Quantum theory describes another reality of which Bohr said we must not speak, but science is about asking questions so we wonder what the universe is like when it isn’t being observed:
“Little has been said about the character of the unmeasured state. Since most of reality most of the time dwells in this unmeasured condition …the lack of such a description leaves the majority of the universe … shrouded in mystery.” (Herbert, 1985), p194.
If quantum waves spread at light speed until a physical event restarts them to spread again, physical events are few and far between amidst a constant press of quantum events. By what logic then are these momentary restarts the reality of our universe? Surely reality is what is there most of the time? And if quantum theory is right, most of the time most of our universe exists in an unmeasured state.
If physical events only occur now and then, the rest of the time, physical things aren’t there at all. We see substances that constantly exist but if our world like a hologram that presents when we look, even matter has no substance. Quantum theory implies that the material world is, as Buddhists say, empty of self-existence, because it exists in appearance but not as a permanent thing.
We of course don’t see our world that way, but what if quantum events occur too fast for the gaps to be seen, like a movie but faster. The Dirac equation predicts that electrons have an ultra-fast tremble, called Zitterbewegung, that occurs 1015 times a second, so a quantum foam could flash the events we see faster than can be discerned. Obviously, reality carries on regardless of what we see, but if it is quantum waves, we can’t expect them to act at a rate convenient to our observations.
Yet even our physical world is an ultra-fast hologram, it still reflects the reality around us, so it is real in that sense. This means that when you kick a stone, it still hurts, because that is the lawful result of that act. We don’t need to know how quantum waves work to act in our world, only what we are given when we look, which is their irreversible result. Evolution may then have primed our species to see what we need to survive rather than the truth:
“You may want the truth, but you don’t need the truth. Perceiving truth would drive our species extinct. You need simple icons that show you how to act to stay alive. Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.” (Hoffman, 2020).
According to Hoffman’s interface theory, perceptions are like desktop icons, useful but not true. For example, if you see a blue email icon on a screen, that doesn’t mean the program that made it is blue. Likewise, seeing an object on the screen of space doesn’t mean an object made it. In fact the opposite is expected, as email icons serve to hide users from program details they don’t need to know about. It follows that the objects we see are also helpful icons that hide quantum reality details from us.
Yet if science is the search for truth and quantum theory is true, does evolution incline us against it? Does the evolution that made us now oppose science? It probably does, but hasn’t it always been so? For a long time humanity didn’t know that bacteria cause disease, because we couldn’t see them, until science proved they did. And later, when atoms were proposed, Mach argued that they couldn’t exist because they were unseen, but today we accept them, again thanks to science.
But now, when quantum theory says that what we can’t see causes what we can, again we turn away, saying “Enough! It cannot be.” Even physicists struggle with the idea that the unmanifest causes the manifest. Do the certainties we see come from an unseen set of probabilities? Is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, just a set numbers? This, it seems, is a step too far, even for physics. After two millennia of scientific struggle, do we now abandon what science tells us? Can’t our brains handle the truth? Yet there remains hope because long ago, some of us believed the unbelievable.