Many assume the universe’s underlying nature can be revealed by astronomy or its cousin cosmology. That’s a big change from a century ago when religion filled that role. Supplementing the world’s scriptural doctrines, metaphysicians and philosophers never tired of creating endless ideas about the nature of reality. But these days it’s cosmology even though astronomers know that our modern knowledge hasn’t adequately clarified the big picture.
True, we’ve learned the cosmos is mostly empty space and can, with some effort, visualize its overall structure. If the dot over the “i” in the word “period” represents the Sun, then the nearest star is another dot 4 ½ miles away. Any visual cosmological scale reveals stupendous emptiness. But it’s hardly sufficient. Especially when astrophysicists tell us that this empty space seethes with unimaginable power called dark energy or vacuum energy. Nothingness crammed with so much energy that it’s the number-one dominant component of the universe? How far can you go with that?
Then a century ago the quantum theory originators said the countless particles that comprise the universe do not have specific properties such as location or spin unless they are being observed. This meant that our consciousness is somehow intertwined and correlative with nature. And that it’s all fundamentally a single essence. Nobelist Werner Heisenberg famously said that “the number of minds in the universe is one.” But can we really get a handle on that when my dreams are different from yours and you cannot wiggle my toes? How is there one consciousness?
Well, one experiences the truth and certainty of Oneness in other states of awareness, but not using everyday dualistic thought and language, which operate symbolically. There are actually no “things” in the universe, since such slicing and dicing is an internal and often arbitrary mental process based on shape, utility or language. So today we’ll offer evidence of the supposed physical oneness that does not require faith or mysticism. It involves quantum entanglement.
If you send a particle of light called a photon into a crystal like beta barium borate, two bits of light emerge. Each has twice the wavelength (half the energy) of the original so there’s no violation of conservation. The two bits of light fly off in different directions but, amazingly, they somehow remain in touch with each other. If one is measured, the observation will immediately cause that photon to exhibit a property such as a specific polarization, and here’s the punchline. Its entangled twin will somehow know this happened and will instantaneously assume the complementary or opposite polarization. Even if the photons are separated by half the width of the universe, the information from the first one reaches the other instantaneously, in real time. Einstein hated this partially because it meant lightspeed was no longer the absolute cosmic speed limit.
Such instantaneous connectivity also applies to solid particles like electrons. And if actions and reactions occur simultaneously in real time across stupendous distances it means, at least on some level, there’s no real separation.
Since such experiments have repeatedly shown entanglement to be real and not merely theoretical, we now have physical evidence for the supposed Oneness. It’s a real-time connectivity in which space and time either don’t matter or don’t exist.
Where such physics leads us philosophically or metaphysically is another story. But since the science is now a century old, it’s probably overdue for us to at least be aware of it.
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