Wide-eyed wonder... Vlatko Vedral. Photo: Edward Duca

Vlatko Vedral is quite certain that a “personal God” who intervenes in human and natural events does not exist, but he ponders the origins of life with the wide-eyed wonder of an evangelist.

“Everything we do suggests to us that there is logic in the universe. This is inexplicable to us. Why is it so ordered?” he muses.

“People look to God to explain it. The problem with that is that you have to be very careful not to explain one mystery by postulating another one. If you say to a scientist that everything is the work of God, then we should switch to studying God.”

While he does not claim to have all the answers, the Serb scientist, a professor of quantum information theory at the University of Oxford, wrote a critically acclaimed book in 2010 entitled Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information.

In it, he explained why “information” was the most fundamental building block of reality, and discussed what a useful framework this was for viewing all natural and physical phenomena.

Prof. Vedral gave a talk at the University of Malta last Thursday in which he elaborated on his ideas.

“I like the hypothesis that information underpins everything. It comes closer to the notion of the ‘first cause’ than anything else in science,” he said.

Prof. Vedral’s notion of information follows a precise mathematical definition: it is the logarithm of the inverse of the probability of an event. Or, in other words, the more unexpected an event, the more information it contains.

“I think information can almost – I don’t want to overstate because we still can’t explain everything – but it can almost explain its own origin in some respects,” he said.

“If you phrase everything in terms of information, you are really talking about the spontaneous creation of information in quantum mechanics.”

Indeed, his aforementioned book finishes by considering the answer to the ultimate question: where did all of the information in the universe come from?

I still think we understand very little

“I still think we understand very little. We understand quantum physics when it comes to small objects. If you want to extrapolate and apply that to the universe, I tried to argue in the book that there is a coherent picture.

“We can look at different areas in a very similar way and recognise the same kind of information processing going on. That is the dream of the physicist: to have a very tight set of rules that explains and justifies everything around them,” he said.

Asked to elaborate further on his personal views on notions such as “God” and “religion”, Prof. Vedral said: “It is hard to talk about the supernatural with the scientific method we are using. You can eliminate certain simplistic sets of beliefs, such as creationism for example.”

However, he claimed that most religious people frequently had a highly sophisticated concept of a higher being.

“It is very hard to eliminate the possibility of this [a higher being]. What we are talking about becomes a matter of semantics: whether I believe in the existence of the whole universe, or whether, like [Dutch philosopher Baruch] Spinoza you call the universe some kind of higher being that already contains its own cause. I think that is highly possible scientifically speaking,” he said.

Prof. Vedral moves on to muse that we may need to move beyond our current knowledge of quantum physics to explain how inanimate matter became living.

“It is not entirely clear that we can bridge this gap with our current understanding. There are suggestions that we should be looking into biology to inform us of how we can construct laws of physics.

“One extreme opinion is that it is just a question of complexity; we just keep on applying quantum physics and ultimately we will derive life. I’m not sure if this is true.”