Stapp Affection

Used to be, it was hard to
conceive of the world as round. Now we
can conceive of galaxies and supernovas, the curves of space-time, black holes,
all because of some marvelous computer images.
It’s harder to think that the same rules that apply to everything else
in the universe actually apply, say, in your own kitchen, but they do. It’s hard to make the link between the cosmos
and your kitchen counter. And if you are
a physicist, it’s even harder to find the missing link (oh yes, physics has one
too) between astrophysics and quantum physics.

Quantum physics, if we go back to
the kitchen, is what is happening at the smallest dimension of your kitchen
counter, the movement of molecules and muons, a salad of subatomic particles
that essentially renders your kitchen counter to a state of non-existence. In other words, there are no labels in this
realm of existence, no electrons with the even tinier sign ‘kitchen counter,
left side, near refrigerator’. It’s
difficult to think of all of the solid objects around you as being chaotic and
fluid. But that’s the case.

Our civilization isn’t the first
to think about the nature of the universe.
In fact, I’d venture to say that in an age thousands of years before
television, when at night, all there was to see was this sea of stars, they
probably did more universe contemplating than we do now, unless of course you
are a professional—a professor of some type of physics. Frequently, the ancients chiseled their
findings (today’s equivalence is publishing or perishing) on their holy
buildings. Along the walls of Angkor
Wat, the bas-relief along the walls describes the universe with metaphor (of
course), as a sea of churning milk. It
may sound strange to our ears, and to our naked eyes, where we look into the
heavens and see almost nothing, our vision of the cosmos blurred by the surface
lights of the world. But to them, they
saw so many stars, so much white light—okay, churning milk. Milky Way.
They saw the churning sea, they saw a churning river, and of course,
churning seems to be a universal constant.

The churning isn’t really all
that primitive. Let me take that
back. Two hundred years ago, when the
universe was as Isaac Newton said it was, Angkor Wat was indeed primitive. Now it’s sophisticated—because the metaphor
can easily, easily apply to quantum mechanics.
In a simplistic way, let me explain quantum mechanics (honestly,
simplistic is pretty much my only speed).
Every moment, every fraction of a moment, a wave arises of
possibilities, what can possibly happen next.
Just think of all of the things that could happen next, and this could
go on for hours, and at the next interval of next, some or only one of those
things happens. That’s called the
collapsing of the quantum wave. What’s
another word for a collapsing wave? See?
‘Churning’ isn’t so far fetched.

Enter Henry Stapp, world renown
physicist. He wrote a paper and never
submitted it for publication—perhaps it was too far fetched, you know, like the
world is round or something. It was
entitled “Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics”, which later became the title of
a book in 1993. He stated simply that
the laws of nature alone are not quite sufficient to explain all of this
quantum collapsing. He posited that
human consciousness, added into this mix, especially the act of humans
learning, actually changes the behavior of nature, it actually increases the
dimensions of the universe. That’s
pretty darned powerful. In other words,
our thoughts create a quantum wave, our choices collapse the wave in a most
powerful fashion. Talk about making the
milk shake.

It’s too bad there isn’t a book
or something that helps us know which decisions to make and when, and how, and
help us to understand and discover what we should be thinking and feeling when
doing said actions—in order to bring a world without war and disease, a tikkun olam, of sorts. Oh wait. I think such a book does exist. It’s too bad folks read it and interpret it
with a Medieval paradigm of divine reward and smiting. Because one could read the exact same book
and think about quantum mechanics and probably get so much farther in knowledge
than your average pulpit Rabbi, who can be of great assistance with some
details regarding the making of the aforementioned decisions, and thereby greatly
assisting with the overall tikkuning.

In other words, the problem isn’t
the Torah. The problem is us, it’s how
we see things. And that is the easiest
thing to change, the way we see things.