The Greatest Master Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi
The Greatest Master Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi

Most of these introductory articles are exracted from Volume I of the Single Monad Model of the Cosmos: Ibn al-Arabi's View of Time and Creation... more on this can be found here.

The EPR Paradox

The EPR Paradox:

Physics theories, which are mainly based on explaining motion and its relation to time, have worked fine for centuries, so that people have been able to send spaceships to the moon and other planets with the great timing accuracy. Dismissing Zeno's paradoxes, therefore, had no negative consequences for applied physics. However, no single theory up to now has ever been able to explain all observations, especially when it comes to the microcosms of sub-atomic particles, where new paradoxes are still arising.

One of the most pertinent tests of Ibn al-Arabi's cosmological model is that through its principles the prominent Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox could be so easily and readily understood. The EPR paradox demonstrates the discrepancy between the two principal theories of physics: Quantum Theory and Relativity. Quantum Theory is one of the most successful theories of science. It explained the structure of atoms, the properties of materials, elementary particles and stars. Although it was generally consistent with the results of many decades of experimenting, the basic conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics can lead to some puzzling paradoxes and strange unacceptable features. The EPR paradox is possibly one of the most compelling of these apparently peculiarly unacceptable features.

In 1935 Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen - in their famous article titled: 'Can Quantum Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?' (Einstein 1935: 777) - developed a thought experiment to demonstrate what they felt was a lack of completeness in quantum mechanics. This so-called 'EPR paradox' has led to much subsequent and still on-going research. The purpose of the EPR thought experiment was to expose the profound peculiarities of the quantum description of a physical system extended over a large region of space. It seemed that, under certain conditions, a quantum system of two entangled particles could in theory exchange information instantaneously or, at least, faster than the speed of light. This clearly contradicts the principle of 'locality' in Einstein's theory of Relativity, which supposes that the speed of light is a maximum terminal velocity. The phenomena of entanglement also lead to the violation of Heisenburg's sacred 'uncertainty principle', which declares that not all the classical physical observables (e.g., position and momentum) of a system can be simultaneously known with unlimited precision, even in principle.

Based on these contradictions, EPR refused this deterministic nature of quantum mechanics and postulated that the existence of 'hidden variables', some thus far unknown properties of the system, should account for the paradoxical discrepancy. Niels Bohr, on the other hand, favoured the view put together in the 'Copenhagen interpretation' of quantum theory and refused the idea of hidden variables (Bohr 1935: 696).

In 1964 John Bell proposed a mechanism to test for the existence of these hidden variables, and he developed his 'inequality principle' as the basis for such a test (Bell 1966: 447). This was followed by many experiments to verify this principle. The most successful of these experiments was performed by Alain Aspect and his colleagues in 1982 (Aspect 1982a: 1804; Aspect: 1982b: 91). Their experiment consisted of light polarisation measurements made on pairs of photons, moving in opposite directions, emitted simultaneously in single transitions by Calcium atoms, then measured by sensitive detectors on each side. The results of the experiment clearly violate Bell's inequalities, eliminating the need for the existence of hidden variables and thus supporting the predictions of non-local quantum mechanics (which violate Einstein's locality principle and even common sense). The results showed that apparently the left hand detecting apparatus was sending some kind of message to the right hand photon informing it as to how the left hand one was set up, so that the right hand photon could interact in the appropriate way with the right hand apparatus. But as a matter of fact there is no communication at all between the left and the right photons, and, if we suppose there is, then the signal would have to travel faster than the speed of light.

Many even more accurate experiments were performed after that, and all show that it is as if time 'stops' between the pair of entangled particles and they interact instantaneously despite the large distance between them. Although this experimental outcome supports the fundamental concepts of the theory of quantum mechanics and contradicts Einstein's locality principle, but there is not any adequate theoretical explanation for it, so far.

Now one of the striking consequences of Ibn al-Arabi's principle of re-creation by the Single Monad is that such strange instantaneous behaviour between the two entangled particles would be natural and very easily explained. According to his cosmological theories the constant creation of the manifest world proceeds like a movie composed of succeeding still pictures. Each momentary 'picture' of the world is like a closed system, where any change in one part of this picture would require another synchronizing change(s) in other part(s), so that the whole does not change because there is no external interaction, only 'internal' changes. We have also explained that all 'parts' of the world are created in series by the Single Monad that constantly creates ('puts on') ever new forms, one total individual form at each instant of time - such that each created form then ceases to exist (intrinsically, not through any other force) the next moment after its existence.

Now if we take that theory of cosmic re-creation into account, we can simply say that the two entangled particles in these experiments, like any two entities in the world, never existed together at the same. Rather, the Single Monad first wears the form of the first particle - i.e., causes this particle to exist (under special conditions); then this unique Single Monad itself wears other forms in a specific sequence (see section V.6), until it comes to wear/create the form of the second particle - regardless of where it is in space. But by the moment of this second state of creation, the first particle is out of existence, and therefore it encountered no time. Now because the two particles are 'entangled' (in a closed system), any change on the first form that corresponds to the first particle will be kept in the 'memory' of the Single Monad, so that when it comes to wear the form of the second particle it does so in a way that keeps the total state of the system of the two particles unchanged (according to the quantum mechanical laws, because it is a closed system). This process is instantaneous; no matter how far apart the two particles are, because only one particle really exists at a time, and during the interval between creating the two particles they were both out of existence, encountering no time. This hypothesis corresponds to Ibn al-Arabi's account of 'the real flow of time' that we explained in Chapter IV.

In fact what we have just said applies to any (large or small) system and not simply the system of those two entangled particles, but in normal cases the effect of the ongoing process of cosmic re-creation is not noticeable because of the many possible changes that could happen in any part of the complex system and the corresponding distraction of our limited means of attention and perception. In other words: any change in any part of the world will cause synchronization changes in all other parts, because the world as a whole is a closed system. This last statement is in fact another and more precise depiction of the whole cosmic process of existentiating causality. This conception also provides a hypothetical explanation for certain 'para-psychological' phenomena.



Please note that some contents are translated Semi-Automatically!