I haven’t written about synchronicity yet, but this first paragraph is a good example of it. Today I got this email telling me registration is open now for winter Continuing Studies courses at Stanford. Among the courses highlighted was one on quantum physics, and more specifically quantum entanglement. All the physics I know is based on books that were only somewhat new back in 2001 and 2002, which means the research in them was even older than that. So I’m feeling totally out of the know, now, since apparently, to the uttter shock of all, I’m sure, while I haven’t been looking, new discoveries have continued getting made. Consequently, I’ve just been swimming around online in things like quantum entanglement and teleportation and Bell’s Theorum. I guess none of these are new to the last decade, but I somehow managed never to have heard of them before now, and certainly not the most recent experimentations with them. Because of them, my ideas for a next post have all been turned on their heads.

Here’s what I was going to write about this time: I was going to talk about clairvoyance, and my own experiences with it, and try to theorize how tiny particles could travel distances, instantaneously, between people. I kept getting stalled up on the whys involved in this theorized process, though, like why, for instance, would those of us who seem to recieve these theorized particles recieve them only from certain people, and not everyone, since theoretically everyone is emitting particles all the time. What would determine the “stations” that our “radios” are tuned into, so to speak? (I will say that I have on a couple of occasions felt my dial break, and signals from everyone flood into my brain, and that these have been among the most alarming and disturbing experiences of my life.)

But! Then I read about quantum teleportation, and my mind is now spinning a whole different way. I have to begin what I want to say now by telling you what I’ve just been learning of quantum teleportation. (here is where any physicists reading this blog might need to roll their eyes or make very squeemish, contorted faces and wish I would just stick to fiction writing. And here is where I guess I’d have to say that…well…maybe I am. I think fiction is more deeply true than anything else sometimes.).

So. To explain what I’ve gleaned on quantum teleportation so far, I have to start with quantum entanglement. Apparently, very tiny systems–quantum particles, we might call them–can sometimes get entangled. What entangled means is that something happens to them, some special kind of thing, such that when they get separated, the two systems aren’t distinct entities anymore. They’ve taken on one another’s characteristics so much that now they act almost entirely as one. They’re spatially separate, but not in reality, if that makes sense. I’ve known a few couples like this. And some people with their dogs.

The guy who coined the term “entanglement” says it this way:

When two systems, of which we know the states by their respective representatives, enter into temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them, and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described in the same way as before, viz. by endowing each of them with a representative of its own. I would not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought. By the interaction the two representatives [the quantum states] have become entangled. (Shrodinger, 1935)

Quantum teleportation, then, refers to the nearly simultaneous “communication” that happens between entangled systems. When something happens to one of them, it’s mirrored precisely in the other. Like the other is a copy of the first. And it doesn’t matter how far apart these systems are! Miles, inches: same dif. It’s as if space between them does not exist.

I know I’m still an embryo when it comes to understanding these things, but for the sake of having fun, and maybe actually stumbling into something true, I’m going to let my imagination fly.

What if clairvoyance is nothing more than entangled particles doing their thing? We’ve all heard stories of people knowing things about their loved ones–deaths, injuries, etc.–before they’d have any known reason to know such things. What if there simply are parts of these pairs (each pair being the person “knowing” and the person actually dying or being injured) that are quantumly entangled, so that nothing actually has to cross time or space for the two to experience whatever is being experienced? In effect, at least partially, or on a certain kind of level, the two people aren’t two people. They’re one.

These kinds of experiences seem like they’re reported most often by people who love each other. Maybe love is a quantum entangler. I wonder if love will ever become a variable in physicists’ experiments.

But here is where my mind goes next: What if everyone is quantumly entangled with everything? What if we’re all made from the same stuff, all rooted in some common seed, such that when Buddhists and sages from many traditions, and now the priests of science, no less, speak of oneness, they don’t mean only metaphorically, and they don’t mean only by cause-and-effect ripples that spread infinitely out from every act? What if they mean literally?

Einstein called the very notion of entanglement “spooky action at a distance” and didn’t want to believe it. And the individualism of the Enlightenment and of much in Christendom today wouldn’t want to believe it either. But what if it’s true? What if we are all one, and it’s only the distances we keep believing exist that actually keep us from reading each other’s minds? What if clairvoyance really is what its French roots imply: clear seeing, and this clarity of sight is awakeness to our own limbs, our own bodies, our own minds and extensions that just so happen not to be anywhere nearby?

This is disturbing stuff, at least to me, and I aim to talk more, next time, about how I’ve dealt with my own clairvoyant experiences, and the choice I made a couple years ago to turn my “radio” off.

In the meantime, I would love any book suggestions–related to physics or otherwise, religious or otherwise–that deal with this idea of oneness. I’d like to explore this some more.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 30th, 2006 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Bodies, Philosophy, Bridge-building, Religion/Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.