full picture). But at the very least, once you see that you are embedded in infinite creative possibilities, the current gloom about the future of humankind and the planet we inhabit can be dispelled. The way out of every difficulty is always creative, and no one is better placed to put that principle into action than you, me, and everyone.

 


DEEPAK CHOPRA MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. He is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. Chopra is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book and national bestseller, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential (Harmony Books), unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”

Why Matter Is a (Useful) Fiction

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Given a choice between physics and metaphysics, almost everyone chooses physics. This is a modern habit that is deeply ingrained, and it turns the tables on the religious approach to reality, which put a divine or supernatural entity, first and foremost in creation. But relying on the physical world as the foundation of reality has run into serious problems. Unable or unwilling to return to metaphysics, people are stuck without a viable model of reality.

This becomes apparent if you go to the nub of the physical model, which is matter. For centuries, ever since the ancient Greek concept of the atom, there has been a constant search for the smallest building block in Nature, on the supposition that the world is like a sandcastle on the beach. If you reduce the sandcastle to grains of sand, you know where it comes from. Putting things on a firm foundation is one of humanity’s driving force, and in the physical world, this drive leads to atoms and beyond.

The problem is the “beyond” part, because around a century ago quantum physics discovered that there is nothing like a minuscule grain of sand from which everything is built. Atoms can be envisioned on a chart in physics class as a tiny nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons. This is a reassuring picture since it makes the atom seem like a miniature solar system. However, this model isn’t the same as reality.

The subatomic particles, also known as fundamental particles or quanta, that make up an atom are not bits of solid matter. They are a mysterious “something else” that quantum physics still ponders. Nothing can be truly settled about quanta because their behavior defies human logic. To begin with, a quantum has a dual personality, sometimes behaving like an invisible wave that extends in all directions, sometimes like a particle with a definite location. Quanta constantly bubble up as “quantum foam” out of a state that has neither matter nor energy in it but is “virtual,” meaning that it has the potential for turning into matter and energy, not to mention time and space.

The best visualization one encounters for how matter exists is a rippling field of activity, with particles being the intersection between two or more waves. This visualization is just a stab at giving substance to a mystery that physics expresses through mathematical formulas. Everything in modern physics occurs in a mathematical space that doesn’t necessarily match the real world.

What this means is that matter, if understood as grains of sand building up bigger and bigger structures, is a useful fiction. The usefulness comes about because each model one can devise leads to a practical technology. The model in physics class of the atom as miniature solar system allows for two powerful technologies, chemistry and atomic energy. Chemistry is entirely built upon the whirling electrons orbiting around the nucleus. Atomic energy is built on splitting the nucleus to release its energy or fusing two nuclei for the same purpose.

In a world based on ever-progressing technology, these outcomes are good enough, and there are new horizons in quantum technology to look forward to. But the building block theory of reality, however useful, leaves out the very thing that builds models and invents technology: the mind. Grains of sand might build a sandcastle, but they don’t spontaneously invent the idea of a sandcastle. The best they can do is to build sand dunes, which are shapeless humps, not complex structures. Without explaining the mind, you cannot explain creativity, curiosity, invention, emotion, aspirations, fears, wishes, dreams, and every other aspect of mind.

The only way forward begins by realizing that matter isn’t what it seems to be. There was always an illusory side to the whole acceptance of the physical world as the foundation of reality. You can take any quality of matter and reproduce it to a subjective experience. Matter is hard, visible, and heavy. Yet if you push the same pole o two poles of a powerful magnet together, they repel each other so forcefully that you can never get them to touch. The space between them is as hard as iron.

A mirage of water in the desert is visible but is made of invisible shimmering air. The pictures you see in your mind’s eye arise in the total blackness of the brain’s interior and from a physical viewpoint are actually invisible. As for heaviness, when you are very tired your body feels heavier, even though the physical model tells you that you didn’t actually gain weight.

What these examples show is that objective and subjective reality don’t form two separate domains but an entangled whole that is very hard to explain. This wholeness is known as reality. What is it made of? Two viable answers are possible. The first says that reality is made from the viewpoint of the observer. One of the greatest quantum pioneers, Werner Heisenberg, held that atoms and subatomic particles do not exist as material things but as response by Nature to whatever the experimenter is asking. Change your questions, and Nature obliges with an answer that fits your point of view. We can call this answer perspectivism.

The second answer agrees with perspectivism but is bigger. It says that reality is more than the sum of all possible perspectives. Even if you give every living thing from a virus and bacterium to a whale and a human being, their own viewpoint, there can be no perspectives without consciousness. So reality comes down to consciousness, which is the very opposite of a building block. Instead of being tiny and separate like a grain of sand, consciousness is a field extending infinitely everywhere.

Modern physics likes the model of a field, which is why from a physics viewpoint reality consists of ripples in the quantum field, the gravity field, and a few other basic fields. The advantage of a field is that it allows you to conceive of Nature as a whole. But we don’t conceive consciousness. It is too real for that. Consciousness is where conceptions come from. It is the “stuff” of ideas, emotions, invention, curiosity, and all the other things created in the mind. You might struggle with the fact that time, space, matter, and energy are also created in consciousness, but there is actually no other way to explain wholeness.

You can’t have on foundation for the physical world and another foundation for the mental world. Science has long recognized this, which is why so much weight was put on the atom. It was hoped that somehow tiny grains of sand would explain the mind if only they got tiny enough. Many working scientists still assume that this hope will come true one day, but it won’t, for the simple reason that matter is just as conceptual as Alice in Wonderland. Alice knew she was in an imaginary world and devoted herself to getting back to the real world. We are in the real world, being conscious, while applying our efforts to stick inside an imaginary one. This has to change if we want to become totally real again, in other words totally conscious.

 


DEEPAK CHOPRA MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. He is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. Chopra is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book and national bestseller, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential (Harmony Books), unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”

The Most Popular Model of Reality Is Wrong

By Deepak Chopra, MD

It would be ideal if reality and our model of reality merged into the same thing. A model of reality explains how the universe was created and how it operates. You might think that this is a definition of reality itself, but it isn’t, which can be illustrated by looking at the most popular model, known as naïve realism.

In a nutshell, naïve realism says that what you see is what you get. In other words, the reality presented by the five senses is reliable. Such a view appeals to common sense. It rests on experiences we take for granted. There is a physical world “out there” separate from our subjective experience “in here.” The physical world predates human beings by 13.8 billion years, going back to the Big Bang. If both of those things are true, then obviously what we think, feel, and desire “in here” has no effect on reality “out there.”

As unimaginably sophisticated as modern science has become, most scientists accept naïve realism, usually without question, even though each of the common-sense facts just mentioned is known to be false.

  • The division of reality into mind and matter has never worked, because it fails to tell us where mind came from or how it relates to the brain.
  • The passage of time, whether in milliseconds or the eons since the Big Bang, has no fixed validity. The quantum field, considered the finest level of Nature by physicists, doesn’t exhibit linear clock time, and the source of the quantum field is timeless.
  • A longstanding problem in physics, known as the measurement problem, indicates that an observer is needed in order to produce the basic outcomes that create particles. In other words, physical reality has a psychological component that is inseparable from it—we live in a participatory universe.

Leave aside the obvious ways we cannot trust our five senses, which tell us mistakenly that the sun rises in the East, that a thunderclap happens after a flash of lightning, and that there could be no such things as small as bacteria and viruses, since they are invisible to our eyesight. Naïve realism is wrong at a much deeper level, which has been grappled with by the most eminent physicists. It is wrong about mind; it cannot connect mind and brain; it has nothing to tell us about the origins of space, time, matter, and energy’ it is contradicted by the strange behavior of the quantum field; and it has no chance of linking the microscopic world with the macroscopic world—in other words, the so-called building blocks of reality live in a separate, totally closed-off domain from everyday reality.

These multiple failures are widely known among physicists but just as widely ignored. A great deal of science and most of technology can advance without a theoretical model of reality. Before he died Stephen Hawking published a book, The Grand Design, in which he conceded the high probability that scientific models will not succeed in matching the reality they are supposed to describe.

If science rolls along without a viable model of reality, that lack isn’t incidental. We celebrate Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein for getting something right, not simply for issuing metaphysical suppositions. So it is important to get things right now. If the present model of reality is, in fact, an abstruse collection of mathematical formulas suspended in a theoretical mathematical space, clearly something is amiss. In medieval times the world had to conform to divine law; now it must conform to mathematical law, yet the fallacy remains the same.

There is a way out. First, we acknowledge a simple truth: Models are right about what they include and wrong about what they exclude. Naïve realism is dead wrong about consciousness because it excludes mind in favor of physical explanations. Secondly, we must accept that reality cannot be modeled. The whole enterprise of reducing the physical world into tinier and tinier building blocks has reached its useful limit. Leading theorists suggest that quarks and superstrings might not actually exist. More to the point, we live with space, time, matter, and energy and yet have no origins story for where any of them came from.

Without a model, what’s left? Still standing is the one thing that permeates reality, brings the five senses to life, allows thoughts to arise in our heads, gives the world color and form, and tells us that we are alive: consciousness. The very thing that naïve realism leaves out is the thing that holds all the answers.

There was a lamentable decline after the earliest decades of the quantum revolution, when all the greatest physicists tackled the problem of mind. In place of great thinkers physics turned to number crunching and atom smashing, which remains its chief occupation, now on a billion-dollar scale. There were exceptions like John von Neumann, John Archibald Wheeler, and David Bohm, who continued the search for a link between mind and matter.

Respected but sidelined in favor of bigger particle accelerators and telescopes, all of these thinkers now enjoy a latter-day revenge, so to speak. Having exhausted the models of reality that discounted and ignored consciousness, forward-looking physicists now realize that mind must be accounted for, which seems like a simple realization except that it was clouded behind a screen, the biggest factor being naïve realism. Satisfied with the common-sense view of reality in their everyday life, physicists were happy to think of mind as “not my job.”

A huge hurdle remains, however, which is the enormous seduction of physical explanations. What is science without them? What is life if we get rid of relying on the five senses? These aren’t rhetorical questions. Life would be transformed if we abandoned the lure of the physical world and the mistaken data of the five senses. The human mind is uniquely able to go beyond appearances, and when we do, the destination is always consciousness. There’s no need to call it “higher” consciousness. A better term is “total” consciousness, the ground state of everything in existence.

Account for consciousness and you explain everything. No models are needed. The everyday mind is the arena of consciousness. Stick with it, experience it deeply, and be self-aware. Only then will reality be fully comprehended, absent any model at all.


DEEPAK CHOPRA MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. He is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. Chopra is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book and national bestseller, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential (Harmony Books), unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”