The Intention Experiment: Use Your Thoughts to Change the World

Sharing Rosenbaum’s curiosity about the strange property of the crystal compound was a young student called Sayantani Ghosh, one of his star PhD candidates. Sai, as her friends called her, a native of India, had graduated with a first-class honours degree from Cambridge, after which she had chosen Tom’s lab for her doctoral programme in 1999. Almost immediately, she had distinguished herself by winning the Gregor Wentzel Prize, given each year by the University of Chicago’s physics department to the best first-year graduate student teaching assistant. The slight 23-year-old, who at first glance appeared abashed, hiding behind her copious dark hair, had soon impressed her peers and teachers alike with her bold authority, a rarity among science students, and her ability to translate complex ideas to the level an undergraduate could comprehend. Sai shared the distinction of winning the coveted prize with only one other woman since its inception 25 years before.

According to the laws of classical physics, applying a magnetic field will disrupt the magnetic alignment of a substance’s atoms. The degree to which this happens is the salt’s ‘magnetic susceptibility’. The usual pattern with a disordered substance is that it will respond to the magnetic field for a time and then plateau and tail off, as the temperature drops or the magnetic field reaches a point of magnetic saturation. The atoms will no longer be able to flip in the same direction as that of the magnetic field and so will begin to slow down.

In Sai’s first experiments, the atoms in the lithium holmium yttrium salt, as predicted, grew wildly excited with the application of the magnetic field. But then, as Sai increased the field, something strange began to happen. The more she turned up the frequency, the faster the atoms continued to flip over. What is more, all the atoms, which had been in a state of disarray, began pointing in the same direction and operating as a collective whole. Then, small clusters of about 260 atoms aligned, forming ‘oscillators’, spinning collectively in one direction or another. No matter how strong the magnetic field that Sai applied, the atoms remained stubbornly aligned with each other, acting in concert. This self-organization persisted for 10 seconds.

At first, Sai and Rosenbaum thought these effects might have something to do with the strange effects of the remaining atoms of holmium, known to be one of the very few substances in the world with such long-range internal forces that in some quarters it was described and worked out mathematically as something existing in another dimension.2 (#ulink_b7c1cd3e-8018-5a30-91c6-eff3096e526b) Although they didn’t understand the phenomenon they had observed, they wrote up their results, which were published in the journal Science in 2002.3 (#ulink_63cede17-084e-52f1-81f8-7e76510eb760)

Rosenbaum decided to carry out another experiment to attempt to isolate the property in the crystal’s essential nature that had enabled it to override such strong outside influences. He left the study’s design to his bright young graduate student, suggesting only that she create a computerized three-dimensional mathematical simulation of the experiment she had intended to carry out. In experiments of this nature on such tiny matter, physicists must rely on a computerized simulation to confirm mathematically the reactions they are witnessing experimentally.

Sai spent months developing the computer code and building her simulation. The plan was to find out a bit more about the salt’s magnetic capability, by applying two systems of disorder to the crystal chip: higher temperatures and a stronger magnetic field.

She prepared the sample by placing it in a little 2.4 x 4.8 cm copper holder, then wrapped two coils around the tiny crystal: one a gradiometer, to measure its magnetic susceptibility and the direction of spin of the individual atoms, and the other to cancel out any random flux affecting the atoms inside.

A connection attached to her PC would enable her to change the voltage, the magnetic field or the temperature, and would record any changes whenever she altered one of the variables by the tiniest degree.

She began lowering the temperature, a fraction of a kelvin (K) at a time, and then began applying a stronger magnetic field. To her amazement, the atoms kept aligning progressively. Then she tried applying heat, and discovered they again aligned. No matter what she did, in every instance the atoms ignored the outside interference. Although she and Tom had flushed out most of the compound’s magnetic component, of its own volition, as it were, it was turning into a larger and larger magnet.

That’s weird, she thought. Perhaps she should take more data, just to ensure they had encountered nothing strange in the system.

She repeated her experiment over six months until the early spring of 2002, when her computer simulation was finally complete. One evening, she mapped the results of the simulation on a graph, and then she superimposed the results from her actual experiment. It was as though she had drawn a single line. There on the computer screen was a perfect duplicate: the diagonal line formed from the computer simulation lay exactly over the diagonal line created from the results of the experiment itself. What she had witnessed in the little crystal was not an artefact, but something real that she had now reproduced in her computer simulation. She had even mapped out where the atoms should have been on the graph, had they been obeying the usual laws of physics. But there they were in a line: a law completely unto themselves.

She wrote Rosenbaum a guarded email late that evening: ‘I’ve got something interesting to show you in the morning.’ The following day, they examined her graph. There was no other possibility, they both realized; the atoms had been ignoring her and instead were controlled by the activity of their neighbours. No matter whether she blasted the crystal with a strong magnetic field or an increase in temperature, the atoms overrode this outside disturbance.

The only explanation was that the atoms in the sample crystal were internally organizing and behaving like one single giant atom. All the atoms, they realized with some alarm, must be entangled.

One of the strangest aspects of quantum physics is a feature called ‘non-locality’, also poetically referred to as ‘quantum entanglement’. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr discovered that once subatomic particles such as electrons or photons are in contact, they remain cognizant of and influenced by each other instantaneously over any distance forever, despite the absence of the usual things that physicists understand are responsible for influence, such as an exchange of force or energy. When entangled, the actions – for instance, the magnetic orientation – of one will always influence the other in the same or the opposite direction, no matter how far they are separated. Erwin Schrödinger, another one of the original architects of quantum theory, believed that the discovery of non-locality represented no less than quantum theory’s defining moment – its central property and premise.

The activity of entangled particles is analogous to a set of twins being separated at birth, but retaining identical interests and a telepathic connection forever. One lives in Colorado, and the other in London. Although they never meet again, both like the colour blue. Both take a job in engineering. Both like to ski; in fact when one falls down and breaks his right leg at Vale, his twin breaks his right leg at precisely that moment, even though he is 4000 miles away, sipping a latte at Starbucks.4 (#ulink_b6bd2568-8017-53c3-bd91-ef9b6f6e4891) Albert Einstein refused to accept non-locality, referring to it disparagingly as ‘spukhafte Fernwirkungen’ or ‘spooky action at a distance’. This type of instantaneous connection would require information travelling faster than the speed of light, he argued through a famous thought experiment, which would violate his own special relativity theory.5 (#ulink_92aaca17-e3dd-5dd1-a497-c96b4ec79438) Since the formulation of Einstein’s theory, the speed of light (299,792,458 metres per second) has been used as the absolute limiting factor on how quickly one thing can affect something else. Things are not supposed to be able to affect other things faster than the time it would take the first thing to travel to the second thing at the speed of light.

Nevertheless, modern physicists, such as Alain Aspect and his colleagues in Paris, have demonstrated decisively that the speed of light is not an absolute outer boundary in the subatomic world. Aspect’s experiment, which concerned two photons fired off from a single atom, showed that the measurement of one photon instantaneously affected the position of the second photon6 (#ulink_fd9883a1-405a-5421-a7ef-5e145cfce3a9) so that it has the same or opposite spin or position (as IBM physicist Charles H. Bennett once put it, ‘opposite luck’).7 (#ulink_d5968318-8e18-52af-8d81-cedcd754a638) The two photons continued to talk to each other and whatever happened to one was identical to, or the very opposite of, what happened to the other. Today, even the most conservative physicists accept non-locality as a strange feature of subatomic reality.8 (#ulink_72ed4c74-b2bc-59c8-a16a-545576dfaf97)

Most quantum experiments incorporate some test of Bell’s Inequality. This famous experiment in quantum physics was carried out by John Bell, an Irish physicist who developed a practical means to test how quantum particles really behaved.9 (#ulink_ba343954-7fa2-5063-ab44-6d4e79b4afbe) This simple test required that you get two quantum particles that had once been in contact, separate them and then take measurements of the two. It is analogous to a couple named Daphne and Ted who have once been together but are now separated. Daphne can choose one of two possible directions to go in and so can Ted. According to our commonsense view of reality, Daphne’s choice should be utterly independent of Ted’s.

When Bell carried out his experiment, the expectation was that one of the measurements would be larger than the other – a demonstration of ‘inequality’. However, a comparison of the measurements showed that both were the same and so his inequality was ‘violated’. Some invisible wire appeared to be connecting these quantum particles across space, to make them follow each other. Ever since, physicists have understood that when a violation of Bell’s Inequality occurs, it means that two things are entangled.

Bell’s Inequality has enormous implications for our understanding of the universe. By accepting non-locality as a natural facet of nature we are acknowledging that two of the bedrocks on which our world view rests are wrong: that influence only occurs over time and distance, and that particles like Daphne and Ted, and indeed the things that are made up of particles, only exist independently of each other.

Although modern physicists now accept non-locality as a given feature of the quantum world, they console themselves by maintaining that this strange, counter-intuitive property of the subatomic universe does not apply to anything bigger than a photon or electron. Once things got to the level of atoms and molecules, which in the world of physics is considered ‘macroscopic’, or large, the universe started behaving itself again, according to predictable, measurable, Newtonian laws.

With one tiny thumbnail’s worth of crystal, Rosenbaum and his graduate student demolished that delineation. They had demonstrated that big things like atoms were non-locally connected, even in matter so large you could hold it in your hand. Never before had quantum non-locality been demonstrated on such a scale. Although the specimen had been only a tiny chip of salt, to the subatomic particle, it was a palatial country mansion, housing a billion billion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 10

) atoms. Rosenbaum, ordinarily loathe to speculate about what he could not yet explain, realized that they had uncovered something extraordinary about the nature of the universe. And I realized they had discovered a mechanism for intention: they had demonstrated that atoms, the essential constituents of matter, could be affected by non-local influence. Large things like crystals were not playing by the grand rules of the game, but by the anarchic rules of the quantum world, maintaining invisible connections without obvious cause.

In 2002, after Sai wrote up their findings, Rosenbaum polished up the wording and sent off their paper to Nature, a journal notorious for conservatism and exacting peer review. After four months of responding to the suggestions of reviewers, Ghosh finally got her paper published in the world’s premier scientific journal, a laudatory feat for a 26-year-old graduate student.10 (#ulink_af5d1b0e-c858-5f3b-93a4-ea58e78f20cb)

One of the reviewers, Vlatko Vedral, noted the experiment with a mix of interest and frustration.11 (#ulink_04bf5132-d8af-5b0c-9a2c-442d3a65be09) A Yugoslav who had studied at Imperial College, London, during his country’s civil war and subsequent collapse, Vedral had distinguished himself in his adopted country and been chosen to head up quantum information science at the University of Leeds. Vedral, who was tall and leonine, was part of a small group in Vienna working on frontier quantum physics, including entanglement.

Vedral first theoretically predicted the effect that Ghosh and Rosenbaum eventually found three years later. He had submitted the paper to Nature in 2001, but the journal, which preferred experiment to theory, had rejected it. Eventually, Vedral managed to publish his paper in Physical Review Letters, the premier physics journal.12 (#ulink_d7c30323-3db8-5dd5-b862-fe023f6b6e40) After Nature decided to publish Ghosh’s study, its editors threw him a conciliatory bone. They allowed him to be a reviewer on the paper, and then offered him a place in the same issue to write an opinion piece on the findings.

In the article, Vedral allowed himself some speculation. Quantum physics is accepted as the most accurate means of describing how atoms combine to form molecules, he wrote, and since molecular relationship is the basis of all chemistry, and chemistry is the basis of biology, the magic of entanglement could well be the key to life itself.13 (#ulink_78c34689-f5a3-54b3-95bf-c840d76aee6c)

Vedral and a number of others in his circle did not believe that this effect was unique to holmium. The central problem in uncovering entanglement is the primitive state of our technology; isolating and observing this effect is only possible at the moment by slowing atoms down so much in such cold conditions that they are hardly moving. Nevertheless, a number of physicists had observed entanglement in matter at 200 K, or –73°C – a temperature that can be found on Earth in some of its very coldest places.

Other researchers have proved mathematically that everywhere, even inside of our own bodies, atoms and molecules are engaged in an instantaneous and ceaseless passing back and forth of information. Thomas Durt of Vrije University in Brussels demonstrated through elegant mathematical formulations that almost all quantum interactions produce entanglement, no matter what the internal or surrounding conditions. Even photons, the tiniest particles of light emanating from stars, are entangled with every atom they meet on their way to earth.14 (#ulink_1c2335b5-a8d0-555a-900d-6602a7d44c59) Entanglement at normal temperatures appears to be a natural condition of the universe, even in our bodies. Every interaction between every electron inside of us creates entanglement. According to Benni Reznik, a theoretical physicist at Tel Aviv University in Israel, even the empty space around us is heaving with entangled particles.15 (#ulink_e8b2912c-438a-5eb2-95b6-f56c4e404a8a)

The English mathematician Paul Dirac, an architect of quantum field theory, first postulated that there is no such thing as nothingness, or empty space. Even if you tipped all matter and energy out of the universe and examined all the ‘empty’ space between the stars you would discover a netherworld world teeming with subatomic activity.

In the world of classical physics, a field is a region of influence, in which two or more points are connected by a force, like gravity or electromagnetism. However, in the world of the quantum particle, fields are created by exchanges of energy. According to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, one reason that quantum particles are ultimately unknowable is because their energy is always being redistributed in a dynamic pattern. Although often rendered as tiny billiard balls, subatomic particles more closely resemble little packets of vibrating waves, passing energy back and forth as if in an endless game of basketball. All elementary particles interact with each other by exchanging energy through what are considered temporary or ‘virtual’ quantum particles. These are believed to appear out of nowhere, combining and annihilating each other in less than an instant, causing random fluctuations of energy without any apparent cause. Virtual particles, or negative energy states, do not take physical form, so we cannot actually observe them. Even ‘real’ particles are nothing more than a little knot of energy, which briefly emerge and disappear back into the underlying energy field.

These back-and-forth passes, which rise to an extraordinarily large ground state of energy, are known collectively as the Zero Point Field. The field is called ‘zero point’ because even at temperatures of absolute zero, when all matter theoretically should stop moving, these tiny fluctuations are still detectable. Even at the coldest place in the universe, subatomic matter never comes to rest, but carries on this little energy tango.16 (#ulink_2e65f325-f353-500e-9781-25fe574d0038)

The energy generated by every one of these exchanges between particles is unimaginably tiny – about half a photon’s worth. However, if all exchanges between all subatomic particles in the universe were to be added up, it would produce an inexhaustible supply of energy of unfathomable proportions, exceeding all energy in matter by a factor of 10

, or 1 followed by 40 zeros.17 (#ulink_98888f59-d5eb-5020-9f40-1fe7db61b957) Richard Feynman himself once remarked that the energy in a cubic metre of space was enough to boil all the oceans of the world.18 (#ulink_eb4ba042-0424-5d28-b688-02a6d2a60eef)

After the discoveries of Heisenberg about Zero Point energy, most conventional physicists have subtracted the figures symbolizing Zero Point energy from their equations. They assumed that, because the Zero Point Field was ever present in matter, it did not change anything and so could be safely ‘renormalized’ away. However, in 1973, when trying to work out an alternative to fossil fuel during the petrol crisis, American physicist Hal Puthoff, inspired by the Russian Andrei Sakharov, began trying to figure out how to harness the teeming energy of empty space for transport on earth and to distant galaxies. Puthoff spent more than 30 years examining the Zero Point Field. With some colleagues, he had proved that this constant energy exchange of all subatomic matter with the Zero Point Field accounts for the stability of the hydrogen atom, and, by implication, the stability of all matter.19 (#ulink_0978ccc0-8884-543e-b2e1-0759a8912e56) Remove the Zero Point Field and all matter would collapse in on itself. He also demonstrated that Zero Point energy is responsible for two basic properties of mass: inertia and gravity.20 (#ulink_969e900f-07e4-5028-bcd0-f57bc8591b71) Puthoff also worked on a multimillion-dollar project funded by Lockheed Martin and a variety of American universities, to develop Zero Point energy for space travel – a programme that finally went public in 2006.

Many strange properties of the quantum world, like uncertainty or entanglement, could be explained if you factored in the constant interaction of all quantum particles with the Zero Point Field. To Puthoff, science’s understanding of the nature of entanglement was analogous to two sticks stuck in the sand at the edge of the ocean, about to be hit by a huge wave. If they both were knocked over, and you did not know about the wave, you would think that one stick was affecting the other and call it a non-local effect. The constant interaction of quantum particles with the Zero Point Field might be the underlying mechanism for non-local effects between particles, allowing one particle to be in touch with every other particle at any moment.21 (#ulink_eeb75f63-4361-520a-b54e-a2897da8795a)

Benni Reznik’s work in Israel with the Zero Point Field and entanglement began mathematically with a central question: what would happen to a hypothetical pair of probes interacting with the Zero Point Field? According to his calculations, once they began interacting with the Zero Point Field, the probes would begin talking to each other and ultimately become entangled.22 (#ulink_b9a6be70-2230-5302-8ef3-5b915a69874d)

If all matter in the universe were interacting with the Zero Point Field, it meant, quite simply, that all matter was interconnected and potentially entangled throughout the cosmos through quantum waves.23 (#ulink_0a9b1e24-98c0-538d-8a6d-2929b30d8b53) And if we and all of empty space are a mass of entanglement, we must be establishing invisible connections with things at a distance to ourselves. Acknowledging the existence of the Zero Point Field and entanglement offers a ready mechanism for why signals being generated by the power of thought can be picked up by someone else many miles away.

* * * Sai Ghosh had proved that non-locality existed in the large building blocks of matter and the other scientists proved that all matter in the universe was, in a sense, a satellite of a large central energy field. But how could matter be affected by this connection? The central assumption of all of classical physics is that large material things in the universe are set pieces, a fait accompli of manufacture. How can they possibly be changed?

Vedral had an opportunity to examine this question when he was invited to work with the renowned quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger. Zeilinger’s Institute for Experimental Physics lab at the University of Vienna was at the very frontier of some of the most exotic research into the nature of quantum properties. Zeilinger himself was profoundly dissatisfied with the current scientific explanation of nature, and he had passed on that dissatisfaction and the quest to resolve it to his students.

In a flamboyant gesture, Zeilinger and his team had entangled a pair of photons from beneath the River Danube. They had set up a quantum channel via a glass fibre and run it across the river bed of the Danube. In his lab, Zeilinger liked to refer to individual photons as Alice and Bob, and sometimes, if he needed a third photon, Carol or Charlie. Alice and Bob, separated by 600 metres of river and nowhere in sight of each other, maintained a non-local connection.24 (#ulink_69fbf090-2c85-5c8c-a6f6-7beb96ddd76c)

Zeilinger was particularly interested in superposition, and the implications of the Copenhagen Interpretation – that subatomic particles exist only in a state of potential. Could objects, and not simply the subatomic particles that compose them, he wondered, exist in this hall-of-mirrors state? To test this question, Zeilinger employed a piece of equipment called a Talbot Lau interferometer, developed by some colleagues at MIT, using a variation on the famous double-slit experiment of Thomas Young, a British physicist of the nineteenth century. In Young’s experiment, a beam of pure light is sent through a single hole, or slit, in a piece of cardboard, then passes through a second screen with two holes before finally arriving at a third, blank screen.

When two waves are in phase (that is, peaking and troughing at the same time), and bump into each other – technically called ‘interference’ – the combined intensity of the waves is greater than each individual amplitude. The signal gets stronger. This amounts to an imprinting or exchange of information, called ‘constructive interference’. If one is peaking when the other troughs, they tend to cancel each other out – called ‘destructive interference’. With constructive interference, when all the waves are wiggling in synch, the light will get brighter; destructive interference will cancel out the light and result in complete darkness.

In the experiment, the light passing through the two holes forms a zebra pattern of alternating dark and light bands on the final blank screen. If light were simply a series of particles, two of the brightest patches would appear directly behind the two holes of the second screen. However, the brightest portion of the pattern is halfway between the two holes, caused by the combined amplitude of those waves that most interfere with each other. From this pattern, Young was the first to realize that light beaming through the two holes spreads out in overlapping waves.

A modern variation of the experiment fires off single photons through the double slit. These single photons also produce zebra patterns on the screen, demonstrating that even single units of light travel as a smeared-out wave with a large sphere of influence.

Twentieth-century physicists went on to use Young’s experiment with other individual quantum particles, and held it up as proof that quantum physics had Through-the-Looking-Glass properties: quantum entities acted wavelike and travelled though both slits at once. Fire a stream of electrons at the triple screens, and you end up with the interference patterns of alternating light and dark patches, just as you do with a beam of light. Since you need at least two waves to create such interference patterns, the implication of the experiment is that the photon is somehow mysteriously able to travel through both slits at the same time and interfere with itself when it reunites.

The double-slit experiment encapsulates the central mystery of quantum physics – the idea that a subatomic particle is not a single seat but the entire stadium. It also demonstrates the principle that electrons, which exist in a hermetic quantum state, are ultimately unknowable. You could not identify something about a quantum entity without stopping the particle in its tracks, at which point it would collapse to a single point.

In Zeilinger’s adaptation of the slit experiment, using molecules instead of subatomic particles, the interferometer contained an array of slits in the first screen, and a grating of identical parallel slits in the second one, whose purpose was to diffract (or deflect) the molecules passing by. The third grating, turned perpendicular to the beam of molecules, acted as a scanning ‘mask’, with the ability to calculate the size of the waves of any of the molecules passing through, by means of a highly sensitive laser detector to locate the positions of the molecules and their interference patterns.

For the initial experiment, Zeilinger and his team carefully chose a batch of fullerene molecules, or ‘buckyballs’ made of 60 carbon atoms. At one nanometre apiece, these are the behemoths of the molecular world. They selected fullerene not only for its size but also for its neat arrangement, with a shape like a tiny symmetrical football.

It was a delicate operation. Zeilinger’s group had to work with just the right temperature; heating the molecules just a hair too much would cause them to disintegrate. Zeilinger heated the fullerenes to 900 K so they would create an intense molecular beam, then fired them through the first screen; they then passed through the second screen before making a pattern on the final screen. The results were unequivocal. Each molecule displayed the ability to create interference patterns with itself. Some of the largest units of physical matter had not ‘localized’ into their final state. Like a subatomic particle, these giant molecules had not yet gelled into anything real.

The Vienna team scouted out some other molecules that were double the size and oddly shaped to see if geometrically asymmetric molecules also demonstrated the same magical properties. They settled on gigantic fluorinated American football-shaped molecules of 70 carbon atoms and pancake-shaped tetraphenylporphyrin, a derivative of the biodye present in chlorophyll. At more than 100 atoms apiece, both of these entities are among the largest molecules on the planet. Again, each one created an interference pattern with itself.