What Does It All Mean?

Why should we care about the strange nature of the quantum realm? Because it appears to describe the ultimate ground of physical reality, and its philosophic implications help to illuminate the most the profound mysteries of life. Another reason is that we cannot talk about quantum physics without coming up against the question of how consciousness factors into reality.

There are some physicists who, since the dawn of the quantum era, have posited that consciousness is what unifies the two realms of quantum and classical reality. For example, physicist Sir James Jeans said that because of the implications of quantum theory, the “universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” His statement reverberates throughout physics because so much of quantum physics comes down to two primary questions: What ultimately connects everything in the universe? and What is the ultimate “measuring” instrument that causes a quantum entity’s superposition of states to “collapse” down to a single state that is dependent on the type of experiment being conducted? The answer to both questions appears to be consciousness. As physicist John Wheeler has suggested, we may live in a “participatory” universe, where our consciousness influences reality.

Frontier science, especially noetic science, is uncovering evidence that we have both a quantum and a physical nature. There are not two realities, the classical and the quantum. There is only one undivided whole. Everything in our world is reducible to the quantum realm. Your body, the chair you are sitting on, the computer you are looking at, the fly buzzing against the window—they are all made of atoms, and atoms are made of subatomic particles, and particles are probabilities, not solid things. They are wave functions. And the ultimate “measuring” or “detection” instrument that collapses the wave function is consciousness.

If you have difficulty wrapping your mind around quantum reality, you are in good company. It’s best to take the advice of one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman, who said, “I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘but how can it be like that?’ because you will go ‘down the drain’ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that” (quoted in Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics, xiii). Noetic scientists are examining what the effects of “it being like that” means to us humans and what untapped potentials we appear to have precisely because the universe is “like that.”

In the rest of this website, we will explore some of their evidence for believing that we live in a quantum participatory universe and why, in The Lost Symbol, Katherine Solomon’s noetic science experiments are said to be able to “unveil the true nature of all things” (53, italics in original). Their evidence is also unveiling the true nature of human beings, and what you are about to learn about yourself is likely to be both truly shocking and deeply awe-inspiring.