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Quantum Mysticism: When Quantum Physics Meets Spirituality

with Dr. Rachel Carbonara 

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Can Quantum Physics Explain Spirituality and Mystical Experience?

Dr. Rachel Carbonara explores the overlap of quantum physics and spirituality.

Quantum physics upended many of our most basic assumptions about the nature of reality, introducing mind-bending concepts like wave-particle duality, Schrödinger's cat, and “spooky action at a distance,” which is how Einstein described the fact that particles can influence each other across great distances.

These groundbreaking discoveries have inspired both scientific spiritual inquiry. Some have drawn on quantum theory to explain parapsychological phenomena like clairvoyance and telepathy, or to support ideas about spiritual healing and manifestation. While some theoretical physicists have participated in research that seeks to connect quantum physics to the spiritual, most have strongly denied any such connections. “Quantum mysticism” or “quantum spirituality” has been referred to as “quackery,” “flapdoodle,” and even “bullshit.”

In this lecture, Princeton University's Dr. Rachel Carbonara will explore the intersection of quantum physics and religion. How have theoretical physicists, since the advent of quantum physics in the 1920's, linked scientific and spiritual inquiry in their work? Does quantum physics actually offer any proof of, or explanation for, religious and spiritual ideas related to God(s), interconnection, psychic abilities, or manifestation? Is it possible to engage in speculative thinking about the relationship between quantum physics and religion without distorting the scientific facts?

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Dr. Rachel Carbonara 
 

Rachel Carbonara is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Culture, Society and Religion at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. in the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion from the University of Chicago in 2024. Dr. Carbonara's work examines New Age spirituality in the contemporary United States with a focus on practices of manifestation and energy healing. She is interested in the ways that spirituality blurs the boundaries between the secular and the religious, and in American spirituality’s entanglements with late capitalism and the racialized logics of its practices of appropriation. Dr. Carbonara has conducted ethnographic research with several spiritual groups in the United States as well as with the spiritual tourism industry in Cuzco, Peru. She has also worked for NPR's Invisibilia, Harvard's Ministry of Ideas podcast, and YouTube's Religion for Breakfast.

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Your Instructor

McNicholl

Adeana McNicholl

Ph.D. (she, her, hers)

Adeana McNicholl is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her scholarship focuses on Buddhism in premodern South Asia and in the United States. Her research engages with the connection between religion and embodiment, particularly race, caste, gender, and sexuality. Her latest book is Of Ancestors and Ghosts: How Preta Narratives Constructed Buddhist Cosmology and Shaped Buddhist Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2024).

 

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