To understand why this mysterious “wave function collapse” matters so much, we need to look at the central concept of quantum mechanics: the wave function. The wave function is not a physical wave moving through space, but more like a giant map of everything that could possibly happen. If you take something small enough (say, an electron) the wave function doesn’t tell you where it is. Instead, it tells you all the places it could be. Before we look, the electron isn’t in one place or another. In a very real sense, it is in all of them at once.
Erwin Schrödinger was the first person to write down the equation that tells this strange “possibility wave” how to move and change. This was in 1926, and the result, known as the Schrödinger equation, is a cornerstone of modern physics. But from the beginning there was a catch: the equation describes how possibilities spread and evolve, but not how they resolve. It can tell us all the futures (or pasts) that might happen (or have happened), but it cannot explain why only one of them does (or did).
Schrödinger himself struggled with this gap. Later in his life, he turned toward philosophy in search of an answer. What he found was not in Europe’s scientific tradition at all, but in India’s ancient Upanishads. These texts describe a profound identity between the root of personal consciousness (Atman) and the ground of all being (Brahman). Schrödinger believed that this insight solved the riddle of collapse: the transition from possibility to actuality is tied to consciousness itself, and consciousness is not just a small private bubble inside our heads but the very ground of reality.1 He famously, if somewhat mischievously, referred to this as his 'second equation'. Though it never appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, it was the necessary philosophical bookend to his work in physics: an identity statement that claimed to reveal the only thing that can bring those possibilities into a single, actual world: the unity of consciousness with the universe itself: Atman equals Brahman. However, Schrödinger never explicitly integrated his two equations – for him they remained parallel ways of understanding reality, rather than components of an integrated metaphysical and physical system. The primary purpose of the present book is to show how this integration might actually work. Schrödinger was talking about the same pivot I have been talking about. His first equation describes what “happens” in what I call Phase 1. His second is an essential part of the explanation for what happens in Phase 2. Schrödinger’s proposal was that the pivot cannot be found in physics alone. It can only be found by recognising that the root of the consciousness which experiences reality from within is the same thing that brings reality forth at all.
This was too radical for physics to absorb. The first equation could be tested, measured, and turned into technology. The second was a metaphysical claim about the ground of being. Yet Schrödinger saw them as two halves of the same deeper truth.
Although the origin of this hypothesis is mystical (to the extent that it could serve as the broadest possible definition of what the word “mystical” actually means), this system is not a religious narrative. Things 2PC does not imply include: God, idealism, disembodied minds of any sort, individuated souls and the afterlife, revealed moral rules, or anything to do with spiritual development.
1Whether Schrödinger was an idealist or a neutral monist is debatable, but his second equation does not imply idealism, and most modern translators think Advaita is closer to a pure neutral monism than to idealism.