Science and Christian Faith 1
Quantum Mechanics and the activity of God
- If God created, he included in creation the opportunity to engage with every part of creation all the time.
- That engagement will be un-measurable, scientifically, and therefore will be a matter of faith.
- Creation may be being sustained all the time by God
- There is a limit
Light
Newton described light as corpuscles. He saw light as a ball which bounced off mirrored surfaces. His explanation was sound as far as it went but failed to deal with some of the key elements of light that arose and as measuring instruments became more sensitive people discovered new features.
Diffraction
Shine a single wavelength (single colour) of light at a narrow vertical slit and it becomes apparent that the light bends round the side of the slit. Most of the light follows a straight line, but some of it curves. This aspect of light is not unlike someone shouting from behind a wall with the door open. You do not need to be in line of sight to hear the voice. Light seemed to behave like a sound wave.
There is a problem with this. Sound waves travel through the air. The ‘wave’ is actually a sequence of small pressure changes in the air. Those ‘waves’ are received by small hairs in the ear which move as the air around them moves. Light, if it is a wave, needs to have some medium to operate in. However light travels across the vacuum of the universe, where there is, effectively, nothing (more about that on a later date). So how can it be a wave.
Interference.
Young in 1801 demonstrated interference in a two slit experiment. Instead of one slit in the wall he showed that with two slits the waves cancel each other out in places and add to each other in places.
This seemed to confirm the wave nature of light.
However Einstein demonstrated about 100 years ago that Newton was right. That light is made up of individual particles, named photons. Diffractions bends them around a corner and they seem to operate like waves even though they are not waves. More recently when individual photons are shot through two slits at a screen they ‘interfere with themselves’ and avoid landing on the screen where they cancel out. In itself that is not classic physics. A ball either goes through one slit or another, and has no knowledge of whether there is another slit or not, yet these balls arrange themselves on a screen so that they must have ‘known’ that there was a second slit.
One key component of all of this is the fact that the landing place of a photon is never known exactly. Because it is operating like a wave we can only say something statistical, like 30% of them will arrive here, 30% here and 40% here. The wave works like this. Where there is a crest or the bottom of a wave, there is a high probability of the photon arriving there, where the wave (or combination of waves is neither at a crest or at the base, the probability of the photon being discovered there, is low.
This lack of sureness about location after a certain time is built into the fabric of the universe. We only know where it is when we measure it, when it hits a screen. Prior to that we know where it is likely to be if we put a screen at that place, by working out probabilities from the ‘wave’ associated with the particle.
Say, for example, there are six possible clumps where the photon could land and say they are equally likely. Each photon, effectively, rolls a die to decide where to land.
Locations of all particles are equally never quite known. This doesn’t matter much to us who are so big, but with small things, particles can be here one moment and somewhere else the next. It is random – not fully random but random, nevertheless.
It might be that, to engender a thought in our brains, a neuron (a brain cell) needs firing. Such a firing may need a couple of particles to be on some part of the neuron that were not on it already.
OK, work with me on this. Location of these particles is like a die throw. What if God, from time to time, forces the die to be a number required to have the particle contribute to the neuron firing? It would be like:
2 5 4 5 5 4 3 1 1 2 6 4 2 5 5 5 4 2 3 1 1 1 3 2 6 2 5 2 2 3 4 5
Where all seems random but God, but including the sequence 3 1 1 1 3 was able to fire the neuron. It would be completely undiscoverable, a coincidence, or a God-incidence.
- If God created, he included in creation the opportunity to engage with every part of creation all the time.
- That engagement will be un-measurable, scientifically, and therefore will be a matter of faith.
Every particle in the universe works like this. The implications are immense. God’s activity can be anywhere any time, and, indeed, can be crucial to life continuing itself, as if it is an unstable aeroplane that cannot be flown by a human without computer control keeping the thing level. God is at the helm keeping life alive.
Entanglement
A photon with a certain energy can be fired into a crystal of beta barium borate which will then emit two photons of half the energy. It is not an easy process. Only one in a trillion photons actually lands up as an entangled pair, and they come out of the crystal at unpredictable angles.
These two photons are linked. They are entangled. If one is spinning one way, the other spins the other way.
Let one hit a screen, or measure it in some way, and the other wave also collapses. If one is found to be clockwise the other is immediately found to be anticlockwise. An event in one of them triggers an event in the other. This happens instantly however far away they are from each other. A universe away – or not.
There is a no-communications theorem which suggests this cannot be used for communication, but a 2013 paper suggests that each pair creates a microscopic wormhole, which lends itself to communication possibilities.
How does God communicate? There are interesting metaphysical questions associated with this.
Delayed Quantum Eraser Experiment
Sending one entangled photon to a detector whilst leaving the other a little longer and then either detecting ‘which path’ information or not, it is possible to affect the result after the result has happened, i.e. affect the past (by nanoseconds). God, not bound by time.