The Quantum WHO?

https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/quantum-physics/physicists-confirm-negative-time-is-real-by-asking-the-atoms-themselves

Decades ago, as a young graduate student in the physics-adjacent field of Biochemistry, my first discoveries of the wildness of quantum physics led me to say, “The physics labs are preaching!” It was not as naïve and reductionist as it sounds. It was my authentic experience of coherence compressed. I was at that time getting to know intimately a God who defines Himself as Spirit, by way of the John 4:24 declaration the Son who perfectly reflects him. I was marveling at the decidedly “Spirit” way Genesis 1 shows His creation movements: converting the energies of His own heart-love into longitudinal soundwaves that transmute to transverse light waves that in turn start the manifestation process that would result in all matter and lifeforms. (Wow…) I was also realizing that only a true and transcendent Creator could ALSO manifest as a thorough and comprehensive REDEEMER. It was a wild and wonderful time for me.

In those early days, it was Schrodinger’s cat and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics that was both enhancing and expanding my lived experience of faith in the Spirit. The role of the observer in participation with “pre-manifest” reality aligned, in my mind, with Biblical faith. I was discovering in the words of Scripture a veritable reuniting of realms—seen and unseen—that were never truly “split.” (That duality is an artifact of post-fall perception—closed by Scripture and grace.) My favorite metaphor in my 20’s was Peter walking on water—a literal occurrence for sure—but a metaphor for the power of observation. When Peter observed a Jesus-sourced potential beyond physical law, that unseen reality held Him up, defying gravity. But when his “noticing” (observation) was hijacked back to the storm—the wind and the waves are mentioned—another earthbound reality kicked in. Notably, sinking his observation manifested did not end the story: Peter walked on water a second time—this time WITH Jesus rather than trying to get to Him. (That, too, becomes important in the noticing.)

Enter Iain McGilchrist a few decades later to unite further the threads I had followed. I suppose we could say with The Master and His Emissary there arrived a middle ground in me--an embodied playground of mind where the wild and wondrous met the everyday. For me, McGilchrist SHOUTS (albeit most gently in his way): “You are living in the world you have PAID ATTENTION TO—but what you mightn’t have realized is that you have not just ONE but TWO ways of paying attention. You CAN choose—one may have been put in time out, but you have the power to remove it from gray exile!”

Materialist critics of what they see as the “spiritualization” of quantum physics call that thought, “quantum woo.” They draw lines that keep the imagination out of the bizarre science-scape that they believe reason alone can travel. They say that nowhere and no way are we permissioned to infer faith-like features into the fabric of the universe. But I think the very POINT of the wildness hidden at the center of the smallest things in the universe is that we are going to beINCAPABLE of rightly traversing the land WITHOUT OUR IMAGINATIONS!

I wasn’t wrong in my naïve youthful assessment: The physics labs ARE preaching! But their preaching approach may not be “evidence demanding a verdict” as we know scientific evidence! No, the physics labs are shouting: You won’t travel this inner-scape of wonder minus IMAGINATION! You’ll always only be hitchhiking through this galaxy of Logos-manifest if you attempt to do it with reason alone. Your imagination must be part of the design of your own vehicle. It’s not just “quantum physics confirms faith” (though I’m not going to fight you over that statement)—but more like, THE WHOLE UNIVERSE CONSTANTLY INVITES US TO AWAKEN TO REALITY BEYOND MERE MATERIALISM—with a decided first side-effect of awakening being the loosening of the illusion of CONTROL.

By the way, I now think we (Christians) wouldn’t have so many critics for trying to make the connections between quantum wildness and faith if we would pause at the hinge-point of wonder. We are expecting people to instantly regain imagination when it is in fact packed away neatly in a closet of Western societal programming reserved for artists and poets. We rush too quick to demand a bridged gap between faith and science, rather than allowing the natural bridge to emerge from obscurity into individually. What if the church learned to help people unpack their imaginations with the patience of a loving teacher or coach? This is just an extra musing towards the job of “washing the face of Jesus” from the slung mud it has invited upon itself, from one who has always believed wonder can be an effectual door to worship.

But now I come to the recent finding presented above, further extending the “quantum crazy” (the article’s wording) into evidence. The caption under the photo reads, “An illustration of light being absorbed by an atom. New experiments confirm that some photons can spend a negative amount of time within a cloud of atoms, reaching their destination before they technically enter the cloud.” The article gives the specifics, but that is almost all you need to know: there is a real possibility of “negative time”. Even time—culprit that it is on this side of the “seen” barrier—cannot conquer matter into material parameters alone!

Where else did we see negative time??? I’ll point you straight to the CROSS where the film of creation itself—including you and me—was cosmically rolled back into Christ in what the early church fathers called “recapitulation”. Before we were even born, a cosmic and cataclysmic reversal of heart-intention was accomplished FOR US embodied in a suffering Savior. Like those photons just observed, we reached our destination before we technically entered the cloud.

I shudder to type the next thing that has come to my mind, but there is a cause. “Quantum woo”—the ridiculous appearance from the outside when we try to extract meaning from a world that just keeps defying all linearity—ceases to be quantum woo when it becomes “quantum Who.” (Sorry—it’s worth it but still it stung a little in the cringe department.) It’s the WHO of it all that revolutionizes the interpretation. I see ONLY “woo” without a WHO—a Logos we can know as both Creator and Redeemer. This WHO does NOT just “infuse” His own physics with meaning but rather REVEALS the meaning that the physics emits constantly into every understanding-darkened space!!!

In 2016 when the wonderful Malcolm Guite spoke to the C.S. Lewis Summer Conference in Amherst, Massachusetts, he read an early untitled poem by Lewis that had been somewhat arbitrarily titled, Reason. (I know this because from time to time I delight in YouTube offerings such as these.) Malcom Guite pointed out that this poem revealed how early Lewis’ quest to reconcile imagination with reason had appeared as a guiding trajectory that would culminate with Tolkien’s simple conversational assertion to him that Myth and Truth could indeed coexist in the same space. (“Of course it’s myth—but it’s True!” Tolkien had said of his faith. This was the last wall of resistance in Lewis to the Gospel.)

Malcolm Guite before he read this poem, gloriously took the liberty of renaming it, since it wasn’t Lewis who named it Reason. He named the poem, WHO, (the capitalization is mine). In his genius, Guite was saying that the question the poem asks, like all worthy questions, does not find its answer in a fact or group of facts, or even a “how,” but rather a Who! Reason and imagination do not reunite and dance to the music without Incarnational input. It when the holy WHO arrives that the dry bones finally put on flesh.

I remember being captured years ago by the sentence construction in Revelation 4:2 where John reports, “At once I was in the Spirit, and I saw a throne standing in heaven, with someone seated on it.” To my mind, there is a three-fold progression there: In the Spirit, a bold, new land where meaning abounds and all things are washed in the “speechless Real” of Logos….Then amidst all that, behold a Throne! All is not chaos and randomness: there is an authority of Holy Order—one that does not fear wildness but rather gloriously channels its fractal energy into something that always points back to eternal “dynamic stability.” Those two stages are enough to keep the physics labs AND the poet’s pens active and in pursuit forever—as well as any theologians that might dare to enter the domain.

BUT the pinnacle of the progression is not just the Spirit or the throne. The pinnacle of the progression is the ONE seated. Only in Christ do Rule of Order and the Reign of Beauty cohere. Only in Christ does wildness actually contribute to efficiency! Only in Christ does myth shine as True. Only in Christ do hemispheres—I never seem to tire of saying it—in the earth and the skull—dance together into faith. There is a Spirit realm that is not just about “woo” but about WHO—and that WHO has no need to “prove” His rulership—He is SEATED as the unequivocal Monarch of a Love that blinds the blindness itself. (And the unhelpful “woo” the church now and then generates melts away when the WHO is seen once again on the throne.)

There’s a four-word phrase from the unlikely source (as it seems to some but not for me) of Dave Matthews lyrics that sums this up well. I believe these four words sum up the effects of Revelation 4:2 in all its flowering stages: “IT MELTS INTO WONDER.” What is “IT”? Whatever is blocking wonder and maintaining the frenzy of fear and survivalism—whatever is keeping us in the left hemisphere hall of mirrors whether it be materialism’s dominance or nervous systems yet unconverted to freedom. There is a point where IT melts into wonder. IT doesn’t get “fixed” or “solved” per se—it MELTS into something that transcends it, that is IT finds coherence in WHO. Incarnation was not a step in a process of redemption: it IS a way of life. We ourselves even find our “who” identity in the WHO that bathes our very being with meaning. The full lyric is good advice: “Why won’t you ever be glad—it melts into wonder?” And that’s a pretty good philosophy of life to accompany myth that is indeed Truth.

BONUS: I removed the following paragraph for the sake of preserving flow, but if anyone has discovered fractals, this is just for you and I will just leave it here, dangling ridiculously:

Even people who know enough math to slightly understand fractal geometry often forget an important fact about these wonders, one of which (Mandelbrot’s) has been dubbed, “The Thumbprint of God.” That fact is that fractals are graphed not in the regular Cartesian plane, but in the special COMPLEX PLANE—the one that handles dynamical systems, not simple ones. And that complex plane has instead of a mere “y-axis,” an axis that is--literally--called imaginary.* You can dismiss that as “math woo” OR you can marvel a moment with me at the metaphor. Raging iterative beauty reappears when we give imagination an axis in the plane with reason alone. It might just be right there that we initiate the experience of the one and only Who.

*An imaginary number is a number that equals a real number multiplied by 𝑖, where 𝑖 is defined as the square root of −1. While they sound fictitious, these numbers are essential in real-world mathematics for solving advanced algebraic equations, analyzing electrical circuits, and modeling waves.