Relationship and Synchronicity in Quantum Physics – SAND19 US

In the theory of quantum mechanics, it is experimentally established that things (or rather properties of things, such as mass or location) do not exist in and of themselves. Ingenious experiments testing “Bell’s inequalities” have convinced even die hard materialists that, without relationships and interactions, there are no material things. All the loopholes in these experiments have been closed, including a recent experiment that relied on starlight many thousands of light years away to decide the settings of the equipment, ensuring that human choice had nothing to do with the matter. What does all this mean? Theories of “relationality” makes exactly this claim. In this presentation, I report on the most recent work that I and others are doing on quantifying the theory of relational quantum mechanics. Using the beautiful mathematics of Fourier transforms, I will show that the “location” of an object is not a real thing. All that is specified by the laws of physics is a “trajectory” or path through space and time. It is only when two entities interact—what we call a measurement—that the idea of specific locations and times become real. These represent the time and place of the interaction, not of the things in and of themselves. Hence, from a quantifiable perspective in quantum physics, it appears that only relationships are real.