Shocking Link Between QUANTUM MECHANICS and CONSCIOUSNESS Unveiled by a Nuclear Physicist! EP 390

You know you need something, you're just not sure what. You've been listening, you're doing the work, but there's still this feeling that you're circling the same place, like you're waiting for the thing that finally moves you. Now maybe you've thought about working with me one-on-one. Maybe something's held you back, the timing, the money, or you're just not sure you're ready yet.

I get that.

And I want you to know there's still a place for you. I built a resource for exactly this moment, guided meditations for when the waves hit and you just need to breathe. Workbooks to help you get out of your head and onto the page, ebooks on what near-death experiences tell us about the people we've lost, and whether they're really gone, a full course for widows and widowers who are ready to find their way back to living, and a full course for the evidence of the afterlife. And all of it is available for pay what you want. Nobody gets turned away because of money. I think these resources are valuable, but I don't want to hold them back because you don't have the money to pay for them. You don't have to wait until you're ready for coaching. The next step might be a lot smaller than you think. To find out, go to grief2growth.com/store. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/store. And check out the resources I've made for you. Close your eyes and imagine. What are the things in life that cause us the greatest pain? The things that bring us grief are challenges, challenges designed to help us grow, to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we've been buried. But what if, like a seed, we've been planted? And having been planted, we grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes. Open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature. This is Grief to Growth. And I am your host, Brian D Smith. Eric Dumas grew up in Antwerp, Belgium, and studied physics and mathematics at the University of Antwerp. He's been a student of Hatha yoga since he was 17. He studied philosophical religious texts on world religions, including the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, from— for which he learned Sanskrit. That led to a practice of Ashtanga yoga until today. After his PhD in computational nuclear physics, he moved to Florida in 1985 to study the quantum theory project at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Georgia. He ended up working there for several decades building computer models of chemical reactions. Since 2011, he's the director of the Department of University of Florida Information Technology Research Computing, which supports all high-performance research computing activities and research and education on University of Florida's supercomputer, HyperGator. So Eric has been studying quantum mechanics since 1976. So when people talk about quantum mechanics, This is a guy, Dr. Dumanz, who knows what he's talking about. But even after all that studying of yoga, of the physical world, quantum mechanics, etc., he had a big change when his wife passed away a few years ago. And he realized that he wasn't really well-rounded in terms of his life. And that's what we're going to talk about in this interview. The idea of spiritual versus physical and how we bring those two things together and how we need both to be a well-rounded person.

So with that, I'm going to introduce you to the, the interview with Dr.

Eric Duhemans.

Well, I saw your interview. I forgot who it was with, and I really was intrigued by what you said.

So I appreciate you coming on.

Ken Marks. Ken Marks.

Yeah. Ken Marks. Yeah. I really appreciate your perspective. So I'm looking forward to sharing that with my audience today.

Yeah, I'm happy to do that. These are things that I've been working on all my life. Somehow I got on this two-track pursuit. One is physics and math, and the other one is spiritual exploration.

That's awesome.

I love that. And the spiritual exploration started really, you know, I grew up in Belgium, Catholic environment., and I was an altar boy. And, but I just, by the time I was 9, 10 years old, I felt that they didn't have the right answers. They weren't asking the right questions and they didn't have the right answers. Sort of like, well, do this and shut up. Mm-hmm. And so that's how I got open to investigate other things. And that happened at the same time that I was also scientifically intrigued. Somehow my mom or my godmother bought me a really nice book in that time. So that was around the early 1964, 1963 or something about the The, the Universe, and it had lots of beautiful pictures. And, and at that time there was a lot of advance in astronomy and astrophysics things because we had some new satellites. Mount Palomar came online. And so that book then summarized for the general public, including kids like myself, what, what stuff was happening. And I was just totally fascinated by that. And then of course we also had the the space exploration, you know, going on. So I was just totally fascinated by the science and I wanted to be an astronaut and go and travel to the planets, you know, make a fast spaceship. And then I learned in one of these books about Einstein and the special theory of relativity that you couldn't go faster than light. And so that's where I sort of decided, wow, that's, that's not good. Because if I wanted to go to any of these other stars, my dream was to go to the Andromeda Nebula because I thought it was a beautiful Milky Way and it was 2 million light years away. That means it takes 2 million years even at the speed of light. You know, that's just not gonna happen. So I, I determined that I was going to investigate and prove Einstein wrong and make a spaceship that could go faster than the speed of light.

That would be cool.

So that's, that's how I got on that, that track, sort of.

Yeah. And then you, uh, you majored in physics, right?

Yeah, I, I, I went to college and I, I took, uh, uh, physics and I also took math. And, and then I did my master's in, in physics, general theory of relativity. And then I did my PhD in, uh, quantum chemistry in nuclear physics, actually.

Wow.

And computational nuclear physics. And that's how I fell in love with computers. And so my professional life has been science and computers. But at the same time, I was always exploring this yoga path of figuring out spiritual, you know, what's the truth here? And you have all these people saying things. And I also felt, because I was very familiar with science and how you do the scientific thinking and making your argument, it always sort of struck me that some of the people who are talking about spiritual matters like to call in scientific things that they heard or read about in the popular press as evidence and support for their spiritual views of the world. And I always felt that they were off the mark. The majority of them are like totally off the mark. And that, that is something that I always wanted to figure out more precisely. Well, how do you explain this better? So that the general public and the people who are in spiritual matters, but not licensed physicists or mathematicians, can understand that there is a big difference and that these things that sort of from a scientific, in the scientific popular literature, are described that they don't match to the spiritual. And you can't say, oh, that's evidence that this is, you know, like, like some of the stuff in quantum mechanics happens. And then people say, oh, this is evidence that the world is the spiritual worldview is correct, or is supported by this scientific thing. And it's not— it doesn't work that way because people use the same words, but the people who use them within the field of expertise attach very different meanings to them.

Okay. Can you give me an example?

Yeah.

Well, uh, we, we can get into some examples, but one of the things that I want to sort of put is that Communication, and there are people who study the theory of communication, but when it really comes down to it, it's just a matter of tokens. When you have a language and you have words, it's a token. And we agree that that token means something, and what it means has to be connected to your personal experience. If you don't have any experience of being weightless and I try to explain to you what weightless means, then it's not going to be very well understood. Or if you've never eaten something that's really sour and I talk about something that's sour, you're just going to make some extrapolation and I can make some analogy. I can come up with some roundabout description, but you're never really going to get it until you have that experience. And that's where you have an example. So let me talk about an example, and it's the word energy.

Yeah.

Right. So energy has— is used in a lot of contexts. But for our discussion, there are two meanings that— or two uses that are important. One is In the scientific community, there is definitely energy. Uh, physics has a very clear definition of energy, and it's called kinetic energy, potential energy. There's a formula for it. And what it means is that if you have something like a car that's driving, you need energy to get it moving. And then once it is moving, it has energy that gets released when it runs into like a tree or something else. And then in, in sort of human life, we also talk about energy. And clearly some of that energy is the same. Like if you are picking up a glass with your arm, your body has to supply energy to the muscles and there are all kinds of chemical reactions that happen and, and things in your muscles, they contract. And energy gets conveyed to that glass, and the glass then really fights against the force of gravity that wants to keep it down, and you manage to lift it up and you can drink. That is the correct meaning of energy that relates directly to the way energy is used in physics or science or engineering.

Mm-hmm.

But at the same time, you can wake up in the morning and just feel like, wow, I'm tired. I don't have any energy today. And that energy is very different from the— there's some relation that if you have been running a marathon, at the very end, your body is depleted of energy and you're tired, and it's the physical energy that's gone. But as a matter of fact, many of the runners, when they get their runner high, they, they just finish their run in the morning. They are tired. Their energy reserves in their body are depleted and they need to eat some and drink some. But they actually feel really good. So they actually feel all energetic and many of them actually say, I'm not, I'm ready for the day. That notion of energy is very different. And that's what Eastern philosophies are calling chi or prana. Right.

Right.

But they're not the same. And we have some awareness of them. We can feel them. And there are people who can more expertly control them in their bodies. And you can use them in Reiki to do some healing and all that kind of stuff. But it's not the energy of physics. And it's not the energy of engineering. It's not the energy of cars. It's not the energies that take the spacecraft to launch and get into space. And but then when these spiritual people talk about energy, they say, oh, there's this statement being made in the physics literature. And they didn't really study, they don't have a degree in physics. And they say, oh, it sounds just the same as what I was saying, that I feel really good after I meditate. So, yeah, but they really, they should, they shouldn't use the same word. But of course, in language, we cannot be that precise and invent a new word. Right. So we give double meanings to multiple words and the context is important. So that's what I'm trying to say. And energy is a beautiful example. But there are multiple things like that.

Yeah.

Where people then make extrapolations because something sounds like a really nice catchy sentence. And then they say, oh, that catchy sentence sounds exactly like the catchy sentence in this completely different domain of spiritual awareness. And then you equate them and you say they're the same. See, they now prove that it's the same. It's like, well, you can't say that. You're just misleading everybody. It's not helpful.

Well, that's a really good point because I think we've all heard in the spiritual community that they'll say, well, science says energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Therefore, we are eternal beings because we are energy. And that's, that's the way I've heard it. And I agree, my degree is in chemical engineering, not nearly as, as deep as you, but yeah, these are two different types of, of energy. Um, but I think there is some things, I think, and I think you might agree, there's some things in quantum mechanics that do indicate that the universe is not as, as simple as our materialist friends have told us it is.

Um, I don't agree with that.

Okay.

Because there is actually a problem with quantum mechanics or with the way we talk about quantum mechanics. And this is an interesting year to do this because the, all the physics societies in the world have agreed that 2025 next year is the 100-year anniversary of quantum mechanics.

Mm-hmm.

So there's going to be a lot of people talking about it. What happened in 2025 and 2026— in 1925 and 1926 is that people came up with a mathematical formalism of how to do calculations about the quantum world. But somehow, because of the dominant role that Bohr had, people did not investigate as deeply as they should how do we talk about these mathematical formulas. So people now memorize these formulas or they work with them and, and it takes a lot of study and they still use essentially words from classical physics that were created and refined since Newton. Without really recognizing that we need to do this more deeply and more precisely. But Bohr was so eager to try and get a final saying and agreement among the physicist community that we have— it's done, the theory is done. Because with Einstein's accomplishment of special relativity and general relativity, he came up with some brand new concepts but they were so clear and they were not as disruptive as the quantum concepts. So within a very short time after people discussed about it, they all agreed, yep, this is the way it is. In quantum mechanics, that was not the case. And actually, the young Heisenberg has— if you read some of the literature and some of the letters that he said and the discussions he had with Einstein and Bohr and others, He was open to say, look, we have this mathematics and this mathematics is not clear. And some of the way that we talk about it doesn't really accurately map to what we do mathematically. So there are two different— they're a little bit disconnected. And that leads to all kinds of misunderstandings. But somehow in the two years after 1925, He, and because he was a young student, PhD student, and Bohr was his mentor, and Bohr sort of talked him out of it. And then he basically fell in line and followed Bohr's dogma and never argued with it again. But what has happened over in the 100 years since, there are several occasions where we found that people said, okay, if you think about it and use the the concepts and the words that Bohr tells us to use, we are going to expect this to happen. And then they did the experiment and it didn't happen that way. Then people started to look at it more carefully and more deeply. And they did the mathematical calculations and they went, oh, actually the mathematics doesn't say it. Our words misled us and the mathematics comes out exactly the way the experiment is. But somehow that dichotomy has never been resolved. And people are still trying to use the words and the concept because it's easier and quicker than you have to sit down and do all these mathematical calculations. And even in the last decade, when people are building these quantum computers, there are several things. Now you have to do some very fine engineering of equipment and pieces of machine, and they all have to work exactly like like they need to work in order to make it be a quantum computer.

Right.

And they start out with some vague concepts because that's typically the way we start. And then they go to the lab and they try to make it and it doesn't work. And then they need to go back to the drawing board and do some more math. And then finally they figure out how to do it. And it's been a challenge. And that is because we're not talking about it correctly. Now, that's— that talking about quantum mechanics is what is reflected in the popular press. And that is why people who have these spiritual visions saying, oh, there is a match, but that match is disconnected from the mathematical formulation and is not in agreement with experiment. And so it's not— it sounds good, but it's just some interpretation that somebody makes up and it has no substance.

Interesting. So is there anything quantum mechanics can tell us about spirituality? Is there any connection at all?

Uh, in some ways, the way you have to think of it is you have— the world is realized in awareness or consciousness, and everything that is sort of the material realization, the world that we live in, is governed by the laws of physics, including quantum mechanics. And that's just the mechanics of the world that we live in. Okay, so very much by definition or by construction, almost, it is not consciousness. It comes out of consciousness, but it's not consciousness. Consciousness is realized and incarnates in the physical world, which has these laws. And the laws provide some restriction, but they are not fully restrictive so that you can still act out and do the thing that we are supposed to do as awareness and as souls, which is learning. So the way you should think of it is that physics and the material world is like the building, and the souls and the people are going into these buildings to learn stuff, like going to a school. And all the laws of quantum mechanics and classical physics and electrodynamics and chemical physics, all these laws are basically the engineering specs of that building. It's like, okay, if I go and I push the button on the elevator, the elevator will come. I can— then the doors open, I can go in, and it describes how the elevator works. And the elevator and using the elevator to go from one floor to the next is useful as part of your learning expertise because you need to go to this class that's on the second floor or whatever. And the air conditioning comes on and the air conditioning is important to make sure that the building is livable so that you can actually pay attention while you're learning or something like that. Just think of it that way. But that doesn't mean that the function of the elevator or the function of the air conditioner is in and of itself a spiritual activity, but it is created just like in human society. We have nature and we built these buildings in order for us to have our society be more efficient and we protect from the elements so that we can concentrate on certain things. And right, so that's how you should think of it. And so physics and quantum mechanics is part of that aspect, which is important. But in and of itself, it's not spiritual. Interesting. It's out of— it's created out of— the spirit creates it because we need it. Like we build buildings in our society because that's going to make our society work better. But it is not— you cannot say, oh, because elevators work this way, you know, it it makes human society a better society. You know, if you have better elevators, you're not going to get fundamentally morally and better people or happier people or people that are, you know, more friendly to each other or less violent or whatever. The elevator helps create a better environment. It's useful, but in and of itself, it is not going to make people better or more loving, or, you know what I'm trying to say?

I think I do. So what I ought to hear you saying is that there's been— and it's really, I'm trying to kind of wrap my head around this, because, you know, for many years, or for millennia, people have been spiritual beings. We knew that we were spirits, we knew that we were spirit, we knew that we came here for a purpose, we knew that we went on, etc. And then I think it was about 400 years ago, we got really caught up with our science. And said, okay, sci— science. Now science is everything. So we have to look every— everything is material. And you're saying, I think that it's actually science is great for what it does, but spirituality is a different thing.

Exactly. And, and actually Mona Sobhani actually surprises us in her book, uh, describes that very much because she describes her, her journey from being a convinced scientific materialist to seeing that that doesn't cover everything. Yeah. And, and that's so science is very important. But then make the extrapolation that, okay, now we have managed to understand so much of the world around us. We can make this glib extrapolation, we got it all.

Yeah, we—

the brain is so complicated. Everything that the brain does, and everything that we see people do, including all their spiritual aspirations, are just emergent things that happen in the brain. The brain is like a big computer. It can do all these things. And they— and it's so complicated that it can do all these complicated things, all these emotions, all these feelings, all these spiritual insights, all that is just emergent. So the only thing we need is we have this clockwork, right, of material foundation. It's described by science and everything else is just consequence of that. And it's the same thing with AI, right? We make this machine and AI now has this stuff. And that's also what leads to currently the debate, is AI really artificial intelligence where we have this, again, the word is going to be mixed up. Is that true intelligence? Is that like human awareness? Is that—

Right.

So then people start getting in these fuzzy conversations. Is it intelligence? Well, it is intelligent in some sense that if you define an intelligence test of being able to write an essay that when you read it is correctly grammar of English or French or whatever, then you can say, yeah, it's intelligent because it passes that test. But when we sort of talk about intelligence, we have a much broader feeling that, yeah, we can write a text that is correct grammar, but there are all kinds of other things that we can do and can— and again, people make this extrapolation.

Right. Well, you know, analogy I, I use when people would talk about AI is like, when I was in high school, I had a calculator that did math really, really well, uh, much better than I could, right? But nobody ever said your, your calculator is conscious. But because these large language models can do that same thing with language, we say, well, then they therefore, they must be conscious. And I think that is a, that's a mistake. That's a, that's a leap that we don't, it's not really justified. But the thing is, um, and going back to the spiritual people trying to use quantum mechanics, and you think about— you said, well, why are they doing this? Well, because we come— we become so— we worship science. And so the spiritual people feel like we've been squeezed out. We're called woo-woo, we're called, you know, delusional, we are wishful thinking. So we're grasping to try to say, look, science shows that we're right. I think that's where that motivation comes from.

No, I fully understand that. But you see, this is where I think those teachers are missing the true mark. Because what they are doing is they're trying to explain to other people, like, I'm not, I'm not a fully spiritual realized kind of person. I've thought about this a lot, but I know I'm not fully there for sure. So some of those real realized masters, they have a particular state of awareness. And they're now talking about it, and they want to convey this to you and I. And then they sort of say, well, what analogy can I use? And then they find that some words are published in the literature about science that sort of resonate with that. And then they say, oh, you know, if you think of science, or if you think of that, it's the same thing. But that's where, again, they are trying to— they are using a word or a sentence and they're trying to convey, call up an awareness inside you that you don't have, or I don't have, because I never had that experience. So they're talking about the quietness or whatever, the bliss of pure awareness or something. Let's take that as an example, right? I've never been aware of that. So now they're gonna say, oh, we can, we can have this analogy. But what they should do is like, okay, let's try and find a prescription and a process where I can teach you, Eric, to go through all these steps, and then you will have that awareness. And then we can say, okay, that awareness I call with this word. And then in the future, when I use that word, you can call up that memory of that awareness and you're fine. So if we're trying to map all these other concepts and these concepts are very close, then that's helpful. But if they're not very close, they're not that helpful. And because these spiritual leaders don't really know enough about science and it sort of sounds good to use that, they sort of make that extrapolation and it's not helpful.

Yeah. So, so how do we help people understand what, what you're describing? The fact that the material is actually derivative from consciousness as opposed to the other way around. How do we, how do we talk to people about that?

Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

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I hope to see you there.

Well, that's where you have to sort of get people into some practice. You have to say, look, intellectually, we're not going to do this. And actually, this is what happened in my case. I grew up as a complete brain geek. In my life, everything was— the brain was first, and I had a reasonable brain. Anything that I wanted to study, I could just put attention to and I could learn it, and it was good. And I have a reasonable awareness of my body in the sense that my body works well. And I, you know, I didn't do massive sports, but I've been a scuba diver. I did lots of swimming and scuba diving. So I'm physically active doing things. And I've been doing hatha yoga all my life. So my body just works fine for me, you know, and I have reasonable strength and whatever. But I never really had this interest to explore what sensations do I get from the world, from my body, to really focus on my body. And then the third component of, I think, a human being is emotional life. My emotional life was like totally quiet. I never had any massive, uh, things going on, no big traumas. I'm sort of a very quiet kind of person, a little shy. I remember one time in my life now I'm 69 years old where I was really mad at something and it turned out it was unjust. I was mad at a particular guy for doing something and he was just doing his job and I got it wrong. And then I was so— that was the maddest I ever was. And for the rest, you know, I just don't get mad. I try to help people. I'm just nice. But again, I don't have any deep, emotional, rich emotional life. And it wasn't until after my wife died, now 2 and a half years ago, that I was guided by her to explore things differently. And with some of my friends, including Debbie, I got much into exploring these other aspects. And it's only in the last 6 months that I really could feel my heart open and that emotional thing. So that is to give you an answer to— there are things that I would read about in the spiritual philosophical texts, you know, and I even studied Sanskrit to try and read some of the Yoga Sutras and other texts to really understand them. And so I have a good intellectual, but these words never meant anything because I had no— I didn't know what they were talking about. I didn't have a personal experience emotionally, or the sensation, the detailed sensation in my body, or because I just used my body like a machine and it was fine and I didn't have any complaints. So it was like, okay, yeah, you know, it's like I buy a car, I drive the car, the car gets me where I want to go and I have no interest whatsoever in figuring out how the car works or what details of the car. There are some things that I've never used in my car.

Mm-hmm.

And then there are some other things that, like this emotional life I never had. And that is where I think if you want to get to convey to people what spiritual is, you have to work towards creating that balance. You have to have some intellectual acuity and awareness with the concepts, but they are not going to be the answer. For some, for some people, they may be the path in to get started, and then they go. But for other people, it might be emotion, and then you have to guide them to work on this emotional awareness and teach them some intellectual concepts so that they can talk about these emotional rather than just feel them and be all puzzled.

Right.

And the same, you have to get to your body and be aware of your body and that it's a very important and unique instrument to learn because the whole basic thing is that if you're pure awareness, You can't feel anything. You just have this bliss. And we need the body and the brain and emotions and that are to get these experiences and then get the message and get the lesson. So instead of just talking about it, which is of course the way you start doing it if you want to publish it in a book, but a book is not enough. You need the books.. But you also need the places where you get together and then you do some exercises and they can be all kinds of exercises. It could be yoga, it could be, uh, some sport, it could be whatever.

Mm-hmm.

And then you have to also do the emotional thing. One of the things that I never in my, did my life did was reading romantic novels, novels.

Mm-hmm.

And so recently I found on my wife's Kindle, which I inherited, like there was one book that was recommended to her. And it was another one that I, that I saw she had started reading the first 8 pages before she died. And I decided, or I had this inkling, which I never would have done before, I said, I need to read that. And I read it and, and I felt that for the first time it sort of really resonated with me and it gave me an experience that I had never had before, a depth of, of engagement with the characters. And it was a romance You know, I would read books that were scientific or historical record kind of things about how did America get discovered and how did, you know, but not this romantic feeling. And so that's a new experience that I never had before. The reason I'm just saying that is that people talk about stuff, but if the words don't match a true experience, then they're just words and they're very easily distorted. And now, in retrospect, one of the things that I think was wrong about my Catholic education is they came up with these words and they didn't mean anything, and they weren't even trying to tell them what they meant. It's like, you just got to do it.

Yeah.

And they were just, it was just like, totally empty. And they could have, instead of using the Dutch words, they could have used some other gobbledygook words and say, well, that means you do this, and that means you do that. And that's it, you know?

Yeah. So tell me about your wife. What's her name?

Elizabeth.

Elizabeth. And was she a spiritual person?

Yeah, she and I, I mean, not as intense as I was, but she was very, very spiritual, but more sort of in a natural flowing way. And actually, there's a lot of things that she taught me about life and spiritual, and many of the things she was engaged in my spiritual quest too. She would basically say, oh, I found this, and we would go to a meditation session together with Debbie for many years.. And she pointed out, so, oh, I found this, maybe that's something of interest to you, because she knew that I was working on this and, and, and was very supportive of me doing it. And she did some of it herself. She did not, she was always amazed by the fact that if I decided to do something or if she convinced me that something needed to be done, I could sort of turn a flip, flip a switch. You need to go exercise more because you're not exercising enough. And then I would say, okay, I'll sign up. And then I would start this routine 3 days a week the next day, and I would just do it. And it's like I flip. I said, if it's rationally necessary, I'll do it. And I would do it. And it frustrated the hell out of her because she was trying to do certain things and, and, uh, get into a new habit, and it was hard to get into that, establish a rhythm for doing that. And then she would always— it's just unfair that you just say you have to do this and then you just do it, right?

Yeah, I, I understand that. So, um, but it sounds like you, you're saying until, until she passed, you didn't really feel this, this rich emotional life. And I think I heard you say that she's teaching you that.

So is she your—

is she guiding you now?

Yes. Yes.

Awesome. Yeah.

So in some ways, I feel she's with me all the time. It's not that I hear her voice, but there are these thoughts that pop in my head that I know are not the thoughts that I would have had, you know, more than 3 years ago in my life before. They're not Erik thoughts.

Yeah.

So I don't know where they come from, but I think they come from her because they are aligned with what she would say and do, and then I do them. I've learned to pay attention to them.

Yeah, well, it's, you know, it's really interesting. My, my path has been actually very similar. You know, I was raised in a fun— in a Christian fundamentalist background and didn't make a lot of sense to me. I'm a very rational kind of person, so I was like, I want to study engineering, I want to figure out how this thing works. And this conversation has been really interesting for me because I have realized that we are a lot of times as people in the spiritual community are trying to prove to the scientific community, using their language and their methods, to say, this is, this is scientific. And I hear you saying, this goes beyond that.

Yeah, and actually, one of the things that I find so valuable about Mona Sobhani— do you, are you familiar with her book? I'm not, no, I have to check that out. I recommend that you read that. So she, she is a neuroscientist. And she was doing her PhD work or maybe just finished. She was a researcher trying to do things. But then there were some things that happened that sort of made her question this material scientist. But she was very reluctant. So she was not going to give in and give up on that material scientist principle. So as far as she was concerned, she was an expert on the brain, what the brain can do. Everything that is claimed to be spiritual by all those other guys, by the woo-woo people. She was going to prove that that follows. And then it just— she started to investigate, and more and more things came up that just didn't jive. And then she found that there actually is a group of people across the world who had similar things. And they started to investigate using scientific methods, and establish that these spiritual phenomena are really not explainable as, as a consequence of just the normal mechanics of scientific materialism. And what happens is actually the methods. So since she is a neuroscientist, she is very familiar with the rigor of what you have to do in order to establish a science paper or an observation about, you know, the mental behavior or the activity of the brain associated with some mental behavior or whatever. So she knows how rigorous it is. What she reports in her book and what she found is that the community of all the people who are trying to prove spiritual phenomena are using the same methods, but to a standard that is like at least an order of magnitude more rigorous. 10 times more rigorous. And the reason they have to be so much more rigorous is because whatever they say is always discarded by the scientific, the regular scientific community as bogus. So they have to be extremely careful. The least mistake they make would immediately be called out and then everything they say will be discarded.

Right.

So it turns out that that body of results is more rigorous and more clearly established than anything else that we have in the current research field. And that then eventually sort of convinced her. It was like, yep, we don't know everything. There is that, there is that thing, which is essentially what I was saying. You have the world, the world is governed by these laws, which we are now understanding quite well, not 100%, but quite well.

Right.

There is this gap between that and the spiritual reality of our experience, if you pay attention. Now, there's a lot of people who go through life from beginning to end, and they never need to get to any of these spiritual features. They're never fully aware of it. And to them, the whole paradigm of scientific materialism is perfectly fine. You know, it gives them all satisfactory answers that they would ever need.

Yeah, I guess there are those people. It's interesting to me, though, that it seems like at some point that tends to break down. Like when we have a crisis.

Yes.

When we lose somebody, or when we, when we, when we have an illness or something, that, that works until it doesn't, just like religion. Religion works until it doesn't. You know, a lot of times people will come to me and say, I'm a, I'm a Christian, I believe in God, I'm a good person. But my my daughter died, and how could there be a God? How could he let this happen? So those things, um, yeah, some people do seem to skate through to the end and they're okay, but it's interesting, some of them even, you know, toward the very end are like, uh, maybe I need to think about this a little bit.

Yes, exactly, exactly, exactly.

One thing I do want to ask you about, not to, um, try to have science prove religion again, but— or spirituality, but You mentioned at the very beginning nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and that's a big limitation if we want to try to travel to anywhere because everything's so far away. Um, but quantum entanglement, okay, so how does— is there any thought as to how that works? Because that would have to be faster than the speed of light, right?

Yeah, you see, this is one of those big disconnects between the way we talk about quantum mechanics and the way it is described mathematically. Okay. And so there is some fine print to quantum entanglement that all the physicists know about, sort of, and they are aware of it. But that in the popular press, is not talked about or is not made clear. They sort of leave off the fine print or the footnote that explains this because it's just too complicated. So quantum entanglement means that if you do certain things a certain way, you will see correlations between certain activities that immediately— and Einstein, when it was first brought to his attention, he said that is called spooky action at a distance, right? And because he was fully aware of the special theory of relativity, since he invented it, he said, what is that? How can that communication happen? So then the physics community immediately started to investigate. Well, is there anything communicated between these two things? So if you measure— so the way quantum entanglement works, just as a quick summary, is you, you basically create a quantum mechanical system, like you have an atom and it ejects two photons. One goes one way and one goes the other way. And because they were created at this initial point, there is a correlation between them, like one has spin up and the other one, or one has polarization up and the other one has polarization orthogonal to it. But you don't know which polar— which direction polar— you just know that the two of them have orthogonal polarizations, but you don't know whether it's like up in the lab, in my lab, or whether it's up in your lab. We don't know that. So then these photons travel at the speed of light and they could travel very far. We've done experiments where they, they travel tens of kilometers and even in space you can do hundreds of kilometers. You can have communication like that between satellites. And so then the mystery of entanglement is that if I receive the photon in one satellite and I find out that the polarization, since it wasn't clear what it was before it hit the satellite, but now it's in the satellite, it's up, like it's pointing towards the sun, say. Vertical up. Then we know that if I go and measure the photon in the other satellite that is like 100 miles on the other side, I will find orthogonal. So that means it's not going to point to the sun, but it's going to point to a direction orthogonal to the sun. And so people have this So once I make this measurement, it instantly is now known on the other, and then you can do the measurement on the satellite and you find, yeah, indeed, it's like that. So then people have the question, well, it must be that there's some information being sent that way. And if there's that information being sent to determine the outcome of that other experiment in the other satellite, Well, then maybe we can use that to send some messages. Well, now the, the physicists figured out all the math and they could prove that you cannot use this mechanism to send information. And that is never explained in the popular press. They basically say, oh, we measure it here and then we immediately know that it happens on the other side. But we can prove that it cannot be made— that cannot— that experiment cannot be made, and you cannot modify it or make it more elaborate or make it more sophisticated to actually violate the principle of special relativity that nothing can travel faster than light and that you can use it to send communication. You cannot do that. We know that.

Interesting. Okay.

But the way we talk about it, we talk about it as if there is something being sent. Yeah. And that produces then in normal people who read this, they say, oh, why can't I send this as a signal? It is a signal because people talk about it as a signal. And so then they make all kinds of conclusions on their own, which by that footnote in all the scientific papers or in the education of the physicists is like, no, we've proven that you can't send any. So don't even go there.. But then the question naturally asks, well, if it can be done, how does it work? And that's where Bohr's dogma comes in. It's like, well, there are some questions you cannot ask, or you can ask them, but there's no answer.

You're not allowed.

And that is— and there are a significant number of physicists that sort of object to that in some ways. They say, well, that's really a cowardly and unscientific situation to sort of say, hey, there are some questions you can't ask. So that's not scientific, you know, there's something missing.

Right, right.

So when it comes to the materialistic paradigm that we, that we live in, and you being such a student of physics and physical and the way things work, but also being a spiritual person, how is your spirituality received in your community?

Well, most physicists have a spiritual awareness, but we make it very— and many of them, like Einstein, they have strong opinions about this because they know, because they practice physics every day, they sort of know that you cannot get all the answers that way. But it's part of the scientific paradigm and being a good scientist that you cannot let yourself be guided by these external things. They are considered as external and they're not part of it. It's sort of the same thing as saying you're working as an engineer in a factory, you're building cars. Well, your emotional life and your relationship with your family and your kids or whatever should not influence your job at the factory and modify in any way the way you do your job making these cars and making sure that they are safe and sound and whatever. So they keep that in a separate part. You know, obviously, if something happens at their home and they need to take, then they ask for sick leave and they don't come to work.

Right.

But that is, that's the way you should think of it. So physicists, they all have opinions. There are some that are total materialists and they say, I don't believe in any God, but it doesn't guide the way they do their steps. They cannot, as part of a scientific publication, say, oh, we are now drawing this conclusion because there's no God. Now, there are some papers where you can have a discussion on the connection between science and spirituality in some philosophical journals, professional philosophical journals. But in general, in the physics and chemistry, the pure science journals, that's not done.

Yeah. And I, it's interesting to hear you say that because the perception for me and a lot of people is that most of the scientific community are materialists, that they are fundamentally like— and I've had conversations with people where they'll say literally, well, that's impossible. Uh, mediumship is impossible. Near-death experiences, they don't happen. Um, all these things that you were saying, like, I guess that maybe that Mona Sabani was looking at, that, that not only will they say, well, we don't study that, that's outside of our field of expertise, they'll say it's not it's not possible. So you haven't run into that, or have you?

Yeah, yeah. But, but you see, this is the, the people who are advocating for scientific materialism are the ones who really want to make that case. They're the ones that are most vocal, and they're the ones that you therefore hear about. There is a whole group of other people who basically say, you know, I have my doubts. I don't. But it doesn't matter because it doesn't influence the way I do physics. I can build my career. I have these thoughts. I keep these thoughts to myself. I'm not going to talk about it and say I have this religious belief and it colors— no, no. People like Einstein made some comments about that. There are some others that made some comments about it. But the majority of the people are either quiet about it and then they have their own opinion and you don't know it, or they're the ones that have an axe to grind and they want to really prove that scientific materialism is it. And, and they use that.

Yeah, well, I would say, and this is coming from a layperson because those guys you talked about— Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein— all the guys up and up until that point, I think a lot of people were like, they were spiritual people, you know, maybe not religious but spiritual. And they said, we're going to study the physical, and but we're not going to bring— try to bring God into the lab. There seemed to be a break around that time where science said No, it is— they, they don't realize it's a philosophy. They became materialists. And they're like, there is no spirituality, there is nothing beyond. And maybe those are just the vocal ones. But that's, that's what's coming up, actually.

And Bohr, Bohr was definitely like that, because Bohr made some statements that he believed that quantum mechanics was going to explain all of Eastern mysticism. He made that claim in 1926 or whatever, around that time he made that claim. And but then because quantum mechanics, as part of his final conclusion, left this— there are some questions that are not askable or not answerable. That basically put a very strong damper in the scientific community. So if you would, as a scientist, question that this way we talk about quantum mechanics and the way we do the mathematics are not fully aligned, if you try to question that, if you wanted to do some investigation on that, people would consider you as a heretic because you were going against Bohr.. And so people who were trying to work on a PhD thesis or publish some papers, they were essentially told, well, if you want to have a career, if you want to get tenure, just stick to these material, scientific materialist activities, and don't talk about any of that other or connection to spirituality or whatever. And that kept on going until the 1960s, where in 1965, Um, what's his name? Um, I'm drawing a senior moment. He was— he worked at CERN and he had the, uh, uh, let me see. Well, anyway, so, so, so he, he, he He worked at CERN. He was a particle physicist.

Okay.

And as his hobby, he worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics. And then he basically established what is now known as a theorem. And I forgot, forgot the name. And that's when people started to think about this. And there was a graduate student, Aspect, working. He wanted to test that thing, and his professor allowed him to, to do this. And they established entanglement, for which they gave the Nobel Prize 2 years ago, because people— and that was for the first time that it became a little bit more legitimate to do this kind of thing, because he asked the question and connected it to an experiment that could actually be carried out, and that made it accessible and not just speculation. Right? When it— as long as people were just speculating and talking about, we need to investigate the clarity of how quantum mechanics is formulated and why there are these strange paradoxes, we want to understand them. That was all taboo for many, many years. Right now it is still considered a little bit sidetracked, but at least it's allowed and it's considered legitimate. And somebody got on and the group got the Nobel Prize for it. So, so, so there is a— what you're saying is true. There, there definitely is this feeling that, yeah, if you want to have a good scientific career, don't dabble in that connection between spirituality and physics.

Well, I, I, I work with Dr.

Gary Schwartz, who you may know from University of Arizona, and he's been working on consciousness for decades. And, you know, and it's interesting to see how he gets blackballed in certain places because, just because of the work that he's doing, even though he's bringing extreme scientific rigor to it. Like you said, you've gotta, you've gotta do it 10 times better. You've got to repeat the experiments over and over again. And that, and what a lot of people don't understand, lay people, is that some of these things have been proven. Like, uh, you know, pre-sentence, pre-sentience, where they would do an experiment. Well, people will have a feeling before they have a they see something, or, you know, psychokinesis or remote viewing. I mean, these things have been proven scientifically to the point where it's, as you said, more than some things that we accept as generally accepted, but they're still considered woo-woo.

Yeah, yeah. So, so the guy that I was trying to remember the name is John Bell.

John Bell, yes. Okay, I've heard the name. Yeah.

So he is the, he is the one who established his Bell inequalities, which then allowed somebody to make an experiment to actually verify what he was what people were asking. And then that led to this whole notion of entanglement and the proof that entanglement exists. But still, the way we talk about entanglement has not been clarified. But now at least you can do an experiment and you can say, yep, it works. And it's currently being used for quantum cryptography and all kinds of things. So it really works.

Okay.

But we don't understand it and there is no good way to explain it. And you can't use it for communication, but you can use it for other things.

Well, that's interesting. So just to go down the rabbit hole a little bit more, cuz I don't— make sure I understand it. You can't use it for communication, but you said you can use it for quantum cryptography?

Yes.

Okay.

So basically the way you can use it is you can communicate because of that correlation.

Mm-hmm.

You can communicate a, a key to another thing and verify whether you accept it or not. Okay, so you have to use a classical signal to send the information to, to the other person. And then you use this entanglement thing to establish the key for decryption.

Okay.

But actually, you don't send the information using entanglement. The information has to be sent separately on a separate channel.

Okay. Wow.

Like over the internet or something.

Yeah. Interesting. Wow. Okay. That's fascinating. Well, um, we're coming to the end of our time. I really appreciate you, you having this conversation today. It's been, uh, it's been fascinating. So is there anything you'd like to say as we wrap up?

No, I'm, I'm very grateful for you to have this conversation with me. I thought it was, was great fun.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, awesome. Eric, um, good to meet you. Uh, enjoy the rest of your day, and, uh, I'll see you later.

Yes, you do. Have a great day.

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