By Ahmed Munir (Team Publications)
Following is a simplified gist of the ideas exchanged at NUST Physics and Astronomy Society’s first official Discussion Session on The Need for Quantum Mechanics and Relevancy of Quantum Consciousness, held on 30th December 2021. Beware! What follows might seem like a linear progression of events, but the reality wasn’t half as simple – much like the quantum world.
Are the laws of physics deterministic? Can we track the evolution of our system in time and predict a completely accurate picture of our model in future? Prior to the 20th century, the answer to both questions was an assured yes. Lord Kelvin, the famous British physicist has been quoted saying,
There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.
However, there were two minor inconveniences in this deterministic clockwork model that needed to be sorted out and as history tells its tale, the solutions to these inconveniences lead to of the greatest revolutions in history of physics. The problems were that of Blackbody Radiation and that of Ether. For our intents and purposes, we are only interested in the problem of Blackbody Radiation as it led to the development of Quantum Mechanics by Max Planck who said that light exists in discrete levels or Quanta. Erwin Schrodinger further added to this work by intertwining it with probability by suggesting that the position of every particle in the universe is given by a probability wave, the wavefunction. When a particle is discovered at a particular point in space, its wavefunction collapses to that point. This led a new paradigm shift in physics as people realized that at the tiniest level, the universe is non-deterministic.
This type of behavior goes against both our common sense and the principles by which our macroscopic world operates. Why doesn’t a football appear outside the net if I try to score a goal? The main point to be taken in such discussions is that these Quantum Mechanical effects are microscopic, and they happen at a very small level. The more we increase the size of a structure, the less these effects happen. The main experiment that confirms these effects is the Double Slit experiment for electrons. Imagine that a single beam of electrons is fired through two slits and a detector is placed between the slits. If we use our common sense, then there should be two patterns on our detector corresponding to our slits but what we get is an interference pattern. This experiment confirmed Schrodinger’s assumption and Classical Mechanics was taken as a large-scale limitation of Quantum Mechanics. Now since our universe is made up of atoms and molecules, what this essentially means is that at its most fundamental level, our universe is nondeterministic.
Now if we think about it, our conscious experience is a collection of electrical interaction between billions of neurons and synapses in our brain. Does that mean that consciousness in our brains is a Quantum Mechanical phenomena? One pioneer who is very interested in this question is Nobel Prize winning physicist Sir Roger Penrose. He suggests all our decision making and conscious decisions are just collapse of wavefunction to a Quantum State. His position however is very controversial in scientific community and for now, consciousness is still a very classical process. That may however change in future and the nascent field of Quantum Consciousness still has a long way to go.
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