Lothar Schafer - Infinite Potential: What Quantum Physics Reveals About How We Should Live

A LSO BY L OTHAR S CHFER

In Search of Divine Reality (1997)

Copyright 2013 by Lothar Schfer
Foreword copyright 2013 by Deepak Chopra

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Deepak Chopra Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

DEEPAK CHOPRA BOOKS and colophon
are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the Library of Congress.

eISBN: 978-0-307-98596-5

Jacket design by Michael Nagin
Jacket photography Traumlichtfabrik/Getty Images

v3.1

To Gabriele,

friend of a lifetime,

and our loving children

Introduction
Y OUR C OSMIC P OTENTIAL : B EING P ART OF THE U NIVERSE

Appendix for Chapter 1
O N S INGLE- P ARTICLE I NTERFERENCE AND THE C ONCEPT OF P OTENTIALITY W AVES

Appendix for Chapter 2
H OW THE N ONEMPIRICAL P ART OF R EALITY I S D ISCOVERED IN THE V IRTUAL S TATES OF A TOMS AND M OLECULES

Ideas turn into high drama when they walk on stage and change peoples lives. In physics, traditionally honored as the queen of the sciences, this happens very rarely. No queen is more aloof or enigmatic. When Einstein discovered relativity, it was said (by the English philosopher Bertrand Russell) that only three people in the world understood it. Russells arithmetic wasnt astronomically wrong if you were counting people outside physics. Relativity shook the foundations of three major concepts in the field: time, space, and gravity. The cosmos would never be the samebut peoples everyday lives would.

Lothar Schfer plunks a colorless word on stagepotentialwhich is as mundane as relativity. Its also the seed of an entirely new universe, however, one that Einstein could never accept. The new universe outlined here is conscious. We are thinking creatures because the cosmos thinks. We breathe with life because the primal ingredients of life are embedded in the fabric of Nature. Not just the elements that evolved into organic chemicals. The process of life itself is basic to the universe and has invisibly guided it since the Big Bang. A fan of James Joyces writing once gushed that he used so many words. He replied that it wasnt the words, it was where you put them that matters. The universe has taken its vocabulary of atoms and molecules and arranged them precisely to give rise to human DNA and the human mind. This book tells how and why that happened. We are the expressed potential of creation, the way that Da Vincis Mona Lisa is the expressed potential of his genius.

But its not the science that I want to emphasize first but its human dimensions. No one, including Einstein himself, has had the nerve to subtitle a book, as Lothar Schfer does, What quantum physics reveals about how we should live. It will be scandalous in many quarters that he makes such a statement. Physics is proud not to apply to everyday life. You and I raise a family, pursue our careers, and face our everyday challenges without the slightest need to refer to the equations of Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell. Every cell in the body obeys the principles of physics discovered by these pioneers and others, but the fact that physics speaks in mathematics removes it from the experience of living.

Ironically, the gap widened enormously with the arrival of quantum physics over a century ago. On one side, quantum mechanics revolutionized the concept of the physical universe, turning certainty into probabilities and unseating the very notion of solid particles. But on the other side, everyday life goes on. How can Nature contain two opposite worlds?

The everyday world, which is usually labeled Newtonian, surrounds us through physical objects; our five senses feel, see, and hear what goes on in the Newtonian world. Looking out into space, the vast distances between the stars may awe us, and the empty void may send a shiver through us. But planet Earth is the offspring of a familiar cosmos, in that even the most distant galaxy is a secure physical thing.

The other world, the quantum domain, couldnt be more different. Our five senses cannot detect it. The existence of Natures building blocks begins in virtual reality, that is, in a realm of reality that isnt accessible to our senses. All things are rooted in the unreachable realm of no-thing. That the entire cosmos could arise from a place that is beyond human experience and unknowable, fits amazingly well with a saying from the Vedic scriptures of ancient India: It is that which is inconceivable but by which all things are conceived.

The familiar and the inconceivable. That defines the paradox of modern physics in a word. It is sometimes called the mismatch between the microscopic and the macroscopic, meaning that what holds true at the tiniest scale in Nature, where the visible world emerges out of a realm of invisible forms, does not hold true in our world of plants, animals, rocks, and human beings. Worse, the quantum world is more fundamental. It cannot be dismissed as a queer anomaly. Creation is born here; genesis is now, taking place every nanosecond, with the inconceivable void as our womb.

Even though the conscious mind cannot cross over the border where matter ceases to exist (it is the quantum equivalent of Hamlets undiscoverd country from whose bourne no traveller returns), Schfer argues that we are most at home there. The fact that we are conscious beings derives from the womb of creation, the void that contains nothing we can describe in words. But we cant describe ourselves in words, either. Not when it comes to consciousness. Consciousness simply is. Each person is aware of being aware. In that regard, Hamlet asked the wrong question. Its not To be or not to be? but To be conscious or not to be conscious? As hard as it is to imagine death, its infinitely harder to imagine having no mind.

The mind is maker of reality. It doesnt look on Nature like a customer looking in a department store mirror, intrigued by a reflection. You and your reality are one. If a sunset looks beautiful in your eyes, nothing in physics or biology can explain why. Certain wavelengths of light strike the retina of your eye. Electrical and chemical signals travel along the optic nerve, reaching the visual cortex in the occipital lobe. Going through several stages of neural processing, the photons that began as emissions from the sun become a sunset.