Anyone who is not shocked by Quantum Theory has not understood it. —Niels Bohr, father of Quantum Theory Ron gives us a crash course in Quantum Theory and explains why it has profound implications for our understanding of reality and Creation's everlasting significance.

1. How to Design an
Eternal Universe
1

2. Psalm 19
1 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of
his hands.
2 Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal
knowledge.
3 They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from
them.
4 Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of
the world.
7 The law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul.
The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple.
8 The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart.
The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes.
9 The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever.
The decrees of the Lord are firm, and all of them are righteous.
2

3. Genesis 1: 31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.
And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.
3

4. More to Come… Not Less!
Hebrews 2
5 It is not to angels that he has subjected the world to come, about which we are speaking. 6 But there is a place
where someone has testified:
“What is mankind that you are mindful of them,
a son of man that you care for him?
7 You made them a little lower than the angels;
you crowned them with glory and honor
8 and put everything under their feet.”
1 Corinthians 2
6 We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age
or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. 7 No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery
that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. 8 None of the rulers
of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
9 However, as it is written:
“What no eye has seen,
what no ear has heard,
and what no human mind has conceived”—
the things God has prepared for those who love him—
4

5. Boring!
5

6. 1 Corinthians 15
The Resurrection Body
35 But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they
come?” 36 How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. 37 When you
sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of
something else.
42 So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it
is raised imperishable; 43 it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in
weakness, it is raised in power; 44 it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.
46 The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual. 47 The
first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven. 48 As was the
earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also
are those who are of heaven. 49 And just as we have borne the image of the earthly
man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man.
50 I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the
kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. 51 Listen, I tell you a
mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— 52 in a flash, in the
twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be
raised imperishable, and we will be changed. 53 For the perishable must clothe itself
with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.
6

7. A SEED
7

8. Democritus 460 BC
8
“We are survival machines – robot
vehicles blindly programmed to preserve
the selfish molecules known as genes.”
― Richard Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene (2,500 Years Later)
Just As Boring!!!

9. Geometry
Relativity
9

10. EinsteinNewton
10

11. Erwin Schrodinger: Nature and the Greeks 1954
“Until not very long ago… scientists used to be
content with… the primary qualities [such as]
extension, motion, matter… these primary qualities
were thought to be the extract, the true and
unshakeable, distilled by reason from the direct
yield of our sense data. This view is, of course, no
longer acceptable, since we have learnt from the
theory of relativity (if we did not know it before)
that space and time, and the shape and motion of
matter in space and time, are an elaborate and
hypothetical construction of the mind, not at all
unshakable...”
11

12. Quantum Theory: The Matter Myth
12
If we compress all the void out of a
human being so that there is only
protons, neutrons and electrons in
physical contact, the resulting object
would only be visible under a
microscope.

13. Atoms: Conceptual Model to help order and
manipulate certain types of our experiences:
heating, combining, dissolving…
13

14. Atomic Reductionism
.
14

15. Mereology: the abstract study of the relations between
parts and wholes. The whole is just the sum of its parts.
15

16. Merelogical Fallacy: Emergent Hierarchies
16

17. God’s Lego Set – Fatalistic and Boring!
17

18. In Classical Physics, Uncertainty or Mystery
is Epistemological, NOT Ontological
Uncertainty exists only because our
Senses or Measurement techniques
need refining and improving. It is
theoretically possible to build a
measuring system that can predict the
outcome of a coin toss.
18

19. How to design an Eternal Universe
? 19

20. If the electron is a particle, or piece of what we call
matter [Lego!], we would expect it behave like a golf ball.
It should have the characteristics of a solid object which
exists and moves through space and time.
20
No dropping
out of reality
And re-appearing here

21. Lets do the same thing with water:
Interference Pattern Characteristic of Waves
Doesn’t work for individual water droplets
21

22. Now Light
22

23. Area of unknown ontology. We don’t
know what is happening in here.
Now Electrons
Not like a water wave
Let’s try one at a time
23

24. Initially appears random
Still appears random
Interference pattern emerges
More hits at the measuring device
Wave/Particle duality demonstrated
24
WecanonlyevermeasureParticles

25. Is Matter a Wave or Particle?
Both at the Same Time!
25

26. Delayed Choice Double Slit Experiment
26

27. Electrons are “shape shifters”…they change their behaviour depending on how we
choose to measure them: Backward Causation, Instantaneous Collapse into a
Particle, Instantaneous Reconstitution into a Wave, Violate Relativity and Locality.
27

28. Quantum Theory demonstrates that the foundational elements of
matter are totally mysterious between measurements, and only
enter space and time once we measure, or collapse them.
Classical Particle Quantum Wave Classical Particle
28

29. Epistemological Problem –
Easy!
Ontological Problem i.e. The
Measurement Problem!
Quantum Stuff
29

30. QUANTUM STUFF
Measurement Probability Matrix:
Heisenberg
Measurement Probability
Wave: Schrodinger
Quantum Theory Is A Theory About Measurement NOT Ontology
30

31. When do Matter Waves Become Particles?
When they are Measured!
But What Constitutes a Measurement?
Quantum Stuff
Measurement
31

32. 32

33. Then came Quantum theory, which totally transformed our image of
matter. The old assumption that the microscopic world of atoms was
simply a scaled-down version (Mereology!) of the everyday world had
to be abandoned. Newton's deterministic machine was replaced by a
shadowy and paradoxical conjunction of waves and particles, governed
by the laws of chance, rather than the rigid rules of causality. An
extension of the quantum theory goes beyond even this; it paints a
picture in which solid matter dissolves away, to be replaced by weird
excitations and vibrations of invisible field energy. Quantum physics
undermines materialism because it reveals that matter has far less
"substance" than we might believe.
— Paul Davies and John Gribbin, The Matter Myth, Chapter 1
33

34. In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally
significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our
experience of the everyday world. It isn't just that Bohr’s atom with its electron
“orbits” is a false picture, all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we
can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms,
nothing else.
Sir Arthur Eddington summed up the situation brilliantly in his book The Nature of
the Physical World, published in 1929. “No familiar conceptions can be woven
around the electron,” he said, and our best description of the atom boils down to
“something unknown is doing we don’t know what.” He notes that this “does not
sound a particularly illuminating theory. I have read something like it elsewhere;
The slithy toves
Did gyre and gimbal in the wabe”
… as Eddington pointed out more than fifty years ago, all the fundamentals of physics
could be translated into “Jabberwocky”.There would be no loss of meaning, and
conceivably a great benefit if we broke the instinctive association in our minds of
atoms with hard spheres and electrons with tiny particles.
John Gribbin
34

35. Descartes founded the image of the human mind as a sort of
nebulous substance that exists independently of the body.
Much later, in the 1930s, Gilbert Ryle derided this dualism in a
pithy reference to the mind part as “the ghost in the machine”.
Ryle articulated his criticism during the triumphal phase of
materialism and mechanism. The machine he referred to was
the human body and the human brain, themselves just parts
of the larger cosmic machine. But already, when he coined
that pithy expression, the new physics was at work,
undermining the world view on which Ryle’s philosophy was
based. Today, on the brink of the twenty-first century, we can
see Ryle was right to dismiss the notion of the ghost in the
machine - not because there is no ghost, but because there is
no machine.
Paul Davies & John Gribbin
35

36. Quantum Mechanics … considers both the atom and the measuring
device to be incomprehensible. We cannot understand the quantum
world because its nature is utterly alien to human
thought…Quantum theory predicts how a classical measuring
instrument will respond to a quantum system, but the theory itself
does not contain such measuring devices - nothing in there but
proxy waves. Fortunately for the practice of physics, each of us is
born into a world already inhabited by these inexplicable measuring
devices: your eye is one example.
In other words, the Old Physics attempted to explain macroscopic
objects in terms of the atoms which make them up; the New Physics
explains atoms in terms of macroscopic objects. In this inverted
Copenhagen scheme, there is a sense in which atoms are made of
measuring instruments and not the other way around.
One of the main facts of life is that we radically change whatever
we observe. Legendary King Midas never knew the feel of silk or a
human hand after everything he touched turned to gold. Humans are
stuck in a familiar Midas-like predicament: we can’t directly
experience the true texture of reality because everything we touch
turns to matter.
Nick Herbert
36

37. The Weirdness of Quantum Mechanics
If the world is one substance, as satisfying
as this discovery may be to philosophers, it
is profoundly disturbing to physicists as long
as they do not understand the nature of that
substance. For if quantumstuff is all there is
and you don’t understand quantumstuff, your
ignorance is complete.
Nick Herbert
37

38. We have reached a very interesting position. Ever since the beginning of modern science four or
five
hundred years ago, scientific thought seems to have moved man and consciousness further from
the centre of things. More and more of the universe has become explicable in mechanical,
objective terms, and even human beings are becoming understood scientifically by biologists and
behavioural scientists. Now we find that physics, previously considered the most objective of all
sciences, is reinventing the need for the human soul and putting it right at the centre of our
understanding of the universe!
Alternatively, others have suggested that the world is observed, not only by ourselves, but by
another eternal conscious being, whom we might as well call ‘God’. The idea that God has a role
in ensuring the continual existence of objects that are not being observed by human beings is
actually quite an old one and led to the following nineteenth-century limerick:
There once was a man who said, “God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there’s no one about in the quad”.
Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd
I am always about in the quad
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by, yours faithfully, God
Alastair Rae
38
Hebrews 1
2 …in these last days he has spoken to us
by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all
things, and through whom also he made
the universe. 3 The Son is the radiance of
God’s glory and the exact representation
of his being, sustaining all things by his
powerful word.