This is an article I had published in Indigo Sun Magazine about six years ago.
Because I gragually changed from agnostic to spiritual healer due to having read a book on quantum physics and mechanics about 18 years prior to writing this article, I am hugely excited about what I am about to tell you. This week a friend in Florida forwarded me an article on the eminent physicist John Wheeler. The original article is in Discover Magazine, June, 2002.
John Wheeler, a colleague of Albert Einstien and Niels Bohr, is the man who coined the term "black hole" to describe the dense objects which trap light that we now believe are common across the Universe. He turned ninety last July. This man is one of the giants of 20th Century physics. He has spent a lifetime making fundamental contributions in areas from cosmology to atomic physics. The rest of his time on the planet will be spent working on one idea. Why does the Universe exist? Wheeler believes that in order to answer that we must attend to a strange aspect of modern physics. At the very most fundamental levels, our observations influence our Universe. The boundaries between personal, subjective consciousness and the objective world blurs in quantum physics. What the experimenters see depends upon how they set up their experiments. A scientist's observations determine if an atom of light behaves like an undulating wave or a solid particle, or what route it traverses moving from one spot to the next.
John Wheeler believes that our observations may actually contribute to the creation of reality. He believes that we are not just observers on a cosmic stage, but creaors within a participating Universe. The Universe may be built like a huge feedback loop. We are contributing to the ongoing creation of not just the now and future, but the past, too. He is not just speculating; experiments have been conducted using light and film to record the behavior of the light. Changes in the behavior of light have been observed not only in the lab, but changes have been observed in the bahavior of light coming from billions of years ago in outer space. If the scientists decide to measure the light, it behaves like a particle. If not, it behaves like a wave. The difference shows in the pattern the light makes on the photographic film that is being used to record the experiments. This includes light that left its distant source before the Earth had living organisms on it, billions of years ago. So the scientists are changing the behavior of light originating in the past by deciding to measure it in the now. They have even set up in the lab an experiment that proves that the behavior of the light changes from wave to particle enroute at the point where the physicists made their measurements, even though the light had already left its source.
What this may mean is that "particles exist in many possible states at one time, travelling in every possible direction, not quite real and solid until it interacts with something, say a piece of mica in Earth's crust." When that happens, one of those many different probable outcomes becomes real." At every moment the Universe is filled with "huge clouds of uncertainty that have not yet interacted" with anything at all, much less a conscious being. This also means tha the Universe is a vast area filled wth realms in which the past is as yet not fixed. This is a clue, according to Wheeler, that the secret to the mystery of creation might not be in the distant past, but in the now. It is this viewpoint that gives him the hope that this question of why the Universe exists can be answered.
If I ever had any doubt that we are Co-creators with the Universe, John Wheeler's work erases that doubt for me. The reader, of course, must draw his/her own conclusion.
