Quantum God – November 2023

The Quantum God

This summer, I went to Switzerland.  Part of the reason for the trip was to meet an inventor who works on clean energy along with several other of the world’s biggest problems.  He has worked with my friend Tom for years, and as you might expect, he is next world intelligent.  I wanted to try and understand the thought process involved in creating solutions from thin air.

The inventor was kind and patient in a brilliant person sort of way and he described his approach to inventing as centering on quantum physics and math formulas that explained the world to him.  To solve problems, he looked for variants in these formulas that sometimes offered new solutions.  Words were an impediment to him in the creative process because they lack the precision that numbers provide.  He tries to brainstorm in the language of numbers which is almost the exact opposite approach of how I make sense of things.   

After two days of conversations in his workshop and over meals, my brain hurt.  I have been allergic to math since my dad made us solve numerical problems on long family drives.  My brother and sister were better at it than me, and in Switzerland, I felt like I was back in the family station wagon on the way to Omaha.  I was lost.

In spite of this, something important settled in my mind on this trip that I have been reflecting on since.  In the quantum world, time is understood as an all at once phenomena rather than one thing that follows another.   Sequencing and causality are displaced and the present moment becomes the fullness of time. Time is an all at once, now phenomenon. 

This is an idea I have been trying to take hold of recently and it offers real world applications.  Last month, my friend shared with me a diagnosis his wife had received that was extremely difficult.  When I asked how he was coping, he said, “We are very sober about what it means.  Looking back causes regret so that isn’t an option.  A view too far in the future is nonsensical because others with this diagnosis have not lived long.  Focusing on living well today is our only hope.  We are together now and that is what we are holding on to.”  It is a quantum application of time that is helping this couple keep it together in their crisis. 

One of my favorite sections of literature begins with the words:  In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.  Put another way:  Before time itself was measured, the Voice (the Word) was speaking. These words come from John, Jesus’s closest friend who is trying to describe God’s untethering to time.  Imagine John trying to explain how his friend, who he had recently walked the roads of Galilee with, could exist outside of time. Rather than use numbers, he resorted to poetry.

Since Switzerland, I understand a fraction more about this idea than I did before.  But it has helped me understand better how the central event of my life—God coming to me in my college dorm room 40-years ago—could feel as powerfully relevant today as it does.  The quantum perspective of time suggests that God’s invasion into my life that day is somehow the presence he brings today.  It seems that God has chosen the one sequence of time to exist in that brings the most help and greatest joy. 

My friend does not have an easy road to walk in light of his wife’s illness.  But what he can do, he is doing.  He and his wife are focusing on living fully together today.  To think that we should live any other way today, comes from a false view of time.