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Quantum Physics & The Nature Of Reality
Does Quantum Mechanics Favor Buddhist Philosophy?
All we are is a result of what we have thought. The Mind is Everything.
Gautama Buddha
All matter originates and exists only by a virtue of a force. We must
assume behind this force is a conscious and intelligent Mind. This
Mind is the matrix of all matter.
Max Planck
(Founder of Quantum Physics)
The last 100 years of science have begun to bridge the gap between the scientific and spiritual understandings of the Nature of Reality.
This can be most clearly seen between the teachings of Buddhism & the scientific findings of quantum physics.
Buddhists point to the notion of Emptiness as that which is the ground from which everything arises and everything returns to.
According to Buddhists, everything that you feel, see, hear, touch, think or taste in this moment is arising from the empty ground of infinite potentiality.
What Is Emptiness?
We are going to investigate what this ground of Emptiness is and how the apparent world and ourselves arise from it as explained in spiritual traditions and by the scientific findings in quantum physics.
Two examples will help us to begin:
You may have a dream in which a gorilla is chasing you. Everything in the dream feels very real and you are terrified.
However, in the morning you wake up happy and no longer afraid knowing that it was all merely a dream.
That you, the gorilla, and the world of the dream all were created by and disappeared back into the dream consciousness.
Nothing about the dream was real; however, the dream consciousness was in a sense real — it was the real potential ground without which the dream could not appear.
A blank piece of paper can also serve as an example.
Even though the blank paper itself communicates nothing, it stands as an infinite potentiality in that an infinite variety of languages, ideas, stories, etc., can be expressed upon it.
Thus, Emptiness can be understood as an infinite field of potential.
And in a sense, more real than anything which appears on or rises from it.
This notion of Emptiness has some amazingly strong similarities to what is called The Quantum Field in Quantum Physics.
Materiality & Pure Potentiality
To understand these similarities we need first to inquire into the materiality of the world.
In a quantum understanding of materiality, we find that material exists in two forms, as particles and as waves.
What is very strange about the waveform of materiality, according to quantum physics, is that it has no definite location in time or space.
In fact, the waveform is understood as being everywhere all at once and thus spread out through the entire universe!
An example may help:
Imagine you have an orange in your hand.
Now this orange in its particle form is locatable in time and space — that is: in your hand.
However, the orange in its waveform is not located in time or space but spread out in an infinite number of possible states throughout our entire universe.
In other words, the orange as a particle is a material thing; but the orange as a wave is pure potentiality.
How can this be?
How can something that seems to be in a particular place at a particular time also exist everywhere all at once?
According to our usual understanding of the nature of reality, this is an utter impossibility.
However, scientists working in Quantum Physics have confirmed the truth of particle/wave materiality thousands upon thousands of times.
They have done this with an experiment known as the double-slit experiment.
We will look more closely at the details of this experiment in a moment.
But when the results of this experiment were first published, it was an earth-shattering shock to the scientific community.
The most profoundly shocking find was this:
The double-slit experiment proved not only that materiality was both particles located in space and time AND waves which were everywhere all at once …
But whether they appeared as particles or waves was determined by human consciousness!
The Feeling Of Solidness Is An Illusion
How does this relate to Emptiness?
Atoms are known to be 99.999999999999% empty space.
Just absorbing that fact must force us to redefine our understanding of not only the nature of reality but the reality of our very selves.
But if reality is only empty space, then why does reality feel so solid, located, and real?
If I am only empty space, why do I feel so solid, located, and real?
Quantum physicists explain this feeling of solidness as being caused by a — as yet undefined — repulsive force between atoms.
This repulsive force is similar to magnets pushing away from each other when two of the same sides are put together.
Therefore, you never actually touch anything solid, rather it is this repulsive force that gives the illusion of touching something solid.
Of you being something solid.
If you are sitting in a chair, you are actually not touching the chair, rather the atoms in your body and atoms in the chair are repelling each other and it is actually this repulsion that you are experiencing.
You are always experiencing forms of energy.
You never experience anything solid.
It is this mysterious repulsive force that gives you the completely illusory feeling that you are experiencing not emptiness but something solid and real.
The particles that make up these atoms arise from what quantum scientists call a quantum field.
The particles are not different from the field but are in fact part of the field.
Like waves are to the ocean.
The quantum field is outside our perception but remains the pure potentiality for matter.
All matter arises from this quantum field and falls back into this field.
The field itself is spread across all space and time.
This quantum field is the very ground from which every atom, all matter, the universe, and our very selves arise from and fall back into.
Buddhism, The Quantum Field, & Entanglement
There is a similar notion within Buddhism. It is called dependent arising or Pratītyasamutpāda.
This states that all things are interconnected and that the idea that there are independent existing objects in the world is an illusion.
Everything is dependent on everything else for its seeming appearance, its seeming solidness.
Within the quantum field when two particles begin to affect each other in a particular way they are said to be entangled.
Now, this is where it gets even stranger.
Once these particles have developed this relationship of entanglement, from that point on anytime one of the particles is changed or affected the other particle will reflect this change — whether across the room or across the universe!
You might think of entanglement like this:
Imagine you and a friend each held a basketball.
Now if those basketballs we entangled like particles can be, each basketball would reflect what happened to the other basketball no matter how far away from each other they were — whether two meters or thousands of light years!!
Entangled particles seem to act as one particle even though they are two and no matter how far the distance is from each other.
And it doesn’t stop there.
At the moment of the Big Bang, all the matter that exists in the universe was compressed into an infinitely small point.
This means that all particles in the universe are ultimately entangled particles.
It is clear from this that quantum entanglement points to a profound oneness of all existence.
But where does the mind and human consciousness fit in all of this?
In Buddhism and many other religious traditions the mind is the centre of reality.
The mind is not merely part of reality but is the very thing that creates what we take as reality.
In much the same way as scary gorillas and worlds can be created in our dreaming state.
Thus, according to this point of view, the world is not outside our minds but is created by them.
This understanding that our apparent reality is created by our minds is the central teaching of the Buddha.
Two and half thousand years later it is the same conclusion arrived at by quantum physics.
It was the quantum physicist, Werner Heisenberg, who first realised that the very observation of electrons affected their positions in time and space. He called this the “uncertainty principle” and went on to say:
What we are observing is not nature but nature as it is affected by our observing minds. Thus, reality is defined by the mind that is observing it.
This reveals not a problem for the scientific method but rather points to the dream-like quality of the quantum particles that make up our universe.
The way in which human consciousness affected these quantum particles becomes very clear with the previously mentioned experiment called the double-slit experiment.
In this experiment, quantum particles are fired through two lead slits.
When observed the particles make patterns and appeared as particles; however, when not observed the particles make wave patterns.
In other words, when the particles were observed they appeared as discreet finite possibilities locatable in time and space — that is to say as particles.
But when not observed they appeared as an infinite potentiality — that is to say as non-locatable in time and space, as waves.
Whether we are Buddhists or quantum physicists we can only conclude this:
Prior to the mind, reality exists only as an infinite potentiality
Or, if we were to put it in Buddhist terms:
Devoid of thought (or Mind), Reality is realised to be Emptiness (or pure potentiality).
Thus, in conclusion, and most simply put:
- The radical nature of reality is Emptiness or pure potentiality.
- The world, or apparent reality as it appears to us, is merely a projection of our minds, or human consciousness.
This is the nature of reality according to quantum physics and the Buddha.
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