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"What a shift! In a radically different interpretation of our relationship to the world we live in, Wheeler states that it's impossible for us to simply watch the universe happen around us. Experiments in quantum physics, in fact, do show that simply looking at something as tiny as an electron--just focusing our awareness upon what it's doing for even an instant of time--changes its properties while we're watching it. The experiments suggest that the very observation is an act of creation, and that consciousness is doing the creating. These findings seem to support Wheeler's propostion that we can no longer consider ourselves merely onlookers who have no effect on the world that we're observing.
To think of ourselves as participating in creation rather than simply passing through the universe during a brief period of a lifetime requires a new perception of what the cosmos is and how it works. The groundwork for such a radical worldview was the basis for a series of books and papers by another Princeton physicist and colleague of Einstein, David Bohm. Before his death in 1992, Bohm left us two pioneering theories that offer a very different--and in some ways, a nearly holistic--view of the universe and our role in it.
The first was an interpretation of quantum physics that set the stage for Bohm's meeting and subsequent friendship with Einstein. It was this theory that opened the door to what Bohm called the "creative operation of underlying ... levels of reality." In other words, he beileved that there are deeper or higher planes of creation that hold the template for what happens in our world. It's from these subtler levels of reality that our physical world originates."
