Quantum Mysticism

Quantum mysticism is a term that has been used to refer to a set of metaphysical beliefs and associated practices that seek to relate consciousness, intelligence, or mystical world-views to the ideas of quantum mechanics and its interpretations. The term originally emerged from the founders of quantum theory in the early twentieth century as they debated the interpretations and implications of their nascent theories, which would later evolve into quantum mechanics, and later after World War II, with publications such as Schrödinger's and Eugene Wigner’s 1961 paper. The essential qualities of early quantum theory, and the ontological questions that emerged from it, made a distinction between philosophical and scientific discussion difficult as quantum theory developed into a strong scientific theory. Quantum Mysticism is popularly considered pseudoscience. Many of the leading Quantum physicists did however give mystical interpretations to their findings.

David Bohm was deeply influenced by Jiddu Krishnamurti, crediting him as a source for understanding the worldview he proposed in his interpretation of Quantum Mechanics that he put forth in Wholeness and the Implicate Order (his first footnote credited Krishnamurti's book Freedom from the Known - a treatise putting forth a distilled rendition of apophatic mysticism), and had a series of in depth dialogues with him that were published in the book The Ending of Time. In On Creativity, he wrote of Krishnamurti, "I got to know Krishnamurti in the early sixties. I became interested around that time in understanding the whole thing more deeply. I felt that he was suggesting that it is possible for a human being to have some kind of contact with this whole . I don't think he would want to use the word 'God' because of its limited associations." The Harvard historian Juan Miguel Marin noted also the "“lucid mysticism,” a synthesis between rationality and religion" favored by Wolfgang Pauli, that Pauli "speculated that quantum theory could unify the psychological/scientific and philosophical/mystical approaches to consciousness". He further noted:

Among contemporary quantum field theories, the important gauge theories are indebted to the work of Weyl and Pauli. Yet many physicists today would be shocked if they learned how Weyl and Pauli understood the concept ‘field’ when they wrote their classic articles. They were both immersed in mysticism, searching for a way to unify mind and physics. Weyl published a lecture where he concluded by favoring the Christian-mathematical mysticism of Nicholas of Cusa. Moreover, Pauli's published article on Kepler presents him as part of the Western mystical tradition ... For those who do not favor the Copenhagen interpretation and prefer the alternative proposed by David Bohm, I would suggest reading Bohm's many published dialogues on the topic of Eastern mysticism ... Eddington and Schrödinger, like many today, joined forces to find a quantum gravity theory. Did their shared mysticism have a role to play in whatever insights they gained or mistakes they made? I do not know, but I think it's important to find out. —Juan Miguel Marin, "'Mysticism' in Quantum Mechanics: The Forgotten Controversy" in European Journal of Physics 30 (2009), as quoted by Lisa Zyga in "Quantum Mysticism: Gone but Not Forgotten"

Marin noted that Albert Einstein, though he claimed belief in Spinoza's God remained opposed to some of the novel mystical formulations of Pauli and his colleagues. Wolfgang Pauli was strongly against pseudoscience, severely criticizing unfalsifiable theories, coining, when referring to them, the phrase: Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch! ("Not only is it not right, it's not even wrong!") Nevertheless, his findings in Quantum physics led, in his view, to mystical interpretations.

According to Marin, the opposition to mystical interpretations of Quantum Mechanics that Einstein and others had stemmed from their adherence to the philosophical school of realism. Yet in the 2007 Nature paper An experimental test of non-local realism, Anton Zeilinger and his colleagues wrote that, "Most working scientists hold fast to the concept of ‘realism’—a viewpoint according to which an external reality exists independent of observation. But quantum physics has shattered some of our cornerstone beliefs. According to Bell’s theorem, any theory that is based on the joint assumption of realism and locality (meaning that local events cannot be affected by actions in space-like separated regions) is at variance with certain quantum predictions. Experiments with entangled pairs of particles have amply confirmed these quantum predictions, thus rendering local realistic theories untenable. Maintaining realism as a fundamental concept would therefore necessitate the introduction of ‘spooky’ actions that defy locality. Here we show by both theory and experiment that a broad and rather reasonable class of such non-local realistic theories is incompatible with experimentally observable quantum correlations. In the experiment, we measure previously untested correlations between two entangled photons, and show that these correlations violate an inequality proposed by Leggett for non-local realistic theories. Our result suggests that giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are abandoned." Professors Richard Conn Henry and Stephen R. Palmquist, commenting on that paper, stated: "Now we are beginning to see that quantum mechanics might actually exclude any possibility of mind-independent reality and already does exclude any reality that resembles our usual concept of such (Aspect: 'it implies renouncing the kind of realism I would have liked')." They concluded their commentary by adding that in their view, because of these findings, "a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism." Nonlocality is a concept in physics, previously known as action at a distance.