Quantising Emptiness

Issue #61

There is a famous principle of Buddhism that emphasises that everything is devoid of any internal meaning. Nothing means anything in itself, only relative to something else. The argument goes something like this. For every individual entity that exists in the universe, living or non-living, the causes for its existence always lie outside of it. Even the totality of interconnected and impermanent things itself is a relative concept (relative, say, to our perception). For Buddhists, this realisation of the intrinsic emptiness of everything is meant to be a source of comfort and the point of liberation from suffering.

Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash

There are two things I like about emptiness. One is that Buddhists use this logic to try to avoid the need for postulating an “uncaused cause”. If everything needs a cause, then we quickly run into infinite regression since the chain can never be terminated. Even if, as some physicists might say, the cause for everything we see at present in our universe lies in the Big Bang, a question immediately arises as to what caused the Big Bang itself. Note that postulating God does not necessarily solve the problem, since this then begs the question of what caused God to exist before the Big Bang. Realising this problem, Aristotle postulated that God is the cause of everything, but whose cause for existence also lies within God. That’s why he called God the unmoved mover.

But, as I said, Buddhism found another way to get out of the uncomfortably infinite chain of causes, and it is simply to say that everything is mutually interdependent. It seems to be a more elegant solution than Aristotle’s because it does not need to postulate an exception to the principle that “everything happens for a reason” (aka Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason). Everything happens for an (to it external) reason and even the totality does not exist independently of something else outside of it (if it did, we would be back to Aristotle, and nothing would be resolved) – hence we have an overall emptiness.

The second reason I like the Buddhist relativity is that it goes far beyond the relativity we encounter in physics. In physics, some things are relative, but others are absolute (meaning that they don’t depend on our vantage point). For instance, time is relative to motion, but the time you measure on your own wristwatch is an absolute. Thus, if I am moving with respect to you, my time will pass more slowly than yours (so the passage of time is relative), but everyone in the universe must agree on the rate of my time flow. “Our own time in our own reference frame” is an absolute.

It’s not just relativity that’s relative, as many of my readers will know. Quantum physics is relative too. The states we ascribe to various systems are relative to us. I may think that the state of an atom is excited (one of the electrons has moved from the lowest energy state to one of the higher states), but you may see the state of the atom entangled with me, which means that it has a probability to be excited, but also a probability not to be excited. This is behind the famous Schrödinger’s cat experiment, in which the person inside the box with the cat sees it definitely either dead or alive, while, as far as an outside observer is concerned, the state of the cat is entangled with the internal observer (hence, abusing the language just a bit, the cat is dead and alive). I’ve talked extensively about this in my papers “Observing the observer I and II” as well as in my latest book “Portals to a New Reality”.

Now, the physical relativity, both Einsteinian and quantum, is completely quantitative and therefore has huge predictive power. Consider this: you can never tell whether you are moving at a constant speed, no matter what you do within your own reference (you are not allowed to look outside of the window). This means that, even though your wristwatch ticks more slowly than someone else’s who is stationary, all other processes in your frame have to slow down at exactly the same rate. Prediction: your thought processes are also slower, all your biological processes are slower and your toothache lasts longer, too. Why? Because otherwise you’d be able to tell that you are moving, which the principle of relativity says is prohibited!

Buddhist relativity, on the other hand, is much more radical since it says that there are no absolutes. Both you and your wristwatch lack any essence and only become “real” through your mutual relationship. In fact, even that relationship only acquires meaning through something else and so on. But, the price to pay for this generality is that the Buddhist relativity does not have any quantitative predictions to make. It may be psychologically comforting (though even that is dubious, to say the least), but it lacks the explanatory power of scientific principles.

However, and this is the main point of my blog, could we use the Buddhist logic to relativise more things in physics, but in a quantitative manner? A legendary (now late) physicist, David Finkelstein, definitely thought so. One of his mind-blowing suggestions was to relativise the laws of physics. At present we think of the laws of physics as absolute (to the point that we believe even aliens must be aware of Newton’s laws), but could it be that the laws too are relative to something else? Finkelstein sadly didn’t get a chance to make progress in this direction…but it is a fascinating question to contemplate.

I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t finish with something quantum. Entanglement is a concept that comes very close to emptiness. When two systems are entangled, then their individual properties lack essence (which you can think of as the definiteness of classical physics). The cat is neither dead nor alive and you have neither seen it nor not seen it, but the joint state of you and the cat is still definite (and could be said to possess essence). In the joint state, both options are present simultaneously, the one where the cat is dead and you see that the cat is dead and the other one where the cat is alive and you see it so. One might thus be tempted to say that nothing but entanglement is real.

However, and this twist is worthy of the Buddhist emptiness, even entanglement can lack essence. This is because there are states in quantum physics in which entangled states get themselves entangled. This is known as (no surprises here) entangled entanglement. So, even entanglement can lose its essence because the entangled systems could get entangled with some other systems. We can push this to the edges of the universe and create higher and higher level entanglements; however, surely the ultimate entangled state of everything in the universe would still be real in the sense that there is nothing else it could be entangled to. Could relativising even this state lead us to a generalisation of quantum physics of the kind that Finkelstein was suggesting? I don’t know but I sure feel lucky to be able to earn a living by thinking about problems like this.

Take care,

Vlatko