The direction of last things

The direction of last things

I’m writing this piece on the first day after Easter Sunday. Most will know this is the most important and oldest festival of the Christian Church, celebrating the resurrection of Christ. For me, it also marks the passing of a close family friend after a long illness. It’s times like today that urge us to reflect about life, the meaning of life, and the role religion plays when facing death.

Aldous Huxley once wrote most human beings behave as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor. But what happens when you realize the rumor is true. Many see death as a new beginning. We say a person passed away. In Judaism for example the word 'death' is avoided altogether since the person's soul does not ever die. Instead, it passes away or passes on to a different plane of reality, a spiritual realm.

Not all of us have a strong religious predilection and yet the idea of saints and sinners, heaven and hell still shape our thinking. What will lead and inspire us in a world free of all gods. How can an atheist find meaning in life.  How can we face death without the comfort of the afterlife.

More and more people today believe there is no God. Religious values, however, have dominated our lives for hundreds of years and still have a hold over us. What can reason and science offer us in the place of religion.  To bring comfort in the face of death, help us tell right from wrong. Or provide meaning in an indifferent and uncaring world. If there is no God, what is the meaning of life. What’s the point.

One of the oddest reactions to facing up to life without God was that of the Great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. He was bought up Christian and as a young man lost his faith. He had wealth, a family and a celebrity status thanks to his novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina. But in his late forties he began to question everything. Tolstoy was in despair and staring down into an abyss of suicidal depression – he could find no answer to what tormented him. Why do I live? Is there any meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the inevitability of death?

Perhaps this is part of the explanation why religion evolved in the first place. It satisfied our desperate desire to find meaning and order in the chaos.  Is it possible that evolutionary science tells us a lot about ageing and death.  If we look at death from a genes point of view our bodies become nothing more than a kind of a survival machine for genes. Once our genes get us to a reproductive age and copy themselves into a new generation, our bodies began to have less purpose. Time bombs inside us go off. We age – we die. So rather than looking upon ageing as the wearing out of our body perhaps we should see it as a side effect of how our genes work.

And whilst talking about evaluation - evolutionary psychology suggests that we have evolved a sense of a separate mind or soul because it’s useful to us. A soul that’s in control of us.  An executive function makes it difficult for us to shake off the religious way of death. We are programmed to believe in something such as a soul.

God and the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser – he may never be able to see the wave-like nature of reality.

In the last few months pretty much all the available time I have – I’ve been thinking about the implications of the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser. All my life I understood the double-slit experiment to need ran observer in order to collapse the wave-like nature of reality. I have, as perhaps others, never grasped the deeper, the more subtle implication – the idea that:-

If we can know the path the entangled photon takes, that in itself is enough to bring about a collapse.

In quantum mechanics, the quantum eraser experiment is a double-slit experiment that demonstrates several fundamental aspects of the quantum theory, including quantum entanglement and complementarity. Brian Greene describes the experiment in his recent book The Fabric of the Universe. Consider

“A simple version of the quantum eraser experiment makes use of the double-slit set up, modified in the following way. A tagging device is placed in front of each slit; it marks any passing photon so that when the photon is examined later, you can tell through which slit it passed…when this double-slit-tagging experiment is run, the photons do not build up an interference pattern.

What if just before the photon hits the detection screen, you eliminate the possibility of determining through which slit it passed by erasing the mark imprinted by the tagging device?

As we know, it turns out, that the interference pattern shows up again. Which, is unexpected, counter initiative and strange to say the least.  But again it gets even stranger with the delayed-choice quantum eraser. Greene describes it thus,

It begins with [the set-up of the quantum eraser], modified by inserting two so-called down-converters, one on each pathway. Down-converters are devices that take one photon as input and produce two photons as output, each with half the energy (“down converted”) of the signal. One of the photons (called the signal photon) is directed along the path that the original would have followed toward the detector screen. The other photon produced by the down-converter (called the idler photon) is sent in a different direction altogether. On each run of the experiment we can determine which oath a signal photon takes to the screen by observing which down-converter spits out the idler photon partner. And once again, the ability to gleen which-path information about the signal photons– even though it is totally indirect, since we are not interacting with any signal photons at all– has the effect of preventing an interference pattern from forming.

So all we know about the signal photon we learn by observing the idler photon. But even so, we get the photons acting like particles. Greene again

What if we manipulate the experiment so as to make it impossible to determine from which down-converter a given idler photon emerged? What if, that is, we erase the which-path information embodied by the idler photon? Well, something amazing happens: even though we’ve done nothing directly to the signal photons, by erasing which-path information carried by their idler partners we can recover an interference pattern from the signal photons.

The implication here is the fact that we can know which slit the photon exits is exactly what causes the interference pattern to collapse. In the double slit experiment it isn’t the detector (the measurement) that collapsing the waveform. It is that fact that we can know that collapses the wave.

Now if a God can always knows which-path information a photon is to pass, he/she can therefore never see the interference pattern, the wave like nature of reality will be hidden from such a God.