A quantum-theory-neutral version of the two-slit experiment displays the intrusion of the conscious observer into physics. In addition to the undisputed experimental results, only the inescapable assumption of the free choice of the experimenter is required. In discussing the experiment in terms of the quantum theory, other aspects of the quantum measurement problem also appear.

In 1964 John Bell proved a theorem2 allowing the experimental test of whether what Einstein derided as “spooky actions at a distance” actually exist. We will see that they do. Bell's theorem can be displayed with a simple, nonmathematical thought experiment suitable for a physics course at any level. And a simple, semi-classical derivation of the quantum theory result can be given for physics students. These entanglement phenomena are today applied in industrial laboratories and are increasingly discussed in the popular literature. Unfortunately, they are also misappropriated by the purveyors of pseudoscience, something physicists have a responsibility to address.3 Students can be intrigued by the quantum strangeness physics has encountered at a boundary of our discipline.

Nauenberg’s extended critique of Quantum Enigma rests on fundamental misunderstandings.

Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter Facebook Reddit LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Reprints and Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Fred Kuttner, Bruce Rosenblum; Reply to Nauenberg and Mermin. Am. J. Phys. 1 December 2007; 75 (12): 1062–1063. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.2767650 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAmerican Association of Physics TeachersAmerican Journal of Physics Search Advanced Search |Citation Search

Vandervert's "Final Note" is based on a flawed distinction between theoretical and experimental physicists. Vandervert also incorrectly characterizes Kuttner and Rosenblum as "experimental physicists." Moreover, the perspective of Einstein, which Vandervert advocates, includes precisely the type of thought experiment Kuttner and Rosenblum originally displayed and that Vandervert criticized.

Abstract We wonder how literally Martin Rees, Cambridge University professor and England’s Astronomer Royal, meant what he said in this opening quote. Having come this far in the book, you at least know what stimulates his comment. Though quantum mechanics supposedly applies to everything, it’s a big step from those things for which observer-created reality has been demonstrated to the whole universe.

Abstract Consciousness and the quantum enigma are not just two mysteries; they are the two mysteries: the first, the physical demonstration of the quantum enigma, faces us with a fundamental mystery of the objective world “out there;” the second, conscious awareness, faces us with the fundamental mystery of the subjective, mental world “in here.” Quantum mechanics appears to connect the two.

Abstract The meaning of Newton’s mechanics was clear. It described a reasonable world, a “clockwork universe.” It needed no interpretation. Einstein’s relativity is surely counterintuitive, but no one interprets relativity. We come to accept the idea that moving clocks run slow. It’s harder to accept that observation creates the reality observed. That needs interpretation.

Physicists properly join today’s arguments involving the teaching of Darwinian evolution. There is, however, a social issue closer to the responsibility of physicists: Quantum physics is increasingly invoked to promote pseudoscience.Such promotions may start with correct statements of the intriguing implications of quantum mechanics, move to legitimate hyperbole, and then go off into complete hype. Take a recent “international hit” movie as our case in point. It’s strangely titled What tHe #$*! Do w∑(k)πow!? (What the Bleep Do We Know!?) An article in Time magazine described it as “an odd hybrid of science documentary and spiritual revelation featuring a Greek chorus of PhDs and mystics talking about quantum physics.” 1 1. D. Cray, Time, 16 August 2004, p. 22. Early on, the movie illustrates the uncertainty principle with a bouncing basketball being in several places at once. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s recognized as pedagogical exaggeration. But the movie gradually moves to quantum “insights” that lead a woman to toss away her antidepressant medication, to the quantum channeling of Ramtha, the 35 000-year-old Atlantis god, and on to even greater nonsense.Most laypeople cannot tell where the quantum physics ends and the quantum nonsense begins, and many are susceptible to being misguided. According to polls, well over half of the people in the US and England have significant belief in the reality of supernatural phenomena. Robert Park states the problem well. “Many people … seek a certainty that science cannot offer. For these people the unchanging dictates of ancient religious beliefs, or the absolute assurances of zealots, have a more powerful appeal. Paradoxically, however, their yearning for certainty is often mixed with a respect for science. They long to be told that modern science validates the teachings of some ancient scripture or New Age guru. The purveyors of pseudoscience have been quick to exploit their ambivalence.” 2 2. R. Park, Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, Oxford U. Press, New York (2000), p. 39. We should not underestimate how persuasively physics can be invoked to buttress mystical notions. We physicists bear some responsibility for the way our discipline is exploited.The human implications of quantum mechanics that fuel popular discussion arise in the measurement problem and in entanglement. Those terms are at least how we refer to the topics in a physics class, where we rarely go much beyond their mathematical formulation. Elsewhere, the same issues are legitimately discussed more broadly in terms of the nature of reality, universal connectedness, and consciousness. But we don’t distract physics students with excursions into issues that extend embarrassingly beyond the boundaries we define for our discipline. Science historian Jed Buchwald notes that physicists “have long had a special loathing for admitting questions with the slightest emotional content into their professional work.” 3 3. J. Glanz, New York Times, 21 May 2002, p. F4. Accordingly, unlike the biology student able to defend evolution against intelligent design, a physics student may be unable to convincingly confront unjustified extrapolations of quantum mechanics. It’s not the student’s fault. For the most part, in our teaching of quantum mechanics we tacitly deny the mysteries physics has encountered. We hardly mention Niels Bohr’s grappling with the encounter between physics and the observer and John von Neumann’s demonstration that the encounter is, in principle, inevitable. We largely avoid the still-unresolved issues raised by Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Eugene Wigner, David Bohm, and John Bell. Outside the classroom, physicists increasingly address these issues and often go beyond the purely physical. Consciousness, for example, comes up explicitly in almost all of today’s proliferating interpretations of quantum mechanics, if only to show why physics need not deal with it. The many-worlds interpretation, for example, is also referred to as the many-minds interpretation, and a major treatment of decoherence concludes that an ultimate understanding of the implications of quantum mechanics would involve a model of consciousness.The Copenhagen interpretation is, of course, all we need to describe the world for all practical purposes. And for a physics class, practical purposes are all that generally matter. But a physics student confronting someone inclined to take the implications of quantum mechanics to unjustified places will find Copenhagen’s for-all-practical-purposes treatment an ineffective argument.We are unable to present students with a “reasonable” picture for what’s going on in the physical world, one that goes beyond merely practical purposes. But a lecture or two can succinctly expose the mysteries physics has encountered, reveal the limits of our understanding, and identify as speculation whatever goes beyond those limits. Such a presentation is possible even in a physics class for non-science majors and would enable students to effectively confront the quantum nonsense. Physics’s encounter with the observer and consciousness can be embarrassing, but that’s no reason for avoidance. The analogy with sex education comes to mind.REFERENCESSection:ChooseTop of pageREFERENCES <

Abstract A few chapters will go by before we encounter the enigma posed by quantum mechanics. But let’s start out with a look at the paradox. Today’s technology limits our displaying the quantum enigma to tiny objects. But that is solely a technological limitation. Quantum mechanics applies to everything.

Abstract In his book Dreams of a Final Theory, Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg writes: “The one part of today’s physics that seems to me likely to survive unchanged in a final theory is quantum mechanics.” We share Weinberg’s intuition about the ultimate correctness of quantum mechanics.

Abstract Schrödinger told his cat story to show that quantum theory denied the existence of a physically real world, that quantum theory claimed that observation created the observed reality. That claim does seem crazy. Indeed, if someone on trial convinced the jury that he believed that his looking created the physical world, the jury would likely accept a plea of insanity.

We describe what seems to be the only objective evidence for the existence of consciousness as an entity beyond its neural correlates. We display this evidence, the nature of observation in quantum mechanics, with a theory-neutral version of the archetypal demonstration of quantum phenomena, the two-slit experiment. This undisputed empirical result provides objective evidence for consciousness, the straightforward alternative being the assumption of not only a completely deterministic world, but a conspiratorial one as well. The objection to this evidence for consciousness, that a not-conscious robot could be the observer, is examined.

Abstract When in our book we discuss the demonstrated quantum facts and the quantum theory (as distinct from the theory’s several contending interpretations), we describe a generally accepted position. We cannot describe such a consensus in our discussion of consciousness—there is none. Diametrically opposed positions are strongly held. We have our own take, but, you may notice, we waver.

Physicists willing to face up to the quantum enigma struggle to interpret what quantum mechanics might be telling us. Several interpretations today contend with the Copenhagen stance. Before we tell of them, we reflect on how different physicists approach the enigma.

Abstract In Princeton one Saturday in the 1950s, a friend asked his son-in-law and me (Bruce) if we’d like to spend the evening with Albert Einstein. Two awed physics graduate students soon waited in Einstein’s living room as he came downstairs in slippers and sweatshirt. I remember tea and cookies but not how the conversation started.

Abstract Six years after Kelvin made this claim, he hedged: “Physics is essentially complete: There are just two dark clouds on the horizon.” He picked the right clouds: One hid relativity; the other, quantum mechanics. But before we look behind those clouds, we tell a bit more of the nineteenth-century physics we today call “classical.” We will describe the phenomenon of “interference,” which demonstrates something to be a widely extended wave. We will need the concept of electric field. Light is a rapidly varying electric field, and it is with light that the quantum enigma first arose. We will also talk of energy and its “conservation,” its unchanging totality. And we will briefly tell of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Its well-confirmed but hard-to-believe predictions are good psychological practice for the “impossible-to-believe” implications of quantum theory. There’s somewhat more in this chapter than you actually need to know in order to understand the quantum enigma. But it’s good background.

Abstract Physics courses are rarely presented historically. The introductory course in quantum mechanics is the exception. For students to see why we accept a theory so violently in conflict with common sense, they must see how physicists were dragged from their nineteenth-century complacency by the brute facts observed in their laboratories.

We respond to Vandervert's (2006, this issue) critique Of Our paper "The Only Objective Evidence for Consciousness" (Kuttner and Rosenblum, 2006) by refuting each of the three points he makes. Namely: (1) he improperly faults our defining of "consciousness"; (2) his complaint that we do not provide "at the outset an explanation of the philosophical-theoretical interpretation of quantum mechanics" misses the crucial point that the evidence we present is wholly empirical; and (3) his claim that we suggest data from "impossible experiments could be treated as non-theoretical 'facts"' is a misreading of our paper.