Despite seeming evidence to the contrary, you are not ever alone, isolated, or cut off from everyone. You are connected so totally with everything and everyone else in this universe and probably other universes as well that you affect All That Is. This is what Earth's wisest spiritual teachers have told us for centuries, and it's now also what most physicists tell us as well.

Recent findings in the field of quantum physics are supporting this ancient spiritual assertion, as physicists have been surprised to find quantum "twin particles", and even clusters of non-locally connected quantum particles that instantly respond when one of their group is observed. This finding of quantum non-locality is the basis for the development of quantum computers, which promise to bring us to a new age of computing with far greater speed and computational flexibility than ever before.

While physicists have now known that observers affect the experiment, and that quantum particles are intimately interconnected with one another across great distances, these ideas are only slowly being absorbed by the general populace. For many centuries, our western way of viewing the world was to see it as something we could observe objectively, without affecting what we were looking at. Quantum research has toppled this assumption, and required that we reassess the way we conduct our research. It seems possible, perhaps even likely, that we see what we want to see. This is certainly true of quantum particles who appear when we are looking as particles, and otherwise remain in a "wave" form which we can't see.

© Cynthia Sue Larson, 2000

Cynthia Sue Larson holds a bachelor's degree in physics from UC Berkeley (1982), earned in conjunction with her pursuit of a more complete understanding of reality. Following completion of her MBA degree in 1984, she worked as a project manager at Citibank for seven years at the California Data Center. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Reality Shifts: When Consciousness Changes the Physical World.