Elizabeth A. Rauscher, PhD, is a physicist and parapsychological researcher. She is author of over 250 scientific papers as well as co-author of several books including Orbiting the Moons of Pluto: Complex Solutions to the Einstein, Maxwell, Schrodinger and Dirac Equations and The Holographic Anthropic Multiverse: Formalizing the Complex Geometry of Reality. She is also co-author of a forthcoming book titled Mind Dynamics in Space and Time: A Physicist’s Exploration of the Nature and Properties of Consciousness. She has served on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley; John F. Kennedy University; and the University of Nevada, Reno. She has also worked as a researcher at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford Research Institute Radio Physics Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Her work has been featured in a book written by MIT professor David Kaiser titled, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Physics Revival.

Here she explores the philosophical implications of quantum theory. She points out how “spooky action at a distance” has haunted physics since Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation. Albert Einstein, who developed relativity theory, resisted quantum mechanics and developed the “EPR paradox” (with colleagues Podolsky and Rosen) as a way to show that quantum theory must be incorrect. Physicist John S. Bell later formalized the EPR paradox as a theorem. In recent years, John Clauser and other physicists have been able to test Bell’s Theorem and have shown – as Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen had predicted – that quantum theory does indeed imply “spooky action at a distance.” Particles are entangled with each other across space and time. This is also known as “non-locality”. Rauscher suggests that this entanglement may tell us something about how the human mind works.

(Recorded on September 27, 2015)

Published on September 30, 2015