Henry Stapp

Henry Stapp is an American physicist, well-known for his work in quantum mechanics.

Biography

After receiving his PhD in particle physics at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Nobel Laureates Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain, Stapp moved to ETH Zurich to do post-doctoral work under Wolfgang Pauli. During this period he composed an article called 'Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics', which he never sent for publication, but would become the title of his 1993 book. When Pauli died in 1958, Stapp transferred to Munich, now in the company of Werner Heisenberg. While making important contributions to, inter alia, the analysis of proton-proton scattering and the development of analytic S-matrix theory, Stapp is perhaps most well known for his ongoing work in the foundations of quantum mechanics, with particular focus on explicating the role and nature of consciousness. He is also an expert on Bell's Theorem, having solved problems related to non-locality presented by John Bell and Albert Einstein.

He is a professor at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Consciousness

Some of Stapp's work concerns the implications of quantum mechanics for consciousness.

Stapp sees a global collapse of superposed brain states as in the process of choosing between alternatives. Stapp points out that orthodox quantum theory reconciles two diverse aspects of scientific practice: the mathematical aspect represented by the deterministic evolution of mathematical properties in accordance with a deterministic equation Schrödinger's equationDubious|date=September 2008; and the empirical aspect associated with our human actions upon the world about us, and the feedbacks that we experience. Another way that he puts it is that the mathematically determined evolution via Schrödinger's equationDubious|date=September 2008 is the 'rock like' aspect of matter, while the quantum collapse of the wave function is mind-like. His theory of how mind may interact with matter via quantum processes in the brain differs from that of Penrose and Hameroff. While the latter postulates quantum computing in the microtubules in brain neurons, Stapp postulates more global collapse via his 'mind like' wave-function collapse that exploits certain aspects of the quantum Zeno effect within the synapses to explain attention.

Analysis

The known laws of quantum theory, taken as including wave function collapse, are indeterministic; they do not completely specify either the actions we take or the outcomes we experience in terms of the prior mathematical state of the universe, and the choice of action is not fixed even statistically. Thus, according to at least one orthodox contemporary theory, the universe of which we are parts evolves, insofar as contemporary science can say, in a way that need not be determined exclusively by the matter-like aspects of nature (although the existence of immaterial determining factors remains speculative). A corollary of this view of reality is that the history of the universe need not be a fixed 4 dimensional structure, as nineteenth century physics proclaimed, but is constantly forging ahead into the future, in keeping with common sense. According to Stapp, each increase in human knowledge is associated with a wave function collapse, which is an 'act of creation' that is a step along the arrow of time. Thus, free will could be seen as directly instrumental in the evolution of the universe.

The emergence of Quantum Darwinism supports Stapp's theories of consciousnessFact|date=July 2007. Quantum Darwinism is a theory explaining the emergence of the classical world from the quantum world as due to a process of Darwinian selection. It is proposed by Wojciech Zurek and a group of collaborators including Ollivier, Poulin, Paz and Blume-Kohout. The development of the theory is due to the integration of a number of Zurek’s research topics pursued over the course of twenty five years including: pointer states, einselection and decoherence.

ee also

*Quantum mind
*Consciousness causes collapse
*Quantum Zeno effect

External links

* [http://www.erim.org/qas2001/stapp_abst.html LBNL Quantum Applications Symposium page]
* [http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/stappfiles.html List of papers on LBNL server]