Physics
The experimental record is unambiguous — local realism is false, non-locality is real, and the act of measurement cannot be cleanly separated from what is measured. Physics has arrived at the boundary between matter and mind — and the deeper the equations go, the wider that boundary becomes.
What mainstream physics has established
For most of the twentieth century, physics operated under an assumption so deep it was rarely stated: that objects have definite properties whether or not anyone observes them, and that influences between objects are limited by the speed of light. This is local realism — the intuition that the universe is made of separate things, each with their own independent existence, interacting only through local contact.
In 2022, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for decades of experiments that conclusively falsified this assumption. Their work demonstrated violations of Bell inequalities — mathematical constraints that any locally real theory must satisfy. The violations are not subtle. They are robust, reproducible, and have survived every attempt to explain them away.
The result is unambiguous: local realism is false. The universe does not consist of separate things with pre-existing properties interacting across space. At the deepest level that physics can probe, it is a network of correlations that are not constrained by distance.
2022
Nobel Prize in Physics
Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger were awarded the Nobel Prize for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science. Their work proved that entangled particles exhibit correlations that cannot be explained by any theory in which particles carry pre-determined values.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2022. NobelPrize.org
2026
Bell violations with massive particles in motion
The ANU team (Athreya, Hodgman, Truscott et al.) achieved the first Bell inequality violations using momentum-entangled helium atoms — extending non-locality from photons to massive particles in motion. Non-locality is not a peculiarity of light; it operates in the world of matter, momentum, and mass.
Nature Communications, February 2026
2022
Quantum signatures in the living brain
Kerskens and Pérez at Trinity College Dublin reported MRI evidence consistent with quantum entanglement in brain proton spins. The signal was present during waking consciousness and absent during deep sleep — suggesting that quantum coherence may be a feature of conscious states specifically. Replicated in 2023.
Kerskens & Pérez, Journal of Physics Communications, 2022
What the results imply
The Bell results do not tell us what reality is. They tell us what it isn't. It is not a collection of independently existing objects distributed across space, each carrying definite properties prior to measurement. That picture — the one that feels most intuitive, the one that underlies most of science and virtually all of everyday experience — is experimentally falsified.
What remains is a set of correlations that do not respect spatial separation. Two particles that have interacted remain correlated in ways that no local mechanism can explain — no signal, no force, no hidden channel. Measurement of one instantaneously constrains the possibilities for the other, regardless of distance.
The ANU result complicates the standard response: Bell violations now extend to massive particles in motion, not just photons in laboratory conditions. The Kerskens result complicates it further: quantum coherence appears to correlate specifically with conscious states in living brains. The question is no longer whether non-locality is real. It is whether we have the right framework for understanding what it means.
The interpretive gap
The physics results are consistent with the claim that consciousness is fundamental — but they do not uniquely require it. A materialist can accept every Bell violation and still maintain that consciousness is emergent. This is the gap that the Not Two Foundation takes seriously.
Non-locality is real. Local realism is false. Quantum effects may operate in biological brains. A peer-reviewed mathematical framework for consciousness as a fundamental field is internally consistent.
That consciousness itself — rather than quantum mechanics generally — is the fundamental substrate. That the non-classical correlations observed are expressions of a consciousness field. That the specific predictions of the consciousness-as-field model produce results distinguishable from materialist alternatives.
The leading framework
In November 2025, Maria Strømme — a professor of nanotechnology and functional materials at Uppsala University's Ångström Laboratory — published a peer-reviewed paper in AIP Advances that provides a rigorous quantum field theory formalism for consciousness as a fundamental field.
The paper proposes a mathematical structure in which an undifferentiated consciousness field (Φ) gives rise to individual awareness through mechanisms that parallel established physics — symmetry breaking, quantum fluctuations, and discrete state selection. Individual consciousness is modeled as localized excitations (|ψᵢ⟩) within the universal field, governed by a personal thought operator (τ̂ᵢ).
Division of Nanotechnology and Functional Materials, Uppsala University, Ångström Laboratory
The framework is built on three principles: universal mind (an underlying formless intelligence), universal consciousness (the capacity for awareness), and universal thought (the dynamic mechanism through which experience and differentiation arise). These are modeled mathematically using the tools of quantum field theory, drawing parallels to Bohm's implicate order, Heisenberg's potentia, and Wheeler's participatory universe.
Critically, the framework generates testable predictions. Strømme proposes that directed mental states may produce measurable deviations in random number generators, that coordinated meditative states may produce detectable EEG coherence between separated subjects, and that biophoton emissions may correlate with intentional states.
Strømme, M. "Universal consciousness as foundational field: A theoretical bridge between quantum physics and non-dual philosophy." AIP Advances 15, 115319 (2025). doi: 10.1063/5.0290984
Subpages
The physics case is built across several distinct arguments. Each subpage develops one in depth.
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Quantum technologies — the same properties, engineered at scale
The quantum properties that point toward consciousness as fundamental are the same properties that quantum computing, cryptography, sensing, and simulation are built on. Working technology as proof of concept.
Explore →Supporting context
Strømme's framework does not exist in isolation. Several other lines of research contribute to the physics case.
Penrose-Hameroff Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR) proposes that quantum computations in neuronal microtubules give rise to moments of conscious experience through objective reduction — a form of wave function collapse tied to spacetime geometry. Anesthesia research supports this: consciousness disappears when microtubules are disrupted, even while neural firing continues.
Quantum biology has demonstrated quantum coherence at room temperature in photosynthesis, and research on superradiance suggests that microtubules may sustain large-scale quantum coherence in biological systems — addressing the longstanding objection that the brain is "too warm and wet" for quantum effects.
The participatory universe tradition, originating with John Archibald Wheeler, holds that the observer is not a passive spectator but a participant in bringing reality into being — anticipating several features of the current convergence.
Connection to the convergence
Physics establishes the empirical ground: non-locality is real, separation is not fundamental, and a peer-reviewed mathematical framework models consciousness as the field from which individuality arises.
Cognitive science explains why we don't perceive the unity the physics reveals — evolution built an interface optimized for survival, not truth. Philosophy explains what individuality is within that unity — a dissociative process, not an ontological boundary. Biology shows that living systems operate as information fields, not machines — consistent with a reality in which consciousness, not matter, is primary.
Each discipline arrives independently. Physics provides the mathematical structure and the experimental evidence. The other three provide the interpretive context that makes the physics results intelligible — and point toward what they mean for everything downstream from how we understand what we are.
The field was never divided. The distance was never real. Physics is the discipline that proved it.