In 1931, Max Planck, the man who opened the door to quantum physics, spoke to the British newspaper The Observer and said something that still bothers people: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
Ninety-five years later, nobody has proved him right. Nobody has proved him wrong. And the most beautiful experiment in physics still gives the same result: matter changes when you measure it.
The idea
First, what has been measured. It is stranger than any theory.
Blow an atom up to the size of a stadium. Its nucleus is a pea in the middle. The electrons are somewhere in the stands, not like little balls but like a cloud of probability. Everything else is empty of particles. The table, your phone, your hand are almost entirely empty space, held in place by forces.
And the pea? A hypothesis physicists have been chasing for half a century, string theory, says that deep down there aren’t even particles. There are only tiny vibrating strings, and every particle is a different note. It has never been measured. But the image stays: matter as music.
Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum physics, used to say, as Heisenberg recalls it, that anyone who isn’t shocked by quantum theory the first time hasn’t understood it. Another line is attributed to him: “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.”
Before you measure it, an electron isn’t described by a single position. It’s described as a wave of probabilities, spread over many places at once. This isn’t philosophy. It’s the mathematics that lasers and the chips in your phone run on.
Fire electrons, one at a time, at a wall with two slits, with a screen behind it. If you don’t check which slit each one went through, stripes form on the screen, like waves overlapping, as if every electron went through both. In 1989, in Hitachi’s laboratories in Japan, they watched it build up dot by dot. In 2002 the readers of Physics World voted it the most beautiful physics experiment of all time.
Now put a detector at the slits, so you know which way each one went. The stripes disappear and you’re left with two bands, as if from little balls. In 1998, at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, researchers showed in Nature that the more the detector “looks,” the more the stripes fade.
Nothing changed in the electron. What changed is whether someone asked. The “observer” in physics isn’t an eye. It’s the measurement: a detector, a photon bouncing off, anything that keeps information about the path.
The electron inside an atom doesn’t climb a staircase. It changes level in jumps, with no steps in between, and that’s where the “quantum leap” comes from. Teleportation exists too, just not like in the movies. In 2017 a team in China transferred the state of a photon from the ground to a satellite more than a thousand kilometres away. No matter travelled. The information of what it was did.
Two particles born together stay linked. Measure one here, and the result of the other matches instantly, however far away it is. Einstein couldn’t stomach it and called it “spooky action at a distance.” In 2022 the Nobel Prize in Physics went to three people who showed with experiments that here Einstein was losing. At this scale, a particle doesn’t carry its answer by itself, in advance.
And then there’s the problem nobody has solved. We know which parts of the brain light up when you see red. Nobody knows why you experience that lighting up, why you’re not a machine processing red in the dark. In 1995 the philosopher David Chalmers called it “the hard problem of consciousness.” Thirty years later, it’s still hard.
This is where the measured stops and Planck’s idea begins: what if consciousness isn’t something matter makes, but the other way round?
Eugene Wigner, Nobel 1963, argued for years that consciousness is what completes a measurement. Later he had second thoughts. The theoretical physicist Amit Goswami built a whole book on the idea. Dean Radin had people who meditate “look” at the slits in their minds, and reports a small change in the stripes. No independent lab has confirmed it. None has ruled it out for good. The right word is “unknown.”
And here’s the part that concerns you, whatever the answer turns out to be: what you look at, you change. What you never look at runs on its own. Your thoughts, your habits, your Monday anger. You don’t need quantum physics to see it. You need to look.
And if Planck was right, then every time you look at the night sky, you’re not a spectator. You’re part of the experiment.
The practices
Measure before you change. Pick one habit (coffee, phone, sweets). For 7 days just note every time it happens, without trying to stop it. It often changes on its own, simply because you’re looking at it.The observer of thoughts. 5 minutes every morning, before you pick up your phone. Name every thought that passes with one word: “plan,” “worry,” “memory.” Don’t follow it. Watch it leave.The question of the day. Once a day, at a tense moment: “Who is watching this right now?” One breath, and carry on.The attention account. Once a week, Sunday evening, 5 minutes. Open your phone’s screen time and look at where your hours went. Don’t judge, just measure. As in the experiment, measuring changes something.