Classical Views in Science Challenged
In 1982, French physicist Alain Aspect and his team successfully performed an experiment that proved the existence of a phenomenon in quantum mechanics called "quantum entanglement" among particles at the submicroscopic level. In quantum mechanics, two or more particles having the same origins seem to have some kind of entanglement correlation even though they may be spatially separated from each other. This entanglement correlation does not disappear no matter how far the distances between the particles are. If one particle is acted upon, the other particles reflect the effect immediately.
Quantum entanglement has been experimentally verified in many labs around the world. Many scientists consider the discovery of quantum entanglement as among the most important discoveries in the past several decades. Although people still do not understand the precise meaning of it, it has already made a deep impact on the fields of philosophy, science, and religion. It is also challenging the current western scientific world's mainstream views. The Universe Is an Inseparable Whole The finding of quantum entanglement showed a great limitation in the current mainstream view of the western science world.
Since the times of Descartes, Galileo and Newton, the dominant world view of western science has been that the universe is like a huge machine. It has no consciousness nor purpose. The interactions among its components are limited by time and space (i.e. they are local activities) and the whole can be understood by studying the individual components, since the whole is simply the sum of all the individual components. This type of science is also known as Newtonian or classical science.
Newtonian science was developed in accordance with these views. One divides materials into smaller and smaller micro-objects and, by studying these individual objects, one tries to understand the whole. A typical example is in the manufacture of machines, in which a whole machine is composed of all its components. This type of scientific view even considers human bodies as machines. Western medicine is based on this method, treat the head if one has a headache; treat the foot if the foot is in pain. Quantum entanglement supports the existence ofspooky action at a distance, which was considered suspect by Albert Einstein. Quantum entanglement surpasses the four dimensional space we live in and is not limited by it. It is nonlocal and tells us that, in some dimensional spaces in the universe, there exists the possibility of some kinds of interaction among all things.
The nonlocal property of quantum entanglement shows that everything has the properties of the whole. In simple terms, the nonlocalness of quantum entanglement basically means that if you have two objects in a system (in physical models they are called particles and separates them, putting object A here and object B very far away (let's say tens of thousands of light-years away), then, whenever object A is disturbed, object B will also react. This reaction is instantaneous. It surpasses our four dimensional space and it does not need to wait for a long time until some signal is transmitted. It does not matter how far two particles are separated; one particle will react whenever the other particle is moved.
This is to say that what happens at one place will immediately affect what happens in a faraway place. It tells us that some things that seem to be independent of each other, like the two particles, actually have some kind of relationship of unknown origin. The nonlocal property shows that there is some internal relationship among objects that has yet to be discovered by modern science. The entirety of a thing is greater than the sum of its components. This disagrees with the hypothesis of classical science. Thus there is an opinion that classical western science can only see each point, but not the entire plane; it only sees the trees but not the forest.
However, in traditional Chinese philosophy, science, and medicine, the whole is always highly emphasized. Quantum entanglement shows that the universe is an inseparable whole, that things are related intrinsically by unknown factors, and that the whole is greater than the sum of the component objects. These all contradict the starting point of classical Western science and impose serious questions about the validity of the mainstream western world view.
The scientists, who have consciousness, study nature and the universe with this rigid and mechanical world view. They have tried for several centuries but their results so far have shed no light on the nature of consciousness and they still have no clue what consciousness is. Consciousness, to western science, is still a mysterious thing.