Chapter Six, The Creative Observer Summary and Analysis

Research physicist Helmut Schmidt becomes interested in the work on extrasensory perception conducted by J. B. Rhine, the scientist who worked with Astronaut Ed Mitchell on ESP experiments. Schmidt is intrigued by physicist Niels Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation, which argues that a neutron is not a precise entity, but rather changing and dynamic in nature—randomness is a basic aspect of nature. What appears to halt that randomness is an intruder—or observer. At the moment the intruder observes the quantum particle is the moment it is given an identity. Before and after the moment, its identity is something else.

Around the same time, Mitchell, Schmidt, Pribram and others begin to have a growing curiosity about human consciousness. The theory begins to emerge that perhaps reality only exists when the observer is...