Quantum physics confronts the would-be discoverer with one of the most enduring conundrums modern science has to offer, what renowned physicist Richard Feynman described as “the only mystery.” The name it has been given—the double-slit experiment—sounds far simpler that its enigma.
This experiment has been made more mysterious now with research revealing a strange connection between mind and matter and how mental practices like meditation may even influence quantum phenomena.
The Double-Slit Experiment
One way to explain this conundrum would be to begin looking at its single-slit counterpart: Try to imagine a beam of photons (light particles) being shot into a light-proof box through a single slit, then hitting a piece of photographic paper inside. What would appear but a pattern matching that slit on the paper as one would expect? The exposure would be strongest in the places where a straight line emanates from the light source, passes through the slit, and touches the paper. Naturally, some light would scatter randomly to the sides, getting fainter and sparser the farther away, as photon particles tend to shoot straight, not sideways; such outliers are predictable, nevertheless. The outer edges of the paper would appear least exposed. This pattern is just what you'd expect from a light beam shining through a slit—like little bullets, photons shoot like particles. Nothing strange here—yet.
The strangeness appears when a second slit is introduced. Light shot through two slits produces an entirely different, and unexpected, pattern; the reason for this breaks the old scientific paradigm. As the single slit produced one exposure, you might now expect two exposures but, oddly, that’s not what happens. Instead, multiple of bands, of varying intensities with gaps in between, appear, spanning the width of the paper—not following straight lines as before, but shooting in all different angles. This is recognized by science as an “interference pattern,” but it’s not something particles (like little bullets shooting through space) produce. Not at all. Interference patterns are caused by waves (the beach instead of bullets), which aren’t particles; and when multiple waves cross paths, either they multiply or cancel each other out at various intervals, generating such patterns. Photons were always considered particles; somehow, the double-slit experiment made them stop acting as such and instead made them behave like waves.
Seeing this, scientists were confounded. Particles aren’t waves. Waves aren’t particles. Bullets are bullets. The beach is the beach. Something was missing in the old Newtonian paradigm.
So, they began examining more closely what was happening between the light source and the paper. They tried shooting single photons one at a time through the slits, without knowing which slit it would enter, and amazingly still ended up with an interference pattern. That’s surprising because one would expect the photon to have to “choose” either one slit or the other in order to shoot in and hit the paper; how could it enter through both slits, like a wave, then multiply so as to produce this pattern? Somehow, the single photon avoided “choosing” as particles would do. The scientists were stumped, so they looked even more closely.
They zoomed in to intimately spy on each photon to tell for sure what slit it entered. And something amazing happened: The act of looking itself seemingly caused the pattern to switch! Gone was the interference pattern; appearing instead were two cluster exposures—as one would expect from little bullets flying through, like in the first experiment! What could have caused this to happen?
Quantum physics doesn’t fit the model of classical physics, which has prevailed for centuries: where matter and mind are forever separated from one another. In the quantum world, the conscious, objective observer loses his objectivity, for the act of observation itself distorts the results.
Experiment: Meditators’ Mental Powers Statistically Significant
Enter Dean Radin and colleagues, who conducted a series of experiments to explore how mind might affect matter. In their tests, participants were first familiarized with the double-slit experiment by being shown a 5-minute cartoon; then they were taken into an electrically shielded steel room, sat down a few meters from a double-slit apparatus, and given instructions to attempt, on cue, to influence the beam of light using their minds alone.During randomly assigned periods, lasting between 15 and 30 seconds, participants were asked either to sit idle or attempt to affect the apparatus. Each session lasted about 15 minutes. They found that during periods when participants focused on the device, interference patterns appeared significantly less frequently compared to when the device was active without anyone present. Human concentration, it seemed, makes a difference.
To see such results by chance, they determined, one would have to run the same set of experiments 150,000 times, while most psychology studies would consider 1 in 20 a valid outcome.
The mental capacity to concentrate, they revealed, was key in the experiments’ outcomes; focused attention affects the nature of light, determining whether photons behave as waves or particles. Furthermore, participants who were experienced in meditation showed considerably greater ability to affect the patterns; those who didn’t meditate typically failed to show statistically significant impacts. The statistical evidence speaks for itself: meditation can play a role in catalyzing quantum events.
