The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to these three physicists: John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.” (Scientific American https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-universe-is-not-locally-real-and-the-physics-nobel-prize-winners-proved-it/)
Let’s take a quick quantum mechanics lesson to truly understand the implications of this discovery and how it radically affects our understanding of everything from technology, security and computing to our perception of consciousness and its role in the human experience.
The 1st lesson is to understand “what” the building blocks of life are and that they are used to construct everything from rocks to trees to oceans and people. Everything in this physical universe and other physical universes are built by particles: a particle is a small localized object to which can be ascribed several physical and chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass. They vary greatly in size or quantity, from subatomic particles like the electron, to microscopic particles like atoms and molecules. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle) Those objects that exist all around you, including yourself, are built with the same components: Protons, Neutrons and Electrons (these particles are called sub-atomic particles because they are smaller than “Atoms – an atom is the smallest unit of ordinary matter that forms a chemical element. Every solid, liquid, gas, and plasma is composed of neutral or ionized atoms.”) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom)
The 2nd lesson is to understand “how” these particles work. “Through the work of Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie, Arthur Compton, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger and many others, current scientific theory holds that all particles exhibit a wave nature and vice versa.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave–particle_duality) This theory is aptly called the Wave-Particle Duality and it says that all particles (and you are made up of trillions and trillions of particles) exhibit a wave nature and all waves exhibit a particle nature. Think of a “Wave” as all of the options on a buffet and a “Particle” as the prime rib that you just chose and put on your plate. The “Wave” nature represents the possibilities, and the “Particle” nature represents the actual choice manifested in three-dimensional physical reality.
And so, this “particle” behavior leads us to our 1st paradox. Since particles are really, really, really small science has postulated a different set of rules that apply when studying their behavior. We call the study of the properties of these sub-atomic and atomic particles Quantum Mechanics (theorized by Max Planck in the early 1900’s). This branch of physics is juxtaposed to the study of very, very, very large bodies of science like planets, stars, gravity and galaxies. To understand the behavior of large bodies of science we turn to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity published in 1915. And, so for over 100 years, physicists and scientists have had to apply different laws of science when studying sub-atomic/atomic (the microcosm) as compared to cosmology and gravitational (the macrocosm) science. For just as long, the scientific community has been trying to figure out how these two theories coalesce or work together to create a more unified theory. Here is the fundamental difference between both sciences:
In general relativity, events are continuous and deterministic, meaning that every cause matches up to a specific, local effect. In quantum mechanics, events produced by the interaction of subatomic particles happen in jumps (yes, quantum leaps), with probabilistic rather than definite outcomes. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/nov/04/relativity-quantum-mechanics-universe-physicists#:~:text=In%20general%20relativity%2C%20events%20are,probabilistic%20rather%20than%20definite%20outcomes
In short, when talking about planets we can speak “definitively”- decisively and with authority; conclusively and when speaking about particles we can only speak in “probabilities”- the extent to which something is probable; the likelihood of something happening or being the case.
The 3rd lesson is to understand “why” particles work the way they do. In order to fully grasp “why” it is important to explain a critical theory, that of Entanglement which is simply: When two particles, such as a pair of photons or electrons, become entangled, they remain connected even when separated by vast distances. What this means is, when 2 particles comingle, connect or coalesce, you can send one of the particles to one end of the Milky Way Galaxy and the other to the direct opposite end, and both particles know exactly how the other particle is behaving. If one particle spins up, the other particle spins down, no matter the distance between them. And, so here is the 2nd paradox, we know from Einstein’s Theory of Relativity that nothing can move faster than the speed of light, so, how does one particle located thousands of light years away (it would take thousands of light years to send the message between particles) know how the other particle is going to behave? Well, once connected, particles share a state of telepathy that transcends time/space. And, if all particles emanated from a single point or singularity (The Big Bang), doesn’t that infer that all particles are entangled?
The 4th lesson is to understand “when” particles work the way they do. One of the most groundbreaking discoveries of Quantum theory is the role the observer (the observer can be anything from a person to a device to other atoms) plays. In the quantum world, its only when the system is measured or observed that the wave nature that particles exhibit settle into a position and become a particle – observation collapses the wave nature of particles and forces them to become particles.
Simply put, in metaphysical terms “You get what you concentrate upon!” Wayne Dyer often said “when we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change”.
The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists and “their experiments that collectively established the existence of a bizarre quantum phenomenon known as entanglement, where two widely separated particles appear to share information despite having no conceivable way of communicating”.
The work of these physicists validates the claim that we live in a world where everything is connected through a creating force of consciousness. The particle building blocks that built you are interconnected to the particle building blocks that built me which are interconnected to the particle building blocks that built the Earth, moon and sun. We all share a piece of one another. To take it a step further, consciousness is imbued in all physical matter; from the electron to the atoms and cells that make up your heart and the amoeba to the Panda, Elephant, Human and Mountain. Those photons that exist on opposite sides of our galaxy, which were once entangled, behave with a sense of interconnectivity that could not be possible without the existence of consciousness because at some point they will become the building blocks of a waterfall, a glacier, a planet, a star or a galaxy and carry out their duties in all of their waterfall-ness or glacier-ness, or anything else that they contribute to building.