We Are the Double Slit Experiment

On being both particle and wave — how science can be spiritual

Today we are talking about the following statement:

We are the double-slit experiment. We are both particle and wave. We are both matter and energy, both the light passing through and a collection of arranged particles.

It sounds like poetry. And in one sense, it is. But underneath the poetry is a piece of real, replicated, hundred-year-old physics — an experiment so unsettling that the people who ran it spent the rest of their lives arguing about what it meant.

I want to talk about what the double slit experiment was and how it makes both a beautiful metaphor for our existence but also may be accurate depictions of what we are. The real science doesn't need to be exaggerated to be sacred. It's astonishing exactly as it is. And when you understand it clearly, the meaning it offers for your own life stops being a stretch and can start to feeling like a homecoming.

The experiment that unsettled reality

Picture a wall with two narrow slits cut into it. Behind the wall, a screen that records wherever anything hits it. In front, a source firing tiny particles at the slits — photons of light, or electrons, one at a time.

Common sense says this is simple. Each particle goes through one slit or the other, like a tennis ball through one of two windows. Fire enough of them and you'd expect two bright bands on the screen — one behind each slit. Two slits, two bands.

That is not what happens.

Instead, the particles build up many bands — bright, dark, bright, dark, fading at the edges. This is an interference pattern, and it's the unmistakable signature of waves, not particles. When two waves overlap — like ripples from two stones dropped in a pond — they add where crests meet and cancel where crest meets trough. That striped pattern is what you get when a wave goes through both slits at once and interferes with itself.

So the particle behaves like a wave. Strange — but maybe the particles are jostling each other somehow.

So the physicists slowed it down and fired them one at a time. A single photon. A long pause. Another. Each lonely particle lands as a single definite dot. But as the dots pile up, one by one, over hours — they arrange themselves into the same striped interference pattern. Each particle, travelling completely alone, behaves as though it went through both slits and interfered with itself.

A single particle, with nothing to interfere with, still lands like a wave. It's somehow both.

And then comes the part that changed everything.

What happens when we look

The physicists wanted to know which slit each particle actually went through. So they put a detector at the slits — a way of measuring the path.

The moment they did, the interference pattern vanished.

With a detector watching, the particles stopped behaving like waves and went back to behaving like ordinary particles — two simple bands, one behind each slit.

The act of measuring which path, collapsed the wave-like nature into a single, definite reality. Stop measuring, and the wave pattern comes back. This is where science is really fascinating.

This is often called the observer effect.

And at its most fundamental level, reality isn't made of tiny solid billiard balls. It's made of something that exists as a spread-out field of possibility — a wave of potential — until it interacts with the world, and then settles into one definite outcome. Before measurement, possibility. After measurement, actuality. The particle doesn't have a single fixed position until the moment it's drawn into relationship with something else.

This is where you bring information into conscious thought to materialize an emotion, sensation, or experience. Subconsciously we may be experiencing things around us, and maybe even ourselves as a wave moving in, out and through our environment.

You are made of this

Here's where the metaphor stops being only a metaphor.

You're not separate from this strangeness, watching from a safe distance. You're built from it. Every atom in your body — in the hands holding your phone, in the heart beating in your chest — is made of particles that behave exactly this way.

Electrons that are also waves. You are, literally, an arrangement of the very stuff that refuses to be only a particle.

And there's more, from another corner of physics. E = mc². We say it so often we've stopped hearing it: matter and energy are the same thing in different clothes.

Mass is energy, condensed and slowed and held in form. Your body isn't a solid object that contains energy. Your body is energy, temporarily arranged into the shape of you.

I dive deeper into this idea in my podcast episode: You Are a Verb on the Subconscious Proof podcast.

So when the original sentence says we are both matter and energy, both the light passing through and a collection of arranged particles — that part isn't poetry at all. That's a plain physical description. You're condensed energy holding a pattern.

Both the arrangement and the light moving through it.

(And here's a small thing I can't resist: your own cells emit light. Faint, measurable photons called biophotons — a real, documented phenomenon. You're not only made of the stuff of the double-slit experiment. You're luminous.)

Where physics ends and meaning begins

It would be an overreach to say you, as a whole human being, exist in quantum superposition — that you're literally in two places at once, or that you can collapse the physical world into being with your thoughts. At the scale of a whole body, all those quantum possibilities average out into the stable, solid world we live in. But science is never done and it is very possible that this could be found to be true.

Physicists call it decoherence, and it's why you don't walk through walls, however much some mornings you'd like to.

But watch what stays true even after we're this honest. The universe, at its foundation, isn't fixed and dead and predetermined. It's participatory. It's made of possibility that becomes actuality through relationship and interaction. And that — the deep shape of it — is something you live out every single day, at the scale of a human life, whether or not the quantum mechanics reaches all the way up.

You spend your life as a wave of possibility, collapsing moment by moment into the particular person you become — through what you attend to, and what you let touch you.

This is the part I actually know something about. Not as a physicist — as someone who's spent years working with the human mind and body. The parts of information that materialize as we interact with them. The information that gathers in the body as we begin to observe ourself and others.

The observer effect in the Double Slit Experiment, at the scale of a life

Think about what actually happens in a life. Before you act, before you choose, you're — like the particle before it's measured — a field of potential. Many versions of the next moment exist for you at once. You could respond with anger or with tenderness. Stay small or step forward. Believe the old story about yourself, or write a new line. In that suspended instant, you're genuinely wave-like: many possibilities, none yet fixed.

Then attention happens. You notice one possibility — or the old subconscious pattern selects it for you — and the wave of what-you-might-be collapses into the particle of what-you-did. The moment becomes definite. It joins the arrangement that is your history, your body, your habits: the accumulated pattern of every collapse that came before.

Here's why this isn't just a pretty analogy. Where you place your attention genuinely shapes the reality you then have to live inside. That's not quantum mysticism — it's well-documented psychology and neuroscience. What you attend to strengthens.

The stories you rehearse become the grooves your mind runs in. The nervous system organizes around what it expects. You are, in a real and measurable sense, participating in which version of your life becomes actual — not by magic, but by the ordinary, daily, powerful act of what you choose to notice, believe, and practice.

The double-slit experiment can't tell you to choose tenderness over anger. Physics doesn't reach that far. But it offers something I find quietly steadying: a picture of a universe that is not finished. A reality made, at its root, of openness — of possibility waiting on relationship to become real.

Time is not the line you think it is

Here's where quantum physics gets even stranger — because everything I've described so far assumes time runs in one direction, like a river, from a settled past through a fleeting present into an open future.

Physics is much less certain about that than we are.

The choice made afterwards

In 1978, the physicist John Archibald Wheeler proposed a variation on the double-slit experiment that still makes my skin prickle. His question was simple and outrageous: what if we wait? What if we don't decide whether to measure the particle's path until after it has already passed the slits?

By then, surely, the particle has committed. It's either gone through one slit like a particle or through both like a wave. The decision is made. Our choice comes too late to matter.

Except it doesn't. Real experiments have since been performed, and the result is what Wheeler predicted: whether the particle behaves as a wave or a particle depends on the choice made after it should already have decided. Change the apparatus at the last possible instant, and the particle's prior behaviour appears to change with it.

Wheeler pushed the thought experiment to its most vertiginous extreme. Imagine light from a quasar billions of light-years away, bent around a massive galaxy that acts like the two slits. That light has been travelling for billions of years. And yet the choice an astronomer makes tonight — about how to configure the telescope — appears to determine how that light behaved on a journey it began before the Earth existed.

Wheeler's own conclusion: no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.

Most physicists do not interpret this as literally changing the past. The mainstream reading is subtler and, I think, just as strange: the particle never had a definite history to change. It's not that we reach backward and alter what happened — it's that "what happened" doesn't become a settled fact until the measurement completes. The story isn't rewritten. It simply wasn't finished being written.

A serious minority of working physicists take the time-symmetry more literally. Yakir Aharonov and colleagues developed the two-state vector formalism, in which a complete description of a quantum system requires two state vectors — one evolving forward from the past, and one evolving backward from the future. It's mathematically equivalent to standard quantum mechanics. John Cramer's transactional interpretation describes quantum events as a kind of handshake between waves travelling forward and backward in time.

These are real, published, seriously-held positions in the science community so it's important we consider them a possibility and stop believing that everything in our life is so linear. Life is not the linear experience we believe it to be and we are getting science backed evidence for much of what spiritual teachers have been saying years ago.

There is no universal 'now'

There's a second thread, from an entirely different area of physics, pointing the same direction.

Einstein's relativity showed that simultaneity is relative. There is no universal present moment. Two observers moving differently will genuinely disagree about whether two distant events happened at the same time — and neither of them is wrong.

Events one observer places firmly in the past may still lie in another's future.

Follow that far enough and you arrive at what physicists call the block universe: the view that past, present, and future all exist equally, laid out together in four-dimensional spacetime, and that our sense of moving through them is a feature of consciousness rather than of the universe. Einstein himself, writing to the family of his lifelong friend Michele Besso shortly before his own death, described the distinction between past, present, and future as a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Careful, as always: the block universe is an interpretation of relativity, not a proven fact, and thoughtful physicists disagree. But it isn't fringe. It follows naturally from equations we've tested to extraordinary precision.

The arrow is not in the equations

And here's the detail that surprised me most when I first learned it. The fundamental laws of physics are, almost without exception, time-symmetric. They work equally well run forwards or backwards. Nothing at the bottom of physics says which way time must flow.

Our powerful sense of a one-way arrow comes from thermodynamics — from entropy, the tendency of things to move from order toward disorder. That arrow is real at our scale. But it's an emergent property, not a fundamental law. At the level of the particles you're made of, the universe doesn't seem to care much which way is forward.

Which means the past may not be behind you

I'm not going to tell you that you can reach back through time and change what happened. Physics doesn't license that, and I won't pretend otherwise.

But here's what I can tell you with complete confidence, because this is my actual territory:

The past you carry is not fixed.

And it is the only past you ever actually have access to.

There's a well-established finding in neuroscience called memory reconsolidation. When you retrieve a memory, it doesn't simply play back like a recording. It becomes temporarily unstable — labile — and has to be re-stored. And in that window, it can be altered. Every time you remember something, you are, in a real biological sense, rewriting it. The memory you hold isn't the event. It's the last time you remembered it.

Sit with what that means. The past that shapes your body, your reactions, your sense of who you are, is not a sealed archive. It's a living structure edited by the present moment in which you turn toward it. When you bring attention to something old — really bring it, with feeling, in the presence of something new — the old thing changes. Not the event. But the version of the event that lives in you and runs your life.

That's not a metaphor for the double-slit experiment. It's a separate, solid, replicated finding from a completely different field. And it says the same thing: what you attend to now reaches backward.

And it reaches forward too. The future self isn't waiting somewhere fully formed. It's being selected, moment by moment, from a field of possible people you could become — by what you practise, what you rehearse, what you let touch you, what you keep placing your attention on. Every collapse narrows some possibilities and opens others. You are, right now, choosing which future becomes actual, in exactly the ordinary way that has always been available to you.

So when I say that what you pay attention to here and now may affect the future you and the past you, in ways we have yet to fully understand — I mean it at two levels at once. At the level of physics, the direction of causation is genuinely, honestly unsettled, and serious people are still working on it.

And at the level of a human life, we already know it's true, and we know the mechanism.

The version of your life that becomes real is assembled at the meeting point of what happened, what you attend to, and who is with you when you attend to it. All three are variables. Only one of them is behind you.

Both particle and wave

So much of our suffering comes from believing we're only the particle. Only the fixed thing. Only the arrangement — the diagnosis, the history, the pattern, the person we've always been told we are. Solid. Determined. Already decided.

But you were never only the particle. You're also, always, the wave — the field of possibility that hasn't yet collapsed, the potential no arrangement can fully contain.

Both are true at once. You are the pattern and the light moving through it. What's already been decided and everything still open.

The wisdom isn't in choosing one. It's in holding both. Honoring the arrangement you've become — all its history and weight and beauty — while never forgetting you're also, still, made of possibility. That the next moment hasn't been measured yet. That the wave hasn't collapsed.

You are not finished. At the level of your very atoms, the universe left the question open.

This is the deepest reason I do the work I do. I've watched people who were utterly certain they were only the particle — fixed, broken, determined by what happened to them — remember, sometimes in a single trembling moment, that they were also the wave. That possibility was still theirs. That they were never as decided as they believed.

You are the double-slit experiment. You always were. Made of the strangest, most open-ended stuff in all of existence — and still, somehow, here. Arranged, luminous, and beautifully unfinished.

Viktoria Hamma is a Registered Massage Therapist, hypnotherapist, Quantum Biology Practitioner and biopsychosocial wellness educator in Muskoka, Ontario. She writes at the meeting place of science and spirit — and works with people who are ready to remember they're more possibility than they've been told. Find her at viktoriahamma.com.