If, as quantum theories and Ellie Goulding suggest, anything can happen, why doesn’t it? Why don’t we walk out of our doors one morning and find that the molecules that once composed our dented and dusty fixer-uppers have transformed into that new Bugatti Veyron we’ve all been coveting? Or better yet, why can’t we get up one morning and walk through our walls to our new Bugatti?
According to Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in their co-authored book titled The Grand Design, the “outcome of physical processes cannot be predicted with certainty . . . [nature, rather,] allows a number of different eventualities, each with a certain likelihood of being realized.” Thus, quantum theories suggest that innumerable outcomes could result from any action within the world of physical reality, and one can never be completely certain what will happen. Quantum theory seems to support the idea that you might in actuality find your old car transformed into a new one in the mere blink of the proverbial eye.
Based on this observation, the 21st century has witnessed a rapid increase in proponents of what has come to be known as “The Law of Attraction Theory.” Law of Attraction (or LOA) has a wide fan-base, attracting supporters from New-Age philosophers to fitness gurus to members of the medical profession, and beyond. The idea behind LOA is that, on a subatomic level, our thoughts can influence the pathways of certain molecules, thus effectively altering the outcomes of certain physical processes.
So…Can Anything Happen?
However, don’t start cleaning out your garage for that new car just yet. While the theory that anything can and will happen holds true on the molecular level, on a plain as large as our physical reality, Newtonian laws predicting an orderly and reliable universe still seem to hold true. Scientists postulate that this is due to a mathematical expression known as the Feynman sum of histories. Theoretical Physicist Richard Feynman suggested that, although the famous double-slit experiment proved that molecules can arrive at any number of destinations when experimented upon, each destination is a probable outcome, and some destinations have far-greater probabilities of being arrived at than others. Furthermore, Feynman hypothesized that as molecules stack up on one probable end point, they seem to influence the paths of other molecules, or rather that certain molecules within the larger realm of physical matter seem to favor certain outcomes.
Put simply, when molecules that compose your car make their molecular journeys, enough of them favor the end point of greatest probability to sustain the physical nature of your car as you now see it. Leading Hawking and Mlodinow to conclude that “large objects move just as Newton’s theory predicts they will.” Sorry to crush your hopes of that new Bugatti.
Still, this leaves us wondering, what sorts of things could influence molecular outcomes on a quantum level? Although the likelihood is that physical matter in our universe will maintain observable properties as we know them, the probability still exists that anything can happen.
