Henry Stapp is an American physicist, well-known for his work in quantum mechanics.
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Stapp received his PhD in particle physics at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Nobel Laureates Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain. While there, he was a member of the Berkeley Fundamental Fysiks Group, founded in May 1975 by Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann, which met weekly to discuss philosophy and quantum physics.[1]
Stapp moved to ETH Zurich to do post-doctoral work under Wolfgang Pauli. During this period he composed an article called 'Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics', which he never sent for publication, but would become the title of his 1993 book. When Pauli died in 1958, Stapp transferred to Munich, now in the company of Werner Heisenberg. While making important contributions to, among other topics, the analysis of proton-proton scattering and the development of analytic S-matrix theory, Stapp is perhaps most well known for his ongoing work in the foundations of quantum mechanics, with particular focus on explicating the role and nature of consciousness. He is also an expert on Bell's Theorem, having solved problems related to non-locality presented by John Bell and Albert Einstein.
He currently performs his research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Some of Stapp's work concerns the implications of quantum mechanics for consciousness.
Stapp is one of those who favours the idea that quantum waves collapse only when they interact with consciousness. He argues that quantum waves collapse when intelligent brains select one among the alternative quantum possibilities as a basis for future action.[2] His theory of how mind may interact with matter via quantum processes in the brain differs from that of Penrose and Hameroff. While the latter postulates quantum computing in the microtubules in brain neurons, Stapp postulates more global collapse via his 'mind like' wave-function collapse that exploits certain aspects of the quantum Zeno effect within the synapses to explain attention. His views are spelled out most clearly in his book, Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer [3]
The known laws of quantum theory, taken as including wave function collapse, are indeterministic; they do not completely specify either the actions we take or the outcomes we experience in terms of the prior mathematical state of the universe, and the choice of action is not fixed even statistically. Thus, according to at least one orthodox contemporary theory, the universe of which we are part evolves, insofar as contemporary science can say, in a way that need not be determined exclusively by the matter-like aspects of nature (although the existence of immaterial determining factors remains speculative). A corollary of this view of reality is that the history of the universe need not be a fixed 4 dimensional structure, as nineteenth century physics proclaimed, but is constantly forging ahead into the future, in keeping with common sense. According to Stapp, each increase in human knowledge is associated with a wave function collapse, which is an 'act of creation' that is a step along the arrow of time. Thus, free will could be seen as directly instrumental in the evolution of the universe.