Research, Science, Quantum Physics, Human Design

Quantum Physics for Dummies (and Weirdos) - Part 1

Quick note: This blog was VERY fun to write, but also A LOT of research, hence why it was posted late (I am aiming to put up my blog posts on Wednesdays)… It also contains a tremendous amount of information - so much so, in fact, I have now split it into two parts!

In keeping with my nerdiness and the internet’s propensity to provide a wealth of information, naturally, as I began to study Human Design for myself, I was intrigued by the claims of being steeped in both ancient Eastern divination texts and mysticism practices as well as quantum physics. So, naturally, I compiled a list of questions that I needed to better understand and began firing them at internet search engines to decipher for myself what was true.

The findings were both a test in challenging AI prompts in their ability to decipher their own biases in the answers, which was its own set of fun hallucinations and admissions of lacking the most up-to-date research to make some of the biased claims it started with. But it was also a compelling deep dive into the history of quantum physics - and the physicists who study it.

The history of quantum physics over the last 100+ years is both contentious and hilarious.

I won’t lie - a lot of these concepts are extremely difficult to grasp as it is basically a conversation with the characters from the Big Bang Theory (a show, I may add, that started out kinda cringe but got significantly better when the female characters joined the cast). quantum entanglement, neutrinos, dark matter, Casimir Effect, Orchestrated Objective Reduction - the topics are as broad and as intricate as the human brain itself. I could do an entire series of blog posts on many of these topics, but for the purposes of simplicity, as well as keeping to the title of this single post, I will whittle it down to the bits that I found most interesting, as it relates to Human Design principles.

Let’s start with quantum mechanics and entanglement.

A physics theory is typically nothing more than a math equation that applies to the shape or dimension of the physical world. But a theory is just a theory until it can be proven through vetting that equation by applying it in an extremely creative means of known, physical experimentation, aka applied physics. The premise of quantum mechanics, therefore, is basically the “quantum” version of applied physics where quantum physicists seek to prove whether or not their math equation is true or not; to find the physical experiment that gives either evidence for, or, more importantly, to disprove, any theory. Classical physics, for the past one hundred or so years, has been insufficient in explaining the behavior of matter and light at atomic scales because once scientists could design equipment and algorithms to study the anatomy of atoms, they discovered that classical physics no longer played by the natural set of rules that humans had been defining for thousands of years.

The first major breakthrough was with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in 1927. Basically, the gist is this: quantum particles move in wave patterns, and we can measure how those particles move. However, we cannot measure where a specific particle is positioned AND how fast it is moving at the same time. Nail down the position, and the momentum goes blurry. Nail down the momentum, and the position smears out. Adding some historical fun, Werner Heisenberg first tried to explain this uncertainty with a story about a microscope knocking the electron around during measurement — arguing, essentially, that our instruments were too clumsy and we needed to build better ones. He was right about the era. The equipment of 1927 couldn't test any of this; that's precisely why the argument stayed philosophical for the next forty years. But he was wrong about the cause. Better equipment was never going to fix it. A particle does not have both its precise position and the measure of its momentum as facts in sharp focus at the same time.

This leads to the “observer effect”, which basically says that a quantum system doesn't settle into one definite outcome until it gets measured. An observer is anything that interacts with the system and registers a result. So while the particle location cannot be determined while it is in motion, the probable odds of where the particle ends upcan be calculated. Similarly, energy and time encounter the same challenge. Define a particle’s energy precisely, and you lose all ability to determine when it will decay. Conversely, when the particle’s energy is uncertain, the longevity until decay is sharply in focus. “Energy in motion remains in motion” - at the quantum level, this is only true because we can’t calculate when it no longer WILL BE in motion!

By 1935, the premise of quantum mechanics was still being built on a shaky foundation — so shaky that Albert Einstein, whose own Nobel Prize came from proving light travels in quanta, tried to discredit the current course of its premises. He and two colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, published a paper pointing out something absurd: two particles could share a single state such that measuring one instantly determines the other, no matter how far apart they were. Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance." While Einstein was attempting to discredit the “single particle momentum versus position” issue, he ended up building a more solid foundation by adding a second particle to the party!

Enter Schrödinger and his cat. Yes, literally.

Similarly, Erwin Schrödinger, who wrote the foundational equation of quantum mechanics in 1926, agreed with Einstein and named Einstein’s phenomenon “Quantum Entanglement”. Schrödinger then published his own objection, targeting the “observer effect” but this time about what happens when quantum weirdness gets scaled up to something cat-sized. This particular thought experiment: wiring a cat to a quantum system and, by absurdity, that would render the cat neither dead nor alive until the box is opened. However, the irony happened to be that Schrödinger’s sarcasm was actually much more real than he knew! Humans continue to scientifically debate the efficacy of his joke to this day.

Einstein and Schrödinger, while both great men in their time, spent decades defending the fully deterministic Universe they were raised in; but instead, ended up helping to build an even more solid foundation for quantum mechanics. In their candor, and with all joking aside, neither of them could accept what they gave to the scientific community. Their attempts at disproving the hypotheses only solidified their truths. And neither of them lived long enough to see the fruits of their labors.

In 1964, John Bell, a CERN particle physicist on sabbatical, took on the problem as a passion project distraction. He dove deep into the implications of quantum entanglement, directly challenging Einstein’s prior work, and formulated his own foundational principles on how to test quantum theories by introducing Bell’s Inequalities. Basically, anyone who wishes to test these theories must distinguish between the mechanics themselves and the possible, predetermined properties of the particles. If the Universe worked the way Einstein insisted it must, results would fall below a certain threshold. If quantum mechanics was right, they'd exceed it.

Until then, the overarching physics establishment would say, “quit asking - shut up and calculate”. But instead, Bell said, “y’all are likely missing some variables - so here’s how to go find them.” And, in the subsequent years, a few others did, despite warnings that quantum mechanics may be a career-killer, if the evidence is not truly solid. When John Clauser turned Bell's inequality into a buildable experiment and ran it at Berkeley in 1972 — getting results that favored quantum mechanics — he'd been warned it would sink him professionally (of note: it didn’t sink him - he went on to win a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022, honoring his research on these foundations). At the same time, counter-culture experiments were also taking place - albeit not so scientifically as one may assume! Three years later, three miles away, a handful of underemployed Berkeley physics PhDs started meeting on Friday afternoons.

They called themselves the Fundamental Fysiks Group. They studied quantum entanglement and Bell's theorem through the lens of Eastern mysticism and psychic mind-reading, discussing the latest research while lounging in hot tubs and dropping LSD. Discussions wove through quantum theory mixed with the latest counterculture, while funding magically poured in from young millionaires who were interested in the counterculture bits and the CIA, worried about Soviet psychic weapons.

Then the larger spiritual community got ahold of the science.

As this is now the mid-1970s, the New Age movement began taking off, spawning nearly an entire generation of “woo-woo wacka-doos”: cult followers, hippie communes, and misinformation on the concepts of consciousness and spiritual interconnectedness when applied through the lens of quantum mechanics. Fueled by the counterculture undercurrent, the Fundamental Fysiks Group began producing a flood of “new physics” publications, including books such as “The Tao of Physics” by Fritjof Capra and “The Dancing Wu Li Masters” by Gary Zukav, which exploded in popularity as they began to blur conceptual parallels between quantum mechanics and Eastern philosophies. This undercurrent nearly made a mockery of the science itself, while mysticism spouted “proof” of our collective consciousness and the potential for enlightenment.

(For my dear weirdos in the crowd, I mean no injustice or bias by that prior paragraph - I am one of you, as I, too, was born to hippie parents. Or, as my mother would say, “We weren’t hippies - we were FLOWER children!” Ok, mom.)

(Continue the saga in Part 2!)