Okay, so it's my pleasure to introduce to Yarnavarcha. So I thought I just, for particularly for people who don't know Yarnavarcha, just say a bit about him, give you a bit of a background to Yarnavarcha. So he first came actually across Buddhism when he was an undergraduate at Oxford University when he was studying physics, and he came across Zen Buddhism. I was quite interested in hearing from right now going the last night, he mentioned about Cabot Zins maybe being influenced by Zen Buddhism. But I think the Zen Buddhism that Yarnavarcha came across was a very different species of Zen Buddhism because it was highly disciplined. It required loads of effort. I think you had to get up very, very early every morning, which for an undergraduate student it's really quite a stretch, let alone for Yarnavarcha. So unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, depending on how one looks at it, Yarnavarcha really liked the ideas of Buddhism but just thought it was impossible to practice it. So didn't bother practicing Buddhism and instead turned to a career in Marx and Spence's in the IT department and worked for quite a number of years in M&S before, he finally came to the London Buddhist Centre in 1993. And he moved into my community two years later, in 1995. In fact, at the time we had two people who wanted to move in and we couldn't decide between them whether to take Yarnavarcha or take actually the person who became my Trae Vera. So we instead, what we had to do is add on a new room to our community so that we could house both of them, which happily we did. And not long after that, he left Marx and Spence's and became our fundraiser, fundraising for Vajrasna I think, and then he became the treasurer at the LBC. And he was ordained in 1999. He was actually ordained in India, which I think was very nice because, well, he was born in Africa but he is of Indian origin so it was very nice for him to be ordained in India by Sabouti. And he was given the name Yarnavarcha which means voice of wisdom. Since then, he's become the metric convener and continues to live. So we've lived together for ten years and it's complete joy. I have to say, living with Yarnavarcha is a real pleasure to live with. He's a very warm person. He's very affectionate and good-humoured. But he's also got very fine, lively intelligence which makes a very lovely combination. And in addition to that, he's very much given himself to the centre and to the movement. He's got involved in all sorts of things around the London British centre. So he doesn't just see guys, which he does do quite a bit of, this mens mixture convener. But he's also does other things. He's involved with the businesses, so he's a trustee of body-wise. He's the director of the Gallery Cafe which of late's been taking a lot of time. He was on the management committee of our gift shop, Sudhana. In addition to that, he's been involved in our website. He's been involved in our new IT developments. My Travando keeps him very busy in terms of giving him manuscripts to read and comment on which he's very good, has a very good eye for. He's my first port of call. If I need to talk something through, I just go to Nyarnavarcha. He's definitely the first place I go to try and think things through. And he also does loads of teaching around the centuries involved in doing classes, in doing courses, he runs retreats. And he's very innovative. He brings new ideas into his teaching. And just one example of that, he's recently been doing a course called What's the Matter, which is a course on Buddhism and quantum physics. So in a way, coming full circle, coming back to his undergraduate days. And it's really on that, that, out of that, that comes our talk tonight on Buddhism and quantum physics, which is subtitled, What's the Matter? Nyarnavarcha. Thank you. The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe is as good as dead. His eyes are closed. So that's some words from Einstein, Albert Einstein. I wanted to start with words from Einstein, who's, I think, a heroic figure, particularly because it's the hundredth anniversary this year of Einstein's discovery or formulation of special relativity and of two other papers that he published in that year, one which proved conclusively for the first time that atoms really existed, that matter was made of atoms. And the third paper was on the nature of light, on what light was. So that was all in 1905. He was 26 at the time, and he had a day job as a patent officer. So he'd been rejected from university posts. He didn't have a doctorate because he wasn't, he wasn't seen to be disciplined enough and good enough. So he was working in this patent office and presumably in the evenings, formulating these ideas. And he published these three papers, which overturned the whole of physics. Relativity overturned our notions of space and time and the paper on atoms and light in a way led the, or laid the foundation stones for quantum physics. He's, he's sometimes in a way thought of as the grandfather of quantum physics, not so much the father as the grandfather of quantum physics. And interestingly, he hated it. I mean, quantum physics that is. He never was reconciled to the sort of grandchild that he'd spawned or helped to spawn. He thought it was a bizarre, inelegant, fundamentally flawed theory that he spent the rest of his life trying to disprove unsuccessfully. Anyway, all that aside, his words, I think, will speak to me because they speak of this sense of wonder. And I think it's this sense of wonder that at least partly led me to want to study physics. Partly, it was also I knew a not very popular option. And if I wanted to go to university, I might get a place more easily. But it's also, in a way, part of what's led me to the Dharma is this sense of wonder and a sense of wanting to get to the truth of things. And well, at the time, as a, as a young 18-year-old, I thought that physics would get to the truth of things. I was sort of disappointed, in a way, fortunately. Yeah. So, Shmuti Ratna prefaced the series by talking about absorbing influences. In a way, I feel a bit of a fraud to say that quantum physics is an absorbing influence. It's more like a tangential fad. But I've sort of recently come back to over the last couple of years through doing these courses. And I sort of looked back at my physics notes in preparation for things and found that I couldn't understand the word of what I'd written, which is quite disconcerting when you find that it's your own handwriting. And you can't understand. So, most of what I'm going to talk about is gleaned from popular layman's books on quantum physics that, in a way, anybody can read. Yeah. So, that's, that's me coming clean as it were. I'm, I'm going to talk a little bit. Well, mainly, I'm just going to talk about the physics. I'm not going to talk too much about the Dharma. I'm going to leave you to make the Dharma parallels yourself, partly because there isn't time, partly because I don't think I need to spell things out to too much and join the dots for you. So, you can make the Dharma links yourself. What I'm going to do is I'm going to say a few words to set quantum physics into context. Then I'm going to actually say, well, have a look at it and say what does it have to say about reality, about the nature of reality. Then I've got some reflections of my own, as it were, or gleaned from various sources. And then I'll conclude. Okay. So, what is quantum physics? This is a contextual bit. What is quantum physics? Well, it's the physics of the very small physics, of course, concerns itself with matter. That's what it's primarily concerned with, the science of matter. And quantum physics is the physics of the very small bits of matter, the smallest bits of matter there are that we can imagine. It's primarily about atoms and the bits that make up atoms and atoms make up everything else. So, I thought, well, how small? I'd like to give you some illustrations of how small is the very small. And so, well, I'm just going to use some analogies. So, if you take a granular sugar, brown sugar, you know, the light stuff, not the thick, thick from star-vado or whatever, but the light sort of demerara sugar. A grain is probably about a millimeter across, isn't it, a millimeter-ish? That little millimeter square or cube of sugar contains, in the order of, a thousand billion, billion atoms, a thousand billion billion, and a billion is a thousand million. Well, at least that's how I'm using it. So, a thousand billion billion. That's one. If you wanted to write it out, it would be one followed by 21 knots, zeros, yeah? Which is, which is a lot, isn't it? It's a lot. That's in a drain of sugar. Give or take it, probably a few, I don't know, billion. Another way that I came across of thinking about it was if you had a millimeter of stuff, I don't know, sugar or anything else, and you wanted to count how many atoms you'd have to lay end to end to just form a millimeter line of atoms. Well, it would be equivalent, roughly, to laying pieces of paper on the ground, one, you know, sheets of paper, from the ground up to the height of the Empire State Building. It would take as many sheets of paper to cover the height of the Empire State Building as it would to have as, you know, lines of atoms in a millimeter. So, that's huge, isn't it? That's huge. And another fact, which might help, or might not, might help at least sort of bamboozle you, is, well, atoms weigh roughly, or the little bits of atoms weigh roughly, a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a gram. So, one gram of stuff would have to contain a billion, billion billion of these things. And so, I thought, well, what is a billion, billion, billion look like? I mean, it's hard to know what a billion, billion, billion is. And I came across this thing which said, well, if you took sugar cubes, sugar seems to feature large in my life. If you took sugar cubes, that were about a centimeter cubed, how many, when you laid them out end to end, how far would a billion, billion, billion sugar cubes stretch? And they'd stretch to the distance of a billion light years, which is a tenth. It's about a tenth of the distance to the furthest known thing in the universe. So, it's about the tenth of the distance of the observable universe. That's how far, that's how many, a billion billion billion is. So, you could say that the quantum world is as to a sugar cube, as a sugar cube, is to the entire universe, observable universe. It's that much smaller to a sugar cube. So, perhaps it's not surprising that the physics of atoms is weird, very, very weird. I think it's extraordinary that in a way that human endeavor has been sort of audacious enough to want to even try and probe into that level of smallness. But even more astounding is that within an atom, within an atom, mostly, there's nothing. Mostly, there's nothing. One way of thinking about an atom is that, well, most of the stuff in there, the most of the matter, is condensed into a tiny, tiny, tiny bit at the center. I think you have drawn there. Not so tiny. And that the rest of the stuff is just whizzing around it, flying around it, in empty space. So, an electron is a bit of an atom that's flying around this stuff at the center, flying around this nucleus. Well, if you blew an atom up to the size of St. Peter's dome in Rome, which is the largest dome I'm told in the world, then the stuff at the center, the nucleus, would be the size of a fly buzzing around that dome. The rest would be sort of empty space. So, what we think of as solid stuff is largely empty, empty space. There's nothing there. We have this illusion of solidity. So, then I'm saying, well, it's worth asking, all this physics of the very, very, very small, does it have any relevance to our lives at all? Does it have any relevance to our ordinary experience at all? And I just want to say, well, why it does in three ways. Firstly, quantum physics is the most successful scientific theory of matter that's ever developed, that's ever been developed. It's successful in its planetary power in how much it seems to be able to explain of the material world, and also its predictive power. So, it can predict how things should work. And much of modern technology for duodoreal, we owe to quantum physics. So, without quantum physics, you wouldn't have a laser. You wouldn't have lasers at all. So, you wouldn't have barcodes being read in the supermarket without quantum physics. Without quantum physics, you wouldn't have computer chips. You wouldn't have mobile phones for a start. You wouldn't have, actually, most of the technology that we seem to rely on on the 21st century, which depends on computers. None of that would be there without quantum physics. You wouldn't have nuclear power, of course. But nor would you have molecular biology, or you wouldn't have genetic engineering. Much of modern molecular biology is based on quantum physics. Quantum physics also explains how metals conduct electricity. So, for a long, long time, before quantum physics, people knew that metals did conduct electricity. But nobody quite had a theory of how or why. It's taken quantum physics to explain how electricity is conducted through metals. It's taken quantum physics to explain why the sun shines and why it stays shining year in year out when it could have just, you know, fizzled out. So, yes, it's successful. That's my first sort of, you know, it's successful and it's impacted our lives, whether we know it or not. That's why it's relevant. But secondly, it's relevant because, well, the smallest, it's dealing with the smallest stuff, and smallest implies fundamental, most fundamental. So, it's dealing with the most fundamental reality of matter that there is. And that is important, I think, in its own, for its own sake. And I think, thirdly, well, it's important because of what it says about reality and the worldview that it implies about reality. And that's what I really want to concentrate on in this talk. But in a way, I need to set a bit more context. I need to sort of say a little bit about what happened before quantum physics. In a way, quantum physics started around 1900, and all the physics that went before it is called classical physics. Pre-content physics is all classical physics. And classical physics also had theories of matter. Isaac Newton, so Isaac Newton had developed his laws of motion and matter, et cetera. And they worked, by and large, they worked. In fact, they worked so well that physicists thought that they'd come to the end of physics. They thought that, you know, they'd done it all. There was, I can't remember his name. I think it was a man called Michaelson who famously said that all that was left to do in physics was to fill in the sixth decimal place to, you know, find a little bit more accuracy. And I think he said it in 1890 something. So he lived to regret it. He lived to be very, very embarrassed by his statement. But yes, it was successful. So there was theories about matter. There were also theories about light. Maxwell had invented theories about light. And again, it seemed to work very well. So matter was stuff. People thought of it as stuff. They didn't realize that it was actually largely vacuous. They thought of it as solid stuff rather than light. And atoms were probably rather like solid billiard balls, but small ones, ball bearings, but small ones. And light was thought of as a wave. So there was either material stuff or there were waves. So light was a sort of wave. Well, I was thinking of this last night. I was thinking, let's have a hood of audience participation. And I was thinking, well, Nyanna Vacher, you hate audience participation in talks and things. And then I thought, well, I don't have to do it. So hands up, who doesn't know what a Mexican wave is? Several of you. My goodness, that's a huge number of you. Okay, so a Mexican wave is I'll sort of have to demonstrate without falling off the platform. What will happen is that each person on my right, so Parima Bandu in each row, will sort of do something like this. You don't have to hit the sound. You just have to raise your hands. Raise your hands. And Shmuti Ratna, who's sitting next to Parima Bandu, as soon as Parima Bandu's hands start to come down, Shmuti Ratna's will go up. And so on along the row until we've done the whole row. So we should have a wave passing through from the right hand side of the room to the left hand side of the room of this. So you just have to kind of get into the sit down, but try not to hit the person in front of you, because that's not very good. So I'll give us a sort of count. We're going to do this more than once, but see if you could just... We'll start with our right, and you go like this. We're just going to go across after three. You ready? One, two, three, go. Go on, go on, that's it. Carry on, a bit faster, a bit more. You need to do it a bit more fast, so that it feels like there's a real wave. So one, two, three, go. That's more like it. Great. That's it. That's it. So we're going to do it again. When we reach my left, the last person on my left, I want it to come back. Okay? And then back again. So we're going to do three waves back and forth. Okay? So one, two, three, go. Okay. Okay. Very good. Very good. Round of applause. Very good. So that looked lovely. It's a shame you couldn't see it, and I'm not really sure that it helps explain waves. But if I'd said that at the start, you wouldn't have done it. I guess what you've just demonstrated with your hands, in a way, is what happens to, say, ripples in water. So the actual bits of water, the particles of water, are just going up and down, but a ripple spreads across the surface of the water, just as something, a continuity of energy spread across the room and then back again. Do you sort of mean? That's what a wave is. That's what a wave is. It's a ripple, just like a ripple of water. And this was a ripple of people waving their hands. Okay. So just bear that in mind. I'll come back to it. Bear that in mind. So back to classical physics. One of the things about classical physics, it was very, very successful. One of the things was that the worldview that it implied was that the universe was like a giant machine, a clockwork machine, that once you set it going, and perhaps it was a great hand of God, certainly according to Newton, that set it going, it just sort of ran. Yeah, it just ran. The planets orbited the sun, apples fell to the earth, etc, etc. Everything just happened according to clockwork. There was no room for free will. There was no room for choice. Everything was predetermined once it was set going. This doesn't seem to have bothered physicists very much, because it worked. What's more is that our bodies were seen to be well, like complex machines. And to some degree, well, perhaps they are. That was the kind of worldview we are, complex machines. Our brains were seen as complex machines. And in fact, some scientists still see that, or believe that, that actually we've just got some sort of equivalent of a supercomputer in our heads. And that's what keeps us going. So it was a mechanistic model of the universe, a mechanistic model of everything. This worldview, in a way, I think is still largely prevalent. It's still largely prevalent. If you think about scientific materialism, it's the view that everything can be reduced to matter. That all things in this phenomenal world can ultimately be reduced to bits of matter atoms. Maybe people don't consciously hold that view. But I think that the sort of implications of that view are still current. It's a nihilistic worldview. It's a nihilistic worldview. It's the worldview that says, well, you might as well just have as much pleasure in this life as you can. You might as well just go shopping, because matter is all there is. And we're all lumps of matter moving around. It has no sense. There's no place for ethics. There's no place for values in this worldview. And it's sometimes said that part of the environmental crisis that Carlos Sheila was talking about a couple of days ago, part of our environmental crisis that's facing us, in a way, our cultural crisis arises partly at least from such a worldview of scientific materialism. Physicist called Ilya Prejozin said, I don't know when he said it, he said, though, that we are suffering the consequences of the separation of science and philosophy, which followed upon the triumph of Western physics in the 18th century. And I think that still applies. We're suffering the consequences of the separation of science and philosophy, which followed upon the triumph of Western physics in the 18th century. Interestingly Einstein, just to come back to him, he was a deeply spiritual man. And just something he said, he said that science without religion is lame. Science without religion is lame. But then he also said that religion without science is blind. Religion without science is blind. Okay, so that sets something of the context of the pre quantum physics world, classical physics. So I want to come onto the quantum world, quantum physics. And I'm going to try and do that by talking about one experiment that physicists can do in the lab. And it's an experiment that a man called Richard Feynman has described as the only mystery in quantum physics. It's in a way, it's at the heart of all the paradoxes that quantum physics brings up. So if you can sort of grasp this experiment, and it's very, very simple, if you can grasp it, you've understood quantum physics, you've understood what all the fuss is about. So we're going to have a go at grasping the profoundest mystery of quantum physics on, I've got four flip chart papers, like I drew up earlier. So a number of steps to go through. So first of all, I want you to imagine just imagine that you are, you've got a pile of rocks that you're throwing at a wall in front of you. Now the rocks are all perhaps the size of your hand, roughly the same size. The wall in front of you has a hole in it that's just a bit bigger than the size of the rocks. And you're just throwing the rocks at the wall in the general direction of the wall. What will happen, I hope you can see, is that most of the rocks will hit the wall and just fall to the ground. Some of the rocks will pass through the hole in the wall and land the other side of the wall. And if you keep doing this long enough, you'll end up with a pile of rocks the other side of the wall. They've all sort of landed roughly in the same place. If you were throwing them at the same speed, with the same amount of power, they'd probably land in roughly the same place and form a heap, the other side of the wall. So far, so straightforward. Yeah, there's just one hole in the wall. I'll ask for questions. Actually, I won't. But everyone who's right, actually now imagine it with two holes in the wall, side by side. So side by side, there's a hole here, hole there. So again, you throw this bunch of rocks at this wall. And I hope you can see that what you'll end up with is most of the rocks again hitting the wall, some of them passing through that hole, some of them passing through that hole, and you'll end up with two piles of rocks the other side of the wall. Yeah, straightforward. Okay, but waves. Remember our waves. Waves don't behave like rocks because they're not made of stuff. If you imagine waves on water, ripples on water, and you can imagine them passing through some sort of barrier with two holes in, they wouldn't behave like the rocks. So I've got a little diagram to say how they would behave. So this has nothing to do with quantum physics just yet. I've got my bread stick, which is you, though. I hope you can see this at the back. What you've got here is something that's causing some ripples in some water, and I've drawn these ripples as curved lines. Actually, there'd be concentric circles spreading out in all directions, but I've just drawn part of the ripple. So there's some ripples, and then I've got a barrier here, a screen or a barrier, and the barrier's got two holes in one there called A, and that's whole B. What happens when the ripples hit the barrier is that they pass through these holes. They pass through whole A, and they pass through whole B, and it's almost as if whole A is a new source of new ripples, and you get a whole series of ripples that seem to come from whole A, and a whole series of ripples that seem to come from whole B, and ripples pass through each other. As in a way, waves, hopefully you can see how waves pass through each other, and as they pass through each other, they overlap, don't they? They overlap. So they get, you get this overlapping pattern of ripples, and you can see this in water, you can see it in your bath. So you get this overlapping pattern of ripples. Thomas Young in the 19th century did this experiment with light, so not using water, but light, and he showed that you got overlapping patterns of light waves, and that's how he proved or showed that light behaves as a wave, and so this experiment is named after him. It's called Young's Double Slit experiment. There's two slits, and Thomas Young was the man who did it, Young's Double Slit experiment. When you do it with light, if you shine the light onto a projection screen, what happens is that this pattern of overlapping waves gives you a particular pattern on the projection screen, and it gives you a pattern which is bands of light interspersed with bands of darkness. So you get a band of light, a band of darkness, or strip of light, strip of darkness, strip of light, strip of darkness. And I've tried to illustrate that here in the way that's normally done in physics textbooks by showing this sort of curvy line, and the broader that sort of curve, the brighter that strip of light. So this is a band of light, this is a band of darkness, band of light, band of darkness, band of light, band of darkness, and the light gets fainter as each band goes out from the center. Okay, so that's how waves would behave if they went through two slits. Okay, so so far so straightforward, hopefully. So now instead of rocks through a wall, we're gonna throw electrons, these tiny little things that are almost unimaginably small, we're gonna throw them through the wall. Okay, so first of all, we've just got one hole, and we've got something that fires electrons just like you were throwing rocks, and I won't go into that, and you've got a hole in this barrier, hole A, and this thing's gonna fire electrons. And what happens is that most of them hit the barrier, just like the rocks did, some of them go through, and I've shown one of them going through, and it's just on all the way until it lands on a screen where you can detect it, like a television screen. And what you get is you get a pile of electrons around that area, which is fair enough, isn't it, like the pile of rocks. Yeah, so far so easy. Okay, so now we're gonna do, sorry, they don't bounce off. They bounce off that that screen, if you like, or, but it's the ones that pass through that we're interested in, and you get a pile of them. So that's electrons through one slit. Now we're going to introduce another hole, yeah, so it'll be like like the two hole thing. And what you'd expect is now I've got hole A and hole B, and you'd expect some of the electrons to go through the top one, some of them to go through the bottom hole, and end up with two piles. Yeah, just like the two piles of rocks, but you don't get that. That's what you'd expect, but you don't get that. So I've got that with a question mark, because that's wrong. And in a way, now we're coming to the to the mystery of quantum physics. Yeah, this is the heart of the mystery of quantum physics, or we're getting there. What you get instead is lots of piles of electrons, lots of them, but in in strips, just like the light waves were in strips. So you get a sort of strip of electrons there, then nothing, a strip of electrons there, then nothing, and another strip and then nothing. So it's almost like imagine you've you've thrown these rocks through this wall, and somehow they've arranged themselves on the other side in lots of different piles, real tidy little piles with nothing in between. And what's more, the biggest pile, that one, is directly behind an obstructed bit. So it's almost like the rocks have gone through the hole and gone round and landed in a place where they couldn't land, landed in a place where they shouldn't land. So this seems to imply that in this experiment, at least, the electrons have gone through these two slits, just like water waves or light waves. They've gone through and behaved like waves. But to do that, each electron needs to have gone through both slits. Yeah, it needs to have gone through both slits, which for a bit of matter is a bit surprising. Yeah, for a bit of matter, it shouldn't kind of do that. It shouldn't, it shouldn't do that. Yeah. I mean, also, how does it know if it was about to go through the top hole, how does it know that now this wall's got two holes and it mustn't go through the top hole, it must somehow go through both. It seems to know that and behave differently. Yeah. So what's happening, what's happening, but it's even stranger than that. So what people said was, well, okay, what we'll do is we'll set up clever little detectors, clever little detectors that will tell us, did it go through the top hole, did it go through the bottom hole, did it go through both? Yeah, you can do that. You can put little particle detectors in the way that will detect which hole it went through. What happens is that as soon as you try and detect which hole it goes through, they stop behaving like waves and you do get two tidy piles of electrons. As soon as you try and notice, they behave themselves as proper stuff and land, either they go through that one or they go through that one, but they won't go through both and they'll just create two nice, tidy little piles. Yeah. As soon as you look, as soon as you look, if you don't look, if you don't look, then they seem to want to go through both holes and happily do that. Yeah. Some clever man called Wheeler thought, will wait, will wait until the electrons have gone through this little barrier before deciding whether to measure them or not. So we're not going to tell them. We're not going to tell them in advance where they're well measured them, which hole it went through. Well, wait. Yeah. So this takes an enormously sophisticated bit of apparatus and it's called the delayed choice Wheeler experiment because you're going to delay making that choice until you know that these electrons are well and truly through these holes. Okay. So you wait, you wait and then if you decide to suddenly quickly put a detector in the way and ask which hole did you go through? Well, you find that they behave as particles and you get two heaps and it either goes through one or the other. If you decide not to ask, then you get this and that's after they've passed through the holes. It's almost like they either they know in advance, but that seems a bit dark because the experimenter you didn't know in advance. Yeah. Either they know in advance or they sort of, I don't know, go back in time and decide whether they should behave as a waiver as a particle depending on what you've now put in their way. And that's what electrons do. That's what electrons do. And of course, it's not just electrons. It's all these little bits of particle and actually it's light as well does this. So what you've got there is a very mysterious situation and quantum physics explains it mathematically. Mathematically, it all holds water as it were with the equations. The equations predict this. But nobody knows what the equations mean. So you're left with this theory that works mathematically, it's foolproof, but nobody knows what it means. So it completely defies common sense. But then Einstein said that common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach the age of 18. Okay. What I want to now do is just talk a little bit about how physicists have tried to make sense of this and what that means for the nature of reality. There's no one standard interpretation that everybody buys into. But there is one that's pretty standard that most people buy into. At least when I was studying physics, this was the norm. This is what undergraduates were taught. I'm told that in the last 10 years, it's sort of lost a bit of favor. But it's still pretty much the one that everybody believes. And it's called the Copenhagen interpretation. And it's piloted, well, its main exponent was a man called Niels Bohr. And Bohr seems to have been one of the few physicists along with Einstein, who was capable of, in a way, thinking outside of the box of mathematical equations and asking about, well, philosophical questions about what this meant about the nature of matter. And what Bohr said was that there's no underlying real electron passing through the holes at all. There never was any electron really passing through the holes at all. There was no underlying real objective thing out there called an electron. Instead, what there is is potential electrons, probable electrons, likely electrons. And that the whole world in a way of electrons just exists as this ghostly world of potentialities and probabilities and likelihoods. And what happens is that when you look for an electron, when you actually try and measure it and look, well, one of those likelihoods potentialities and probabilities becomes actual. So the electron manifests because you look at it. Before you looked at it, you couldn't say it was there. It was only probably there. Yeah, it was only potentially there. So what he said was happening is that when you don't look, well, the electrons got a probability of going through the top hole and a probability of going through the bottom hole. And both of those probabilities are equally probable. And they both interfere with each other. And it's those probabilities that cause the wave pattern. When it hits this screen, suddenly you've measured it and the electron becomes real, the particle actually becomes real. Here, in this experiment, where we tried to look, well, as soon as we looked, it became real. So he's saying that reality only manifests when you look at it. Material objects, material reality only manifests when you look at it. When you're not looking, it's not really there. It's there in potential. It's not a likelihood, but it's not a likelihood not to be there as well. It's sort of likelihood to be somewhere else, or not at all. So then you had to ask, well, why? What is it about looking that creates reality? And the sort of standard answer is that it's consciousness that something to do with observing creates reality, and observing is something to do with consciousness. Or at least that's one standard answer. Most physicists don't bother probing that far. They'll just get on with turning the handles of the equations, and it works. The maths works. But certainly this interpretation, which has been held as the standard interpretation for well coming on to a hundred years, it's 80 years probably, says that there's no objective reality out there. There's no objective reality out there. And that is what the standard interpretation of physics is. So you extrapolate from this experiment, and you say there's no objective reality out there. An analogy that I came across, which I thought was useful, although not completely accurate, is looking at a rainbow. When you see a rainbow, actually what you're seeing is something that's created by the mind. There's no actual rainbow out there. It's light refracted through water droplets in the air, and it causes this sort of sense of illusion of a rainbow. And when you look at a rainbow, when I look at a rainbow, even if we're looking at the so-called same rainbow, actually it's not the same. We're seeing different reflected images, and it's our mind that creates this illusion of a shape. Do you do what I mean? And Einstein hated this idea. Einstein hated the fact that quantum physics says that there was no objective reality. He couldn't reconcile himself to that. The other thing he hated was this notion that all that there is is potentials and probabilities. There's a 50% chance that the electrons here, 50% there, etc. etc. And he famously said, "God does not play dice with the universe. God does not play dice with the universe." And Boer famously retorted, "Stop telling God what to do." Another physicist, a famous genius, really, Schrodinger, who you may have heard of, he was responsible for one of the mathematical formulations of all of this that work. He was appalled by this notion as well, but there was no objective reality out there that there was just potentials. He was appalled by it, and he tried to dream up an experiment which showed how absurd such an argument was. Actually, I just wanted to mention that Schrodinger was a genius and a womanizer, a famous womanizer, and it said that, well, while Heisenberg and other genius used to gain his inspiration through walking in the mountains, and Deerak, Paul Deerak, used to gain his inspiration through a very quiet monastic setting at Cambridge University. Schrodinger got his inspiration from, well, less refined means. I always find that sort of optimistic in a way. Still, so Schrodinger dreamt up this experiment of putting a cat in a box, putting a cat in a box. It's a thought experiment. Nobody's actually done this experiment. You put a cat in a box, you seal the box, so there's no looking. And inside the box, you set up a little experiment with electrons a bit like this, and you cleverly set it up so that if the electron goes through the top hole, it releases -- it bumps into some clever macabre device that releases poison gas, cyanide, and kills the cat. If it goes through the bottom hole, it bumps into a more benign device which releases some cat food. So it's got 50% chance of going to the top hole, 50% chance of going to the bottom hole, and the Copenhagen interpretation says that until you look, both of those probabilities sort of exist. Neither one is actual, but both are equivalently there. And so therefore, according to the Copenhagen interpretation, the cat has to exist in a sort of both alive and dead state at once. And until you look, it's not allowed to either live or die. It exists in this superposition, in this Doctor Who state, of being both alive and dead at once. And he said, how absurd to imagine, in this dark box, a cat that is both alive and dead at the same time. Until you look, you open the box, and of course you find it's either completely dead or completely alive. So he invented this thought experiment as a way of showing that the Copenhagen interpretation was nonsense, was completely flawed. But around 80 years of past, and nobody's been able to come to the bottom of that, showing as cat paradox, it's entered into the textbooks as a real paradox, as something of a mystery. It's not been enough to show that the Copenhagen interpretation doesn't work. The Copenhagen interpretation stands still as the most popular accepted interpretation. That's showing as cat. I will come back to some other interpretations very, very briefly, but not yet. So I just want to look a little bit more at this Copenhagen interpretation. It says that not only does reality not exist until you look at it, that somehow consciousness seems to be involved in making reality, somehow the subject has to be there for the object to manifest, that you can't have one without the other. Not only is it saying that, it's also saying that you can't actually chop reality up into bits at all, that the whole notion of separate bits of reality, like an electron, like an observer, like a slit, is flawed, is fundamentally flawed. The electron is not an isolated entity. The whole setup, including our observation, has to be treated as a whole. Heisenberg said the world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole. The sense of the whole of reality being a web of flowing conditions, like yes, determining the texture of the whole, and that it doesn't make sense to analyze anything out as separate from anything else. There's further evidence for this interconnectedness. There are other experiments that can be done, which show that when you've got two particles that were created from the same cause, even if you separate them in space as far away from each other as you like, they could be different sides of the room or different sides of the universe. They behave as one particle. When you touch one, the other one moves. It knows that you've touched its brother-sister particle. It sort of knows, and it moves. It's affected. Well, that's just with two particles, but then if you think back to what physics says about the birth of the universe, all particles coming from a sort of big bang at the beginning of the birth of the universe, well, the implication is that every particle in the universe is connected to every other particle in the universe. And suddenly, this beautiful image of Indra's net seems to be more than just a poetic image. So the notion of separateness becomes an illusion. So David Boehme, another physicist and philosopher, has this to say. One is led to a new notion of unbroken wholeness, which denies the classical idea of analyzability of the world into separately and independently existing parts. The inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality. And the relatively independently behaving parts are merely the particular and contingent forms within the whole. So he's saying that every time we break reality up into parts, well, that's not the truth. We've simplified, falsified, to some extent. Let me read you some words by Lamadevinda. He said, "The Buddhist does not believe in an independent, separately existing world, into whose dynamic forces he could insert himself. The external world and the inner world are for him, only two sides of the same fabric in which the threads of all forces and of all events, of all forms of consciousness and of their objects are woven into an inseparable net of endless, mutually conditioned relations." Very, very similar to what Heisenberg has to say. Okay, one more sort of startling thing, in fact. So quantum physics looks at, well, it has things to say about empty space. It has something to say about what we normally consider to be a vacuum. So deep space, outer space, there's just vacuum in a lot of places. It's empty. While quantum physics, together with Einstein's theory of relativity, says that empty space isn't empty at all. Relativity says that actually what we consider to be matter is just another form of energy. And quantum physics says that in a vacuum, out of nothing, all the time, you've got little bits of matter arising and then disappearing very, very quickly before you can look at them, before you can sort of say anything. They've gone. So that the vacuum, empty space, is actually a bubbling sea, a form that comes and goes almost instantaneously. The form disappearing into the vacuum, into the empty space. Almost as soon as it arises, but nothing is still, nothing's ever static, even what we think of as empty space. Okay, so that's the Copenhagen interpretation, which is the standard interpretation. It's my favorite interpretation, but probably would be as a Buddhist. There are other interpretations, as I say, some of them gaining in popularity, but I don't think they stand. Well, I don't think they'll stand a test of time, and I'm biased, I guess. So the first interpretation, I'm just going to talk about these very, very briefly. The first interpretation that's gaining popularity is called the many worlds interpretation. And that says that there is an objective reality. In fact, there's more than one objective reality. In fact, every time an electron has to decide which hole to go through or make any decision whatsoever, the whole universe splits into two. And in one universe, it goes to the top hole, in the other universe, it goes to the bottom hole. You split into two, I split into two. We fall into different universes, and in the different universes will never know of the other one. But because there are a massive amount of particles, even in a grain of sugar, doing all sorts of weird things all the time, pretty much there are an infinite number of universes all the time, splitting into an infinite number of other universes all the time. So it's many, many worlds. Well, the appeal of that for physicists is that it says there's an objective reality. [laughter] And yes, a lot of physicists hold to that. Many worlds theories. There are also theories called hidden variable theories which say that well, something else is going on at a deeper level of reality than we can ever know. And David Boehm, who I quoted earlier, is an exponent of one of these. And he has a lovely analogy, a sort of image. He says, well, imagine a dancer on a stage with two spotlights on the dancer. Imagine the shadows that that causes as the dancer dances. So you'll have two shadows as the dancer dances. And then he says, well, imagine that you couldn't see the dancer, but you could only see the shadows. So you'll suddenly see these two shadows that somehow being interconnected. You'd see them moving in synchronicity together. And you'd think that there was something amazing going on because these two separate things were behaving as one. But that's because you couldn't see the uniting principle of the dancer. And he's saying, well, underlying the fabric of our universe, there's a deeper reality which connects everything together. But we can't see that. So we think of things as separate. That's another interpretation. A third interpretation that I only read about recently that seems to have gained popularity in the '90s is that you do have particles traveling backwards in time, fixing things after the event, behaving themselves, but only by traveling backwards in time. Philosophically, things going backwards in time. Well, if you've seen Doctor Who, it causes all sorts of problems. But interestingly, all of those other interpretations all imply interconnectedness. They all imply that everything is interwoven, that separateness is illusory. All of them. There's not a single interpretation of quantum physics that seems to be able to get away from the notion of interconnectedness. That's my interpretation. That's quantum physics. If you've understood or followed that, you've understood it all in a way. So what? So I just want to ask, so what? And I just want to point out some dangers, at least dangers I was thinking of. And I was thinking, well, there's a danger of trying to, in a way, make too many quick analogies between the Dharma and the scientific theory. What if that scientific theory turns out to be wrong in another 50 years or so? And of course, that could prove to be the case. Yeah, well, that's a danger. Another danger is a sort of mystery mongering. The quantum physics is weird. The Dharma is weird. So therefore, they must be the same. I saw a film. I don't know if you saw this film, What the Bleat Do We Know? And it was about quantum physics and the nature of reality. And it was good, but it did go in for this mystery mongering a bit. I mean, there was various scientists that were interviewed who seemed on the whole to say sensible things. And then there was this person interviewed who was, she turned out later to be a mystic, Eastern philosopher, meditation teacher or something. And she was very heavily made up and the camera would zoom in to her face, whereas everybody else was given a bit more space. It was zoom into her face. And she'd say some things like, well, I can't remember, actually, they're all banal. They were things like, is it love? And then she'd go dewy-eyed. And that's all she'd say, and there'd be tears in her eyes, and then, you know, then we'd go on to something else. Unfortunately, such things gives what quantum physics a bad name, I think. Let alone the Dharma. There's a third sort of danger, I think, which is a sort of reductionism. In fact, I've just an appoint at three types of reductionism. The first one is, well, the danger that I've already talked about of scientific materialism. And I think that at least quantum physics starts to undermine simple scientific materialism. If you think that it's common sense that we're just made of matter, well, then think again, because matter is completely uncommon-sensical. So common sense doesn't get you, well, many marks. So perhaps, as Buddhist, we don't fall so crudely into scientific materialism. But I think we can hold subtle versions of it. Well, last night, Ratnaduna, just to refer to his talk, perhaps a form of scientific materialism that we can fall into is in a way not having enough faith in the karma and dharma near us, facing all our faith on these material forms, this body. We often say in the F.W.B.O. that, well, you don't have to make your mind about rebirth, for example. You can remain agnostic or whatever you like about rebirth. But I think it's worth thinking about that if we're not, if we don't believe that there's more to consciousness than the body, if we don't believe that there's anything after the body dies, well, what does that say? Isn't that a form of materialism, a nihilism? Anyway, quantum physics seems to undermine that at a simple level. But there is a danger that everything could be reduced to quantum physics still. And I think that can be a danger. What I mean by this is that some people have tried to explain consciousness as quantum physical processes going on in the brain. And that's attractive because there must be some quantum physical processes in the brain. But it seems to do away with consciousness, still as a material phenomenon, due to pseudamine. And well, Ken Wilber, who I've been reading recently, has some good things to say on this. He's basically saying that you can't reduce the subjective and the objective into each other. The objective world can't be reduced into the subjective, the subjective can't be reduced into the objective. Einstein kind of knew that, actually. He was one of the few physicists that seems to have known that. I think it's implied in this that he wrote. He says, "No, this trick won't work. How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological concept as first love?" And basically what he's saying is that you can't reduce human experience, actually any experience, to quantum physics, or to matter at all, that there's more going on. And then there's another form of reductionism, which is that just because everything's interconnected, well, sometimes people portray this interconnected net as a sort of soup where everything has sort of equal value. So a particle has an equal value to a human being because they're somehow interconnected, to a tree, to a cow, to whatever. And Ken Wilber's very clear about this, that if you're going to talk about interconnected networks, you've also got to introduce the principle of hierarchy, a hierarchy of values, a hierarchy of complexity, a hierarchy of consciousness. Without that, everything gets reduced to the same level. And he's very critical of some ecological thinkers who talk very much in terms of interconnectedness. But because they lack an explicit hierarchy of values, they can't say why a human being is more valuable than a bacterium. And so, I mean, I was just thinking that this, he has a very worked out way of marrying this tension between a hierarchical view and a network kind of view. And he warns against losing this notion of hierarchy in our modern culture. So I think there's probably much to explore in that. I haven't got time to do that. Okay, I'm going to wind up soon. So just one more quote from Einstein. Oh, no, well, it's not the last one, actually. But one more anyway, I like it. He says, two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe. That's Einstein. So what can be sure of? So I just wanted to ask what we can be sure of. Well, the first thing, and this is sort of by way of conclusion, the first thing that we can be sure of is that things are not what they seem. Even if quantum physics proves to be incorrect and is superseded by a more impressive theory, we're never going to, I think, be able to return to a simple common sense view of matter, of reality. Relativity, which I've not been able to go into, says that space and time are not what they seem. So not only is matter, not what it seems, space and time are nothing like what we take them to be. The past, the present and the future, this notion of time as flowing through an absolute space is not how physics sees things. Well, I just want to read another bit of Einstein. He was writing a letter of condolence to the widow of a friend that had died. It's a lovely thing to write. He says, now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between the past, the present and the future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. So things are not what they seem. Secondly, if the Copenhagen interpretation is correct, then we can't talk of an objectively existing reality separate from our consciousness, separate from the subject. It's almost as if physics, starting from the assumption of objectivity, comes to the very limits of the subject object duality and starts to come unstuck because its assumptions are that there was an objective world, it comes unstuck. And fourthly, even if the interpretation of the Copenhagen interpretation, even if that's proven to be wrong, even if there is an objective reality, it seems to be now indisputable that everything's connected to everything else. The interconnectedness of that objective reality is a fact and that we're woven into that. So I find all of that very fascinating. Hopefully some of you at least have found that interesting. But I think I want to conclude by saying, well, of course, it's very limited. Even if it's all true, well quantum physics doesn't really say anything about how we live our lives. It doesn't say anything about ethics. It doesn't say anything about values, even though it might hint at such things. However, it can influence our worldview. And I think that that's an important thing to try and take on board. It can influence our perspective. I think for me, it can help me stay in touch with a sense of wonder. And a sense of wonder for me is very connected with a sense of shred heart, of reverence. It's when I think I know it all, that the sense of shred heart seems to go. So I want to finish now with some words again from Einstein, who seems to, I think, have been a man of spiritual insight. Certainly his writings seem to me to imply that, genuine depth. These words I'm going to read, they're my favorite thing that I've read of Einstein. They echo, for me, words in the Manjidoshu study sartana, well perhaps we'll see why, but they definitely seem to me to be words of wisdom. I just want to conclude with them. A human being is part of a whole called by us universe, apart limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to the affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison, by widening our circle of compassion, to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in all its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but striving for such an achievement is in itself a part of deliberation and a foundation for inner security. a part of the world.
