It happened on a day when the oaks and maples were budding, soon after the birds had returned. The field was unkempt and full of rusty stems. Thistle seeds and pods had attached to my shoes and socks; a grasshopper, fumbling for freedom in a web, was wrapped alive, where the waiting spider poked its proboscis into him. The meadow was soundless. I had twisted my ankle and was sitting on a rock. That is why I was still there and didn’t miss it. Otherwise I might have left still thinking that everything in the world was exactly as it appears, and never have gone on to write “Biocentrism.”

I was beginning to get very bored of sitting on the rock, there by the spider. So I was considering, in my mind (as well as I could, for the sun had made me feel very drowsy), whether it was worth the trouble of getting up and making my way back home, when suddenly a woodchuck emerged from his hole and ran close by me. That was not so very remarkable. Nor was it so very unusual when he paused a moment in his rushed sweep through the grass, holding up both paws, looking at me with the curious glance of the White Rabbit, as if to say, “Why, Robert, what are you doing out here?”

But, when this creature actually looked into my eyes, and twitched its whiskers, I felt the Élan Vital in him, a certain sense of consciousness that cut across space. Then it ran off, and I too. You see, there was a joining, a projection of desires across the species boundary; and as Thoreau once remarked, I feared my thoughts would not come back to me. “If it would have done any good, I would have whistled for them.” For just a moment, it was as if I put my head into the belly of the woodchuck. I could feel the great-tipped wind hairs standing out on the back of my neck, even as the woodchuck might have felt them himself.

Some people at the universities will smile. They will say that the sun was hot upon me that day, and that, considering the circumstance, I should not burden my readers with this affair. Others will wonder what I had for breakfast, if I did not feel weak, or if it was not a fantasy. They don’t think there is any other explanation left. However, some of you probably heard about Zeno of Elea in school–I saw an article about him in a scientific journal. It turns out he was right, which is why I recall the woodchuck and that small suburban field.

It would seem that scientists have proved a theory named for the Greek philosopher that, in the world of quantum physics, shows that a watched pot doesn’t boil. “It seems,” said Peter Coveney, “that the act of looking at an atom prevents it from changing.” Theoretically, by the tenets of the Zeno effect, if an atomic bomb was watched closely enough, it wouldn’t explode if you checked its atoms every quintillionth of a second. This and other experiments suggest that the physical world, and in particular, particles in the atomic realm, are influenced by human observation, prompting some to reevaluate the basic nature of life, of the universe, and of the interrelationship between them.

Zeno of Elea, who lived from 495 to 430 B.C., is best known for one of four paradoxes involving a flying arrow, a paradox that has been explained only in this century through the application of sophisticated mathematical concepts. Since an object cannot occupy two places simultaneously, he contended the arrow is only at one place during any given instant of its flight. To be in one place, however, is to be at rest. The arrow must therefore be at rest at every instant of its flight, and motion is impossible. But is this really a paradox? Or rather, is it proof that time [motion involves objects changing, in time, their position in space] is not a feature of the outer, spatial world, but is rather a conception of human and animal thought?

In the last few decades, physicists have shown that atoms cannot change their energy state while they are being continuously observed. To test this theory, a team of researchers at NIST held a cluster of beryllium ions (the “water”) in a fixed position using a magnetic field (the “kettle”). They applied “heat” to the kettle using a radio-frequency that would stimulate the atoms to jump from a lower to a higher energy state. This transition usually only takes about 250 milliseconds. However, when the scientists kept checking the atoms every four milliseconds with pulses of light, the atoms never made it to the higher energy state, in spite of the force driving them toward it. It seems the process of measurement forces the atoms back down to the lower energy state–essentially resetting the system to zero. This phenomenon has no analog in the everyday classical world of sense awareness and appears to be a function of observation.

Perhaps it’s wiser to try to understand nature in terms of life rather than to interpret her in terms of Schrödinger’s wave functions. To me, my interaction with the creature that inhabited that field was more complicated, and will in the end penetrate closer to the secret of the universe than any experiment that ever was carried out in a laboratory.”

Arcane? Bizarre? It’s hard to believe the quantum Zeno effect is real. It’s a fantastic result, I have to agree. Indeed, when quantum mechanics was in its early days during the beginning of the last century, even some scientists dismissed the findings as impossible. It’s interesting to recall Albert Einstein’s reaction to the experiments: “I know this business is free of contradictions, yet in my view it contains a certain unreasonableness.” A few years later he stated explicitly his conviction that quantum mechanics does not contain any logical contradictions. “The functions [the Schrödinger wave functions],” he said, “are supposed to determine in a mathematical way only the probabilities of encountering those objects in a particular place or in a particular state of motion, if we make a measurement. This conception is logically unexceptionable and has led to important successes.” Maybe so, but I’ve spent my entire life studying nature, the basis of life in general. I have faith in life, not a set of equations.

No doubt the equations are right, but perhaps it’s wiser to try to understand nature in terms of life rather than to interpret her in terms of Schrödinger’s wave functions. To me, my interaction with the creature that inhabited that field was more complicated, and will in the end penetrate closer to the secret of the universe than any experiment that ever was carried out in a laboratory. As I have grown older, I have found myself puzzling more and more over the woodchuck. Somewhere in that little episode, I was sure, lay the key to the secret.

It was only with the advent of quantum physics and the fall of objectivity, that scientists began to consider again the old question of the possibility of comprehending the world as a form of mind. Einstein, on a walk from The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton to his home, asked Abraham Pais if he really believed that the moon existed only if he looked at it. Since then, scientists have tried to revise their equations in a futile attempt to arrive at a statement of natural laws that in no way depends on the circumstances of the observer. It seems only natural that the daily circuit of, say, moon round earth, though satiable only by a mind, was independent of any perception whatever. Certainly the mind is a physical phenomenon. But all this in the end was to prove an illusion.

In these days of experiment and disconnected theory, one point seems certain: the nature of the universe cannot be divorced from the nature of life itself. Indeed, the quantum theory implies that consciousness must exist, and that the content of the mind is the ultimate reality. If we do not look at it, the moon is gone. In this world, only an act of observation can confer shape and form to reality–to a dandelion in a meadow, or a seed pod, or the sun or wind or rain. Anyway, it’s amazing, and the woodchuck can do it too. And maybe even the spider, there on her web, moored to the tall spears of buffalo grass.

But that is not all. The late Heinz Pagels of Rockefeller University once commented: “If you deny the objectivity of the world unless you observe it and are conscious of it (as most physicists have), then you end up with solipsism–the belief that your consciousness is the only one.” This may not unsettle you, except perhaps, if you were standing in a meadow in the afternoon of a spring day, when everything was bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have roused a groundhog, if it had been slumbering in its hole, as it was, I suppose. But there I was, the creature two or three rods off, so still, its eyes immutably fixed on mine.

I knew then, at that moment, that in an important way Pagel’s conclusion about solipsism was right. Only it wasn’t my consciousness that was the only one, it was our’s. There was no doubt; that consciousness which was behind the youth I once was, was also behind the woodchuck. Aye, behind the mind of every animal and person existing in space and time. “There are,” wrote author and naturalist Loren Eiseley, “very few youths today who will pause, coming from a biology class, to finger a yellow flower or poke in friendly fashion at a sunning turtle on the edge of the campus pond, and who are capable of saying to themselves, ‘We are all one–all melted together.'”

Yes, I thought, we are all one. There was a crackling of some twigs, and I jumped up in alarm. In another moment I popped down the large woodchuck-hole under the rock.