Paul J. van Leeuwen - Quantum Physics is NOT Weird

This book is the product of my personal journey of discovery in the world of quantum physics and the astonishing role of our consciousness in it. It is also a tale of the journey of discovery of mankind in the search for what the universe really is and what we are doing in it. The reader with an open mind will discover that the universe is not the objective, material, and indifferent stage in which man accidentally happened to be caught up. It is an environment that we ourselves continuously create and that invites us in turn to use our greatest possible creativity.

Ir. Paul J. van Leeuwen MSc. The Hague, 2022

Browsing the Internet, I find awkward titles like ‘Quantum mechanics for beginners’, ‘Quantum physics for beginners’ and even ‘Quantum physics for dummies’. Well, I assure you, quantum physics is not a subject for dummies. If you really want to understand the message of the quantum world then you will have to think and ponder long and deep. When you hear or read something like 'A quantum object is at the same time a particle and a wave’ and you don’t feel the slightest urge to tackle that paradox, I doubt you will ever master the real message of quantum physics. I recommend that, when you really want to make the contents of this book part of your intellectual property, read, re-read, and re-read again. Save the parts in every chapter, that do not really seem to land safely on first reading, just for later and read the chapter conclusion. You can always pick up later. Take your time.

Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the beginning and development of classical Newtonian physics until the moment that quantum physics made its ground-breaking entry at the start of the 20 thcentury.

Chapters 4 and 5 are about how the quantum phenomena confronted the physicists with stunning problems and how they tried to deal with that.

Chapter 6 deals with eight of the most common quantum hypotheses and seven important experiments. Each experiment is carefully weighted concerning the significance of its results for the sustainability of those eight key hypotheses.

Chapter 7 deals in rigorous detail with the delayed choice experiments and explains and defends their logical implications for our concept of objective reality.

Chapters 8 to 10 discuss the possible connections between information, entropy and consciousness, the elusiveness of the photon and the character of time.

Chapter 11 is dedicated to that highly interesting new branch of biology, quantum biology, with emphasis on quantum tunneling in living systems.

Chapter 12 speculates about possible models of reality that could explain consciousness and its relationship with our experienced reality.

Chapter 13 deals with some proposals for experiments to falsify the models presented in chapter 12.

Chapter 14 deals with the concept of consilience and why that is an important way of mutual scientific confirmation for the existence of a consciousness being independent of the body.

Chapter 15 Contains a small but challenging collection of blogs from my website.

In the appendices you will find:

• Some isolated treatises on certain aspects in quantum physics which, while important, may have interrupted the continuity in the main text,

• How this book came about,

• A list of recommended literature and other media.

At the end you will find the notes and the glossary.

Notes: References to internet content are numbered [1], underlined, blue and in italic, like this: Internet [1]. The numbers correspond to the Notes section. Notes in each Chapter start with number 1. To spare you the copying of the URL’s there manually, go to the Notes page on my website .

Glossary: Newly introduced concepts will be explained in detail. When such a concept is highlighted and dark grey it is to be found in the glossary at the end of this book. You will find there a concise explanation as well as the page number where it was introduced for the first time. This can be of great help when you encounter the concept somewhere else and you would like to refresh your memory.

The most important thing through almost the entire book is to try to understand the workings and the implications of the double-slit experiment.

“If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.”

Niels Bohr, quantum physicist 1885-1962

‘Feynman was fond of saying that all of quantum mechanics can be gleaned from carefully thinking through the implications of the double-slit experiment’.

From ‘The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory’, by Brian Greene, 1999

At the end of the 19th century, promising students were strongly discouraged from studying physics and were advised to strive for a different career since the practice of physics would from then on only be a matter of determining the next decimals.

However, at the beginning of the 20th century, the understanding of the workings of nature by physics – Newtonian mechanics – became dramatically overturned with publications by Planck, Bohr, Einstein, De Broglie, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and many others. Quantum physics was born, shaped, and applied, but poorly understood. The bewildering impression taking shape was that the act of measurement materializes the measured particles. Because of that, Schrödinger formulated his 'simultaneously dead and living cat in a closed box' paradox.

The following quote from the famous physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman is often repeated: " If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics ." Pretty discouraging for someone who really wants to understand quantum physics. Meanwhile, the technical applications of quantum physics – the transistor, the laser, the LED, the computer, the Internet, quantum cryptography, quantum biology, superconductivity, MRI scanners, etc. – have become indispensable for us and can no longer be ignored. In 2015, the media, the daily papers, the science magazines, and the Internet, wrote excitedly with capitals about an experiment carried out by Delft University of Technology researchers that allegedly proved Einstein definitively wrong. The experiment was performed using pairs of entangled electrons with an intermediate distance of 1.3 kilometers and it proved that there had to exist an interaction between them requiring faster-than-light communication. Quantum physics was definitely weird.

In the present time many academically educated people are still living in a mainly Newtonian universe, where everything is objective and must obey immutable laws. This Newtonian image is, now already since more than 100 years, proven as false. It is my deeply felt opinion that a true understanding of the reality where we experience our existence is of enormous importance for the way we deal with ourselves and our environment. What I’m going to tell here could seriously undermine your idea of an objective reality outside and independent of us, by turning it inside out. Hold on and watch your properties.

The Newtonian model of the world is an excellent and extremely powerful tool. I do not mean to diminish that. However, when it is the only tool that we allow ourselves in our search for understanding the universe, it will become a confusing stumbling block. If you choose a hammer as your only tool, everything you encounter will start to look like a nail. In a lot of articles and books popularizing physics by ‘hammering’ physicists and other physics writers it seems obvious that Newton’s objective material reality is still unrefuted in their way of thinking, and often precisely when it concerns quantum physics. This leads to literally incomprehensible statements, like particles being simultaneously waves and traveling physically every possible path. Trying to preserve Newtonian materialism as the only allowed description of the real world ensures misinterpretation and clouds our minds in quantum confusion. Especially when the mind of the observer enters the stage.