The New View
My training is as a physicist. When I was studying at the University of Minnesota, I never really accepted Quantum Mechanics. My attitude was perhaps similar to that of Einstein, who died never having fully accepted Quantum Mechanics. But now, 50 years later, I am coming to accept the weird picture of the cosmos that Quantum Mechanics gives. My friend, Mariah, is a healer, and many of the phenomena she encounters have the same outlandish (from the standpoint of the dominant culture in this country) flavor.
I am especially interested in a particular incredible phenomenon which Quantum Mechanics predicts (and which has been verified experimentally). I like to call it the Watched Pot phenomenon. There is a saying that a watched pot never boils. People usually interpret this as meaning that if you watch a pot it will seem as if it will never boil. But what if, when you watched a pot, it actually would never boil?
The Nobel prize winner Yakir Aharonov in a paper in the Physical Review in 1980 said:
"... if one checks by continuous observations if a given quantum system evolves from some initial state, to some other final state, along a specific trajectory in Hilbert space, the result is always positive, whether or not the system would have done so on its own accord."
In other words, if you watch a system continuously to see if it behaves in a particular way (which you have chosen arbitrarily), then it will always behave in precisely that way, regardless of what it would have done if you were not watching! You don't have to do anything to the system, simply observe it!