Dynamic histories interpretation of quantum physics and whether the past can change
I’ve been reading Robert Lanza’s 2006 book on his theory Biocentrism. I had heard about it before but it didn’t sound that interesting to me until I was tuned into a novel that he had recently published along with well known SF author Nancy Kress, Observer. This novel makes use of some of the ideas in Biocentrism such as the idea that our mortality is a fiction.
Lanza’s theory is that human consciousness manifests reality and that, because of this, we cannot cease to be conscious or reality would disappear. Thus, we constantly manifest new branches of reality where we continue to exist. To back this up scientifically, he points to quantum physics which suggests that matter behaves differently when it is observed versus when not. He argues that his version of quantum interpretation is the correct way to look at the classic, Copenhagen interpretation. That is, it is your consciousness or my consciousness that manifests reality and when we do not observe something, it is nothing but a vague smearing of probabilities.
Copenhagen grew out of a need to interpret some of the experiments in the early 20th century such as the double slit (or hole) experiment. Richard Feynman said that all of quantum mechanics could be gleaned from this one experiment. If you want to know about it I recommend reading the short linked description but in general the experiment involves firing electrons or some other particle at a barrier with two slits in it. Some of the electrons then pass through one or the other and make it to a detector where they are recorded. The quantum nature of the electrons means that, even if we fire one electron at a time through the slits, we will see an interference pattern on the detector as if it were interfering with other electrons going through the other slit that it did not go through. If we try to observe the electron as it goes through the slits to determine which one, the interference disappears. It is as if the electron knows we are looking at it.
Lanza suggests that the biocentric view is the only one that makes Copenhagen make sense. His viewpoint is reminiscent of eastern religions and also the Kantian school of philosophy (sometimes called German idealism) but is based on a number of arguments from science.
I think I would find his arguments more compelling if they were based on, say, Heiddegger rather than scientific arguments if only because these arguments (fine tuning for example) have a variety of other explanations.
Lanza’s ideas opposes the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics. In this interpretation, every quantum measurement causes worlds to split apart with different outcomes occuring in different worlds. Lanza suggests that this not true. Rather, our consciousness travels down a particular pathway where it can continue to manifest the world. There are no other branches as far as we are concerned. When someone you love dies, they have just traveled down another branch of their existence.
Although quantum interpretations abound, there is little reason to accept one or another unless there is actual evidence for it. I have focused my own research efforts, therefore, to developing such an interpretation that would both (1) interpret quantum theory and (2) explain the vast majority of phenomena attributed to dark matter. To this end, I have developed a 5 dimensional theory of General Relativity that explains both.
I have struggled with how to interpret the quantum implications of this theory for some time, wrestling with certain philosophical implications. While I have written about it many times, all my writings are essentially a work-in-progress. I can’t say I have arrived at a final understanding.
My interpretation I dubbed dynamic histories because it is a dynamic version of Feynman’s sum-over-histories approach. Feynman’s approach to quantum physics was to show that, if you measure a particle to be at any particular point, it appeared there with a probability given by the sum of the probabilities of every path that a particle took to get to that point. As a thought experiment, he asked us to imagine not just a double slit experiment with one barrier but many barriers with many slits. These barriers are placed one after the other between an emitter of electrons and a detector. The electron arrives at a detector on the other side by some combination of slits. Based on the double slit experiment, we can extrapolate that the electron actually arrives by all combinations of slits, not a particular path.
Suppose now we increase the number of barriers and the number of slits. The barriers will eventually become empty space because they will be all slits and no barrier. This tells us that the electron arriving at the detector not through any slit must also arrive by all paths.
The question then is: does it actually arrive by all paths or does it only appear that way?
My interpretation of quantum theory answers that by saying: no. It does not arrive by all paths. Rather, the path by which it arrives evolves in a fifth dimension that behaves like time. The time evolution of the path effectively samples many of the possible paths, one at a time, but the path the electron actually takes when we measure it is only one of those. In mathematical parlance, the measurement is the result of a random variable not a distribution.
It is easier to imagine this explanation if we imagine that the fifth dimension is our own time dimension and the path is some kind of filament like a string. The string is attached to the emitter at one end and the detector at the other. This string is not entirely taut and placed in a liquid where it will be bombarded by random molecules. The tautness of the string is analogous to the electron mass (lower the mass, the slacker the string) while the bombardment of the molecules is analogous the Planck’s constant. Over time the string will take on many configurations that are all random, yet the measurement we actually made is fixed.
This is how the path changes in the fifth dimension as well. It is just like the string except that it has a wave-like random motion rather than a Brownian random motion.
The primary issue I have struggled with here is how to interpret measurement. One interpretation is that measurements themselves are nothing special, and our own histories are changing all the time. This was my first interpretation. Basically, I came up with the radical idea that the past is not actually fixed but because our own brains change with the change in the past we are unaware of it. It is as if a time traveler were going back in time and changing our past without our knowledge. We could be moving through many completely different timelines without knowing it.
Later I dropped this interpretation, however, because I had to recognize that measurement cannot be ignored. Measurement itself creates decoherence in quantum phenomenon. Decoherence can simply be understood to be the overlapping of many, many waves that are “incoherent” with one another meaning that they don’t quite line up. The incoherent waves belong to the atoms in the measuring apparatus. The collision of the particle with those atoms effectively causes the particle to reach a kind of thermodynamic equilibrium at that point in time.
The equilibriation of a particle in contact with something much larger like the measurement apparatus causes the measurement to become fixed in the fifth dimenion. It is as if you pinned the string. The string itself continues to change in the fifth dimension, so that part of the history is indeed dynamic, but the part where the measurement is made is not dynamic.
Now, in some quantum experiments, you can have a measurement that itself varies in a quantum way. This is the case with Wigner’s friend type experiments where you have a measurement being made by a particle that is itself in superposition. This thought experiment was invented in the 1960s by Wigner who imagined having a friend who is inside a sealed lab. The friend makes a measurement on a quantum particle. The question is whether the friend’s own measurement causes the measurement to become fixed for Wigner or does it remain in a fuzzy quantum state? Dynamic histories says that, in that specific case, Wigner’s friend’s past is changing in the 5th dimension. This is sort of like if you had your string and you pinned the end to another string. The first string is the electron and Wigner’s friend is the other string.
This suggests that the strings never get pinned to anything solid in dynamic histories. Rather they are pinned to other strings which are pinned to other strings. Eventually all the strings get pinned together and it seems solid like a woven frabric that doesn’t vary but could easily be changing relative to some outside observer.
Therefore, while our past could be changing relative to some outside observer unbeknownst to us, in practice, all matter in the universe decoheres with all other matter, and so we would expect the history of the universe to be fixed with no outside observers possible within our particle horizon. (Outside our particle horizon, who knows, but we can’t have any knowledge of what goes on there since nothing from there can reach us or vice versa, not even light.)
Another way to think of this is to imagine the universe as being a gas of these strings (the particle paths) of every particle there is (in practice these are actually fields, but let’s keep it simple). This gas of string has the strings varying but, because they interact with one another, the whole gas is in a kind of equilibrium. This equilibrium is decoherence. This means that all the strings are moving and jiggling at a microscopic level as they move through the fifth dimension. At the macroscopic level, however, as in a room where the air is still, there is no motion on average.
A Wigner’s friend experiment would be like taking a part of the room and isolating it from the rest of the room with a box. Now, the strings inside the box can be made to have a different temperature or pressure than those outside. That is, they can be out of equilibrium with the outside room. You cannot be completely isolate it from the 4-D universe with a box, however. Recall that the strings are paths that particles take, so they start a time t0 and end at a time t1. The strings inside are still pinned at the beginning, when the box is first created, and, if you want to know what happened inside the box, you have to pin them at the end too when you open it. That means that they aren’t truly out of equilibrium with the rest of the universe. Rather they are partially isolated for the duration of the experiment.
All this convinces us that, while we can create sections of the universe where history actually is changing in the fifth dimension, we cannot isolate anything from the universe completely, even inside a black hole, because it would have to be isolated from the beginning of time. Thus, we expect again that our own past is fixed.
One of the open questions for me is how we are situated in the fifth dimension. While history can change for some things as we propagate in the fifth dimension, we are situated at the edge of time, meaning always being in the present. Is this because we exist on some wavefront that expands into the fifth dimension or is it simply an illusion and we are actually present in all points in time? I’m inclined towards the wavefront hypothesis which means that the strings are not pinned somewhere in the future. They are pinned in the present, and they do not actually exist in the future because the future itself does not exist, but it is constantly being created with each step into the fifth dimension.
I have some indication from my calculations on dark matter that this is true, and spacetime is shifting in a time direction as it moves into the fifth dimension. This means that we not moving in time. Rather as we move into the fifth dimension spacetime pulls forward in time and drags us along with it.
My hope from all of this is to present a theory of quantum physics that has some meat to it. That is, it isn’t all philosophical fluff. Rather, it can explain some genuine phenomena and I seem to be inching closer to that reality.