by Fred Alan Wolf
Ever wonder how lucky or unlucky you are? Or, do you think that whatever success or failure you've had, has nothing to do with luck at all? Well if the quantum world of atoms, molecules, and subatomic particles has anything to do with it, not a single moment has passed by without lady luck looking over your shoulder as you attempted to draw to that inside straight called the game of life. Yet there is way to beat lady luck at her game. All you need to do is look at the world carefully enough.
Quantum physics is the theory of the behavior of matter and energy, particularly at the level of atoms and subatomic particles. It is nearly impossible to imagine the strangeness of the behavior of matter at this level. An electron in an atom, for example, performs a trick much like the crew aboard the Enterprise in the well-known Star Trek series, when it "beams" from one energy level to another. It simply jumps from one place to another without going in between. But if we aren't watching it jump, we have no control as to when it will happen.
But suppose we do watch? Then the bizarre world of quantum physics enters our modern lives. Based on the mathematical laws of probability, quantum physics doesn't ordinarily allow us to make predictions that we can trust. Hence one might believe that nothing could be determined and that success and failure were mere whims of chance. However, it turns out that if current experiments in quantum physics are relevant to our everyday experiences and we can learn to observe our lives vigilantly enough, we can actually alter the crapshoot of life. But, there is a catch to all this; you need to begin to see things quantum mechanically.
The quantum physical worldview is very different from the world we ordinarily see. However the difference is slight in everyday life. According to quantum physics, there is no reality until that reality is perceived. We call this "the observer effect." Because we usually don't pay attention to ourselves in the perception process, our immediate experience will usually not appear to show how our actions of perception changed anything. However, if we construct a careful history of our perceptions they often show us that our way of perceiving indeed changed the course of our personal history.
That may make sense to you when looking at something new and deciding what it means. But you may wonder, "I'm not actually changing reality, am I? I'm just changing my interpretation of reality." The answer is often difficult to appreciate, but as surprising as it may seem, you are changing reality simply by observing it. In the world described successfully by quantum mechanics, ultimately and fundamentally observers affect the universe whenever they observe it or anything in it. If we refine our ability to see by looking at atomic and subatomic processes the differences would be quite magnified and astonishing to our normal way of seeing.
How do you change your way of seeing? I wish to consider your will here, specifically how it manifests in the physical world. Consider: how is it that what you wish to accomplish sometimes occurs without seeming effort, while at other times, even with great expenditure of energy, you fail in your endeavors? According to the quantum physics way of seeing, observation and awareness tie your mind to the physical world through your desire and that desire manifests as a physical force.
Desire first appears in the mind as a mental formation - the object of desire. When this form manifests, desire holds or preserves it in mind. The power to hold the image, determined by the time-span the image is held, is called intent. Next the object that appeals to your senses is sought for in the physical world if it is not present, and mind-object and the physical object are brought together and superimposed in the mind-space in much the same way you fuse two two-dimensional images together, making one three-dimensional image when you look at an object using your two eyes.
Desire, through your vigilance of observation, actually modifies and alters the course of the physical world, particularly your course through it, causing things to occur that would not normally occur if they were not desired. All of this makes up what shamans call Intent.
Intent operates in the physical world by altering the observed state of that world. Quantum physicists, Yakir Aharonov and M. Vardi discovered that intent affects the physical world. They showed that the old proverb "a watched pot never boils" might have a range of validity previously unsuspected when they discovered the paradoxical situation that arises when a quantum system is watched carefully. If it is monitored vigilantly, it will do practically anything. Imagine a tiny quantum-sized pot of water being heated on a really tiny stove. We all know pots of water boil, given a few minutes or so. You would certainly think the watched quantum pot would also boil. It turns out, because of vigilant observations, the boiling never occurs; the watched quantum pot never boils. All vigilantly watched "quantum pots" never boil, even if they are heated forever.
All of this might be considered just quantum physical speculation. However, in 1989, physicist Wayne Itano and his colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado experimentally observed the equivalent of the "quantum watched pot" and, indeed, it never boiled!1 Their experiment involved watching some five thousand beryllium atoms confined in a magnetic field and then exposed to radio waves of energy. The atoms were the equals of quantum pots of water and the radio waves the equivalent of the heat applied to the pot. Under such circumstances the atoms will "evolve" into excited atomic energy states as they absorb the radio energy. Nearly all five thousand will reach their excited state-goals in a little over two hundred fifty milliseconds, that is, a quarter of a second.
To check this, the physicists would observe the atoms after a quarter of a second by shining a short pulse of laser light into their midst. Hot (excited) atoms do not absorb and immediately reemit the laser energy. Atoms that remained cool (in the unexcited state) do. So, by observing the scattered laser light after it passed through the trapped atoms, the physicists were able to determine just how many atoms were hot.
