[Advanced Creation Science]

The suggestion that Darwin’s theory of evolution is like theories in the serious sciences – quantum electrodynamics, say – is grotesque.

David Berlinski

Perhaps the most fundamental principle in physics is quantum theory, and it is this theory that leads to an Intelligent Design inference from a direction quite independent of the arguments offered by Dembski and Behe or even Gonzalez and Richards.

This other form of ID was advocated primarily by physicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler. Their derivation suggests the existence of God, and the existence of God implies Intelligent Design.

Quantum mechanics can be symbolized by Schrodinger’s Equation:

In principle, each component of the universe (sub atomoic particles, molecules, rocks, planets, stars, galaxies, etc.) is a quantum system. Two individual quauntum systems (like two atoms) can be viewed as a single quantum system, and this composite system can be combined with other quantum systems, etc. — one can repeat this combination of quantum systems until one defines a quantum system for the entire universe. That conceptual merging of all quantum systems is represented by the quantum system of the universe, or (for lack of a better term), the Universal Wave Function. Taking the Schrodinger equation and generalizing it for the entire universe, we have the universal wave function as derived by Barrow and Tipler:

where the indexed Psi’s are the individual quantum systems, and the O’s are the “observations”.

In Hofstadter and Dennett’s book, Mind’s Eye, Hofstadter writes:

Perhaps one way to think of the universal WAVE FUNCTION is as the mind - or brain, if you prefer - of the great novelist in the sky

This equation is a parital differential equation. For this equation to be physically actualized, however, boundary conditions must be applied not only in the past but also in the future! The past boundary conditions we might call the Alpha, and the future boundary conditions the Omega. The Alpha and Omega must exist. The Alpha and Omega are thus the ultimate cause of the universe. This is the modern version of the age old argument for God’s existence: Kalaam Cosmological Argument.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of all this is that some Being in the future must be making a measurement in the future to provide constraints so that a solution to the Schrodinger wave equation is actualized. We have a miniature picture of this when we have peformed experiments in the lab where a future measurment influences a past event. This was experimentally confirmed by the Double-Slit Delayed choice experiment.

Jenny Nielsen explains this beautifully in A Report on “The Delayed Choice Experiment”

Not so long ago, scientists were asking themselves the question: Do atoms know when we’re looking at them? Even before this question has been satisfactorily answered, a new question has surfaced: Do atoms know that we’re going to look at them before the event actually occurs? A documented experiment conducted by two prestigious universities actually implies the affirmative.

It’s called the “delayed choice experiment,” and it was originally a thought experiment dreamt up by the great theoretical physicist John Wheeler. It’s a variation on the usual “double-slit” experiment, which proves that when a photon (or electron or photon or any sub-atomic particle) is fire through a sheet with two holes, it creates

an interference pattern on a screen set on the other side as if it had gone through both holes at once and interfered with itself. However, this behavior only seems to occur when the particle is not being watched when it hits the sheet. When a detector is put up to monitor the holes and what comes through, the particle is observed to be going through only one hole–and the interference pattern does not materialize on the screen at the opposite end.

The double-slit experiment is hard enough to understand on its own, even if John Wheeler hadn’t come up with the idea of moving the detector. He had the interesting idea of monitering the particle after it had already made its “chosen” move through the holes, but still before it hits the screen which records the move. According to “common sense” (if one can use common sense in a case like this), since the scientists don’t monitor the particle at the exact moment it is “choosing” whether or not to go through both holes at once, the particle is supposed to go through both the holes at once and cause the interference.

But it doesn’t–not according to the independent experiments carried out by the University of Maryland and the University of Munich. These experiments confirm that the particle actually goes through only a single hole–just as if it had known that it was going to be observed. It makes only a solitary dot on the screen. The little scoundrel anticipates that a detector will be watching him later, and refuses to perform his startling bi-location behavior!

And of course, when the detector is removed, the particle goes through both holes, interferes with itself, and the screen shows the pattern to prove it.
The question now is “do the particles actually know that the scientists will be watching them later?” Or–to look at it a different way–”Do the scientists actually change what the particles did in the past by watching them
in the present?!”

Of course this is altogether maddening to scientists, who have had enough trouble coping with subatomic antics even without having to explain the mysterious prophesying particles. The experiments need to be investigated further before any satisfying conclusions can be drawn. Right there’s talk of using light from quasars bent by “gravitational lenses” to conduct a galactic scale version of the experiment, which would hypothetically provide the most dramatic proof that the experiment always works (or, less likely, that it’s just some sort of international scientific anomaly).

Until then, I’ll chalk it up as just another weird phenomenon of the mysterious quantum world around us.

This curious fact can be extended to galaxies as suggested by the double-slit delayed choice using galactic lenses as pictured here:

John Horgan writes in Quantum Philosophy:

To underscore the weirdness of this effect, Wheeler points out that astronomers could perform a delayed-choice experiment on light from quasars, extremely bright, mysterious objects found near the edges of the universe. In place of a beam splitter and mirrors the experiment requires a gravitational lens, a galaxy or other massive object that splits the light from a quasar and refocuses it in the direction of a distant observer, creating two or more images of the quasar.

Psychic Photons
The astronomers choice of how to observe photons from the quasar here in the present apparently determines whether each photon took both paths or just one path around the gravitational lens-billions of years ago. As they approached the galactic beam splitter the photons must have had something like a premonition telling them how to behave in order to satisfy a choice to be made by unborn beings on a still nonexistent planet.

The fallacy giving rise to such speculations,Wheeler explains, is the assumption that a photon had some physical form before the astronomer observed it. Either it was a wave or a particle; either it went both ways around the quasar or only one way. Actually Wheeler says quantum phenomena are neither waves nor particles but are intrinsically undefined until the moment they are measured. In a sense the British philosopher Bishop Berkeley was right when he asserted two centuries ago that “to be is to be perceived”

For physically actualized systems, it appears then a measurement is essential for the system to be actualized. The measurement made in the future, the process of “knowing”, provides the boundary conditions that define the solution to the Schrodinger equation.

For example, we see measurements defining the boundary conditions of a quantum system such as illustrated by the Nobel Prize winning experiment known as Stern Gerlach. The act of obsevervation “fixes” certain properties of the sytem.

But this “fixing” of properties via observations can be extrapolated not just to things like electron spin but perhaps everything else, even the entire universe, including a universe filled with many phenomenon we associate with classical physics. Barrow and Tipler write in Anthropic Cosmological Prinicple Page 471:

The EPR experiment is a good example of a delayed choice experiment, for in the EPR experiment the experimenter decides which spin component to measure long after the electrons have interacted and separated. One would expect the spin component of the electron would be determined at the time of the interaction rather than at the much later time when the experimenter sets his apparatus to measure the spin component, if it were the interaction rather than the observation which actually determines the spin component of the electron.

Thus it appears that the spin component of the electron is only a ‘latent’ property before the observation: the observation makes the spin component ‘actual’. These latent properties are generally such properties as the electron’s spin, position, and momentum, while the electron’s mass and charge are pictured as ‘actual’ before the observation.

But with the recent success of the unified gauge theory of the weak and electromagnetic interaction in which the electron mass is dependent on the details of symmetry breaking which apparently occurred in the early universe, there is no reason why we should not regard all electron properties as contingent in principle on some sort of observation.

Wheeler points out that according to the Copenhagen interpretation, we can regard some restricted properties of distant galaxies, which we now see as they were billions of years ago, as brought into existence now. Perhaps all properties — and hence the entire Universe is brought into existence by observations made at some point in time by conscious beings. The order in the Universe is brought about in some way by the manner in which these observations are made self-consistent. Wheeler calls a Cosmos arising in this Anthropic manner a ‘Participatory Universe’, hence our definition of Participatory Anthropic Principle in Chapter 1.

However, we ourselves can bring into existence only very small-scale properties like the spin of the electron. Might it require intelligent beings ‘more conscious’ than ourselves to bring into existence the electrons and other particles?

This line of speculation leads naturally to the fourth possibility, that there is some Ulitmate Observer who is in the end responsible for coordinating the separte observations of the lesser observers and is thus responsible from bringing the entire Universe into existence.

John Barrow and Frank Tipler
Anthropic Cosmological Principle

In 1987, John Barrow and Frank Tipler used the word “Ultimate Observer”. The “Ultimate Observer” is:

1. Eternal
2. All Knowing
3. Intelligent
4. All Powerful
5. Conscious
6. Non-Material

Their book was hailed by the prestigious scientific journal Nature. However, in 1996, when Tipler came forward and said the “Ultimate Observer” was to be identified with the Judeo-Christian God, Tipler’s ideas were immediately ridiculed and his pay was cut.

Thankfully, Barrow survived, and received the 1.4 million dollar Templeton Prize in 2006. When Dawkins criticized Barrow’s work, Barrow replied:

You have a problem with these ideas, Richard [Dawkins], because you’re not really a scientist. You’re a biologist.

John Barrow