Would Einstein have griped about quantum health, too?
Would Einstein have griped about quantum health, too?
Going deeper into the world of quantum biology
Mysteries: so compelling! In mystery, there’s something unknown, but discoverable. Ultimately, however, the world (or health) is not a mystery to be solved.
Instead, the Universe is ambiguous, and what differentiates mystery from ambiguity is that in ambiguity, there are multiple valid interpretations. Thus, many answers to the same question.
HERBERT: Einstein was never comfortable with quantum theory, and he basically had three gripes with it. The one gripe was that quantum theory is a probabilistic theory. It just describes things like the world is essentially random and governed only by general laws that give the odds for things to happen, but within these odds anything can happen -- that God plays dice. Einstein didn't like that, but he could have lived with that. The second aspect that Einstein didn't like was the thinglessness, this fuzzy ambiguity -- that the world isn't made of things, it's not made of objects. It was put by Paul Davies -- the notion that somehow big things are made of little things. Quantum theory doesn't describe the world that way. Big things aren't made of little things; they're made of entities whose attributes aren't there when you don't look, but become there when you do look. Now, that sounds very, very strange.
MISHLOVE: Like an illusion.
HERBERT: Like an illusion, yes.
MISHLOVE: Or the Hindu concept of Maya, something like that.
HERBERT: That's right. The world exists when we don't look at it in some strange state that is indescribable. Then when we look at it, it becomes absolutely ordinary, as though someone were trying to pull something over our eyes
-- the world is an illusion. Einstein didn't like that. He felt that the big things were made of little things, as the classical physicists thought.MISHLOVE: The Newtonian view of billiard-ball-like particles -- that if you could only understand the momentum and position of each one, you could predict everything in the universe.
HERBERT: Everything in the universe, yes, a comfortable sort of view.
MISHLOVE: You mentioned three things that Einstein objected to; then there must be one more.
HERBERT: Well, the third thing is this interconnectedness. Einstein said the world cannot be like this, because this interconnectedness goes faster than light. With this quantum interconnectedness, two objects could come together, meet, and then each go into the universe, and they would still be connected. Instantaneously one would know what the fate of the other one was. Einstein said, now that can never be; that's like voodoo -- in fact, he used the word -- it's like telepathy, he said; he said it's spooky, it's ghostlike. Almost his last words in his biography were, "On this I absolutely stand firm. The world is not like this." He died in '55, and ten years later Bell showed that the world must be like this. It's kind of ironic. Bell himself said, "My theorem answers some of Einstein's questions in a way that Einstein would have liked the least."
MISHLOVE: And Einstein created a very strange picture of the universe as it is, almost time travel, in his theory of relativity.
HERBERT: Yes, but even Einstein's mind wouldn't go this far, to accept these instant connections, which now we believe really must exist in the universe.
—Interview with Dr. Nick Herbert by Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove on Thinking Allowed, Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery
Quantum interconnectedness in baby-making
If the “normal,” “classical” and “relativistic” views of the world were able to describe all of life’s mysteries, we would have no need of quantum. But they can’t, and this is why we entertain the scientific exploration of reality at new levels.
As I am exploring, learning, and experimenting with the insights coming from the field of quantum biology as they apply to reproductive health, I am also teaching in the new Practitioner’s tier here at Brighter Days, Darker Nights. I’m grateful to everyone who has joined and is following along! If you haven’t already, it’s not too late and you can get in on the video action by signing up here.
In our most recent set of lessons, we have been laying a foundation for the concepts and premises of quantum biology and how they apply to fertility, pregnancy and birth outcomes. Message me if you have questions about the program. I’d love to have you join us if you aren’t in already:
Two quantum concepts I want to introduce to you today:
The known types of quantum communication
How quantum communication is potentially going to help us decode the “crosstalk” that confounds our ability to predict interconnections in biological systems (for example, how does the woman’s body find and send particular extracellular vesicles through the extracellular matrix to nurture particular sperm making their way towards the egg?)
For those in my Practitioner program, this description will reinforce what we talked about last month.
Crosstalk is fascinating, right!?
Quantum communication
We currently know of 4 types of quantum communication: entanglement, superposition, coherence, and tunneling.
These are things we can observe in research, that “normal” science can’t explain. Many people throw these words (entanglement, superposition, coherence and tunneling) around interchangeably, but within the scientific community each has very specific meanings.
Quantum crosstalk
Crosstalk (sometimes cross talk or cross-talk) is a word that describes “unwanted”communication between systems. In biology, it often refers to systems where communication is happening, but scientists can’t figure out the exact mechanisms. So crosstalk usually applies to interactions between two or more complicated systems where there are overlapping areas of communication feedbacks happening, and our current understanding can’t explain in a linear fashion how all this is happening.
For example, in reproduction, there is “crosstalk” in the fertilization process and when trying to optimize reproduction, we don’t currently have particular levers we can pull to affect the fertilization outcomes that will universally have the same effect:
From the quantum perspective, crosstalk is one of the things we hope to understand through quantum research. And you don’t have to be into reproductive health for this to matter—most modern diseases show significant amounts of crosstalk.
TLDR: We know a lot about health and reproduction, but we don’t know everything! Our growing comfort with ambiguity—with multiple interpretations being correct—is collectively leading us to ever greater clarity into the quantum strangeness that makes one thing/intervention/trick/shift/change work for one individual or couple, and not for the next.