Quantum Strangeness Goes Macro
By Rod Dreher—Director of Publications
Though he loves to play his electric guitar at top volume, Vlatko Vedral is really making his rock-star reputation in quantum physics.
Vedral, a 39-year-old professor of quantum information theory at both Oxford University and the National University of Singapore, is emerging as a leading voice among physicists who contend that information, not matter and energy, is the most fundamental building block of reality. It's a radical idea that blurs the line between physics and metaphysics.
"I think we are really beginning to understand that we should not think of atoms, of matter and energy, as the fundamental units, but we should really think of bits of information as being the most fundamental entities out of which we can construct everything we observe," the Belgrade-born Vedral says.
The concept was famously captured in the great 20th-century physicist John Archibald Wheeler's phrase, "It from bit." A bit—or binary digit—is the smallest possible fragment of information. A bit is nothing more than the answer to a "yes-no" question. It has no substance, and yet, taught Wheeler, all physical reality ultimately results from the answers to those questions—meaning, in Wheeler's words, that all physical reality has "an immaterial source and explanation." The universe, therefore, can be thought of as a vast information-processing machine—a computer the size of the cosmos.
In his 2010 book Decoding Reality, Vedral takes that concept one step further, arguing that the universe really ought to be thought of not as a classical computer, but as a quantum computer—that is, one in which consciousness plays a role in determining results. In other words, each of us participates in the construction of physical reality.
This sort of claim sounds bizarre, and shows why quantum mechanics has about it an air of religion. The mystical gloss is the logic-defying incomprehensibility of quantum results. Despite having been confirmed numerous times through experimentation, quantum effects not only defy common sense at the conceptual level but they can only be observed at the atomic and sub-atomic levels.
Or can they? In the June 2011 cover story in Scientific American, Vedral contends that the unbridgeable gap between quantum physics and classical physics is a "myth."
"Until the past decade, experimentalists had not confirmed that quantum behavior persists on a macroscopic scale. Today, however, they routinely do," he writes. "These effects are more pervasive than anyone ever suspected. They may operate in the cells of our body."
Vedral cites research indicating the quantum process of entanglement may be at work in the navigation systems of robins, and in the process of photosynthesis. "The implications of macroscopic objects such as us being in quantum limbo is mind-blowing enough that we physicists are still in an entangled state of confusion and wonderment," Vedral concludes in his essay. Earlier, in Decoding Reality, Vedral speculated that detecting quantum effects in macroscopic systems provide "hope that one day we may find that Nature has already provided us with a quantum computer and all that is left for us to do is to program it."
If the dividing line between classical and quantum physics is an illusion, then theoretical physicists have to explain how fundamental classical concepts like space and time emerge from quantum processes. The Templeton Foundation has seeded this quest by awarding a $246,000 grant to Vedral to support research toward developing a theory unifying quantum and classical physics. With complementary funding from the National University of Singapore, the project's budget will be $500,000.
According to Dr. Hyung Choi, who directs JTF's mathematical and physical sciences programs, the Foundation is currently funding more than 20 scientific research programs like Vedral's, in which scientists investigate the quantum world from many different perspectives. The Foundation hopes that these programs will advance Sir John Templeton's vision for discovering the nature of the deepest level of reality, and its implications for humanity.
As a London undergraduate in the early 1990s, Vedral found his calling when he encountered an astonishing claim in an obscure book: Information is physical. Those three words gave him a mission: to devote his scientific career to exploring the implications of that insight for our understanding of ultimate reality. Technology-driven cultural advances over the past two decades have made concepts that were once obscure far more accessible to curious minds. This, Vedral predicts, will benefit coming generations of explorers probing the mysteries of the quantum realm.
"We now live in the Information Age," he tells the Templeton Report in a video interview. Convincing young people today that information is "extremely fundamental and important," he says, is a fairly easy task.
Riding Toward Redemption in Rwanda
In the July 11 & 18 issue of the New Yorker, journalist Philip Gourevitch profiles Coach Jonathan "Jock" Boyer, and members of his Team Rwanda bicycling squad. Gourevitch writes:
"Rwanda, of course, is best known for its fratricidal past, but Jock never inquires about the riders' histories beyond what they wish to tell him. "I see them as their potential, and nothing else," he told me. Seventeen years ago, during the genocide, the riders were young boys. They had no agency in the crimes that defined their nation. All of them, Hutu and Tutsi, had been scarred, and they knew each other's stories. They knew how they had been divided by identity in the past, and that those divisions still figure in Rwandan life, but they wanted to be known for something else. "Rwanda needs heroes," a sports fan in Kigali, the capital, told me, and by doing something that every Rwandan could identify with—riding bicycles—these young men were fulfilling that need."
The New Yorker story is part of a larger journalistic project, supported by a grant from the Templeton Foundation, in which Gourevitch is exploring how Rwandans lifted their nation out of the genocidal morass. Gourevitch is investigating how Rwandans did not yield to despair and defeat, but instead dedicated themselves to forgiveness and forward thinking. Gourevitch's ultimate goal: to discover what the rest of the world can learn from Rwanda's inspiring experience.
For Evangelicals, Same Planet—Different Worlds
The sun is rising over Evangelicalism in the Global South, say church leaders there. But their counterparts in the Global North (Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand) see dark days ahead in their part of the world. That's the main finding of a new Global Survey of Evangelical Protestant Leaders undertaken as part of the $3 million Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures Project.
Despite the optimism disparity, Evangelical leaders agree that the greatest threat to their faith comes not from other religions or theological conflicts within Evangelicalism, but from secularism and consumerism. What's more, they are strongly inclined to believe Evangelicals should participate in politics, and overwhelmingly express positive views of Catholics, Jews, and Pentecostals—though they are equally strong in their rejection of the so-called "prosperity gospel" embraced by many Pentecostals.
