Does Death Exist? Quantum Physics Suggests Not
Please excuse me while I dive down into the morbid and murkiness for a moment or two.
I never thought much about death until I saw it up close. And what I witnessed was death in a context most people never will, and I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone. But, my mind sometimes goes to strange and dark places now as a result, so here we are.
We don’t like to talk about it because it makes us uncomfortable. The stillness, the silence, the idea that we just…vanish. That everything take makes us what we are from our crooked toenail on the right foot to the birth mark sprinkled on the side of our faces to the way we pause before answering a question, just stops existing one day.
But somewhere between philosophy and particle physics, a little nagging thought keeps rising. What if death isn’t real?
Not in the way we think anyway, and certainly not in the way we’ve been told.
And now, some quantum physicists are suggesting just that.
That death (like time, like separation) might be a trick of perspective. An illusion of the observer, or a story told from only one side of the veil.
The Quantum View of Reality
At the heart of quantum theory is this truth that doesn’t change, particles don’t behave like objects.
They behave more like possibilities. They can be in multiple places at once, they don’t take a definitive shape until observed, and they are entangled, so what happens to one can affect another instantly, even across galaxies.
In this world of infinite potential, reality truly isn’t fixed, it’s fluid.
Some scientists believe that consciousness itself plays a role in shaping it.
Dr. Robert Lanza, a renowned stem cell researcher, proposed the theory of Biocentrism, which basically said that the universe doesn’t create consciousness, consciousness creates the universe. The chicken versus the egg age-old question just got a lot deeper. Or, the old wondering of if a tree falls in the woods but no one is there to hear it, did it really fall? My husband says this is more like the rendering theory for those who play video games, that noting really renders until you’re close enough for it to matter.
In this model or theory, space and time are not absolute, they’re more like the tools our minds use to make sense of experience.
And death, well, that’s a limitation of our current perspective, not a fundamental truth. When we die, Lanza suggests, our consciousness continues…perhaps in another universe, perhaps in another form. Some interesting echo of reincarnation come back to play, but with more science involved.
Sort of like a wave moving across oceans we can’t yet see.
Multiverse Theory and the Many Versions of You
If there are infinite universes, each playing out different outcomes, then there’s a version of you that never stubbed your toe, one that became a painter (always wanted to do this, but have absolutely no natural gift for it), one that kissed someone you never did, and maybe, one where you didn’t die when you were supposed to.
It’s called quantum immortality. The theory that that the body doesn’t end, but that your conscious awareness shifts to the next branch of existence…where life continues on somehow or in someway.
To outside observers, you're gone, and they remember you fondly, but to you, the story continues.
Time Isn’t Linear, and Maybe Neither Are We
As explored in my article on gold formed in magnetar flares, the universe creates meaning through collisions.
Stars die, and from their remnants, beauty is born. Why should we be any different?
Maybe death is just some form of transformation our brains can’t possibly understand yet. A shift in vibration, or a change in wavelength.
Time was never linear, and post-trauma my mind stopped believing it was many years ago.
Physicists agree on this much without debate, matter and energy are neither created nor destroyed, they only transform.
So what happens to the energy of you? Your thoughts, the way you think deeply in the mornings when you first wake up, your dreams for a better life, your memories, your inner awareness that makes you…you. That’s a ton of energy.
Some say it scatters, others say it returns to whatever higher dimension it originated from.
What if it relocates? Just because a candle goes out doesn’t mean the fire has died, it’s simply moved. Have you ever blown out a candle then held a lighter to the smoke coming off the wick? It relights itself and you can see the fire jump back down to where it used to be.
This isn’t a dismissal of biology, it’s an expansion of it. I understand that our bodies decay and our bones turn to dust and our flesh feeds the soil once we leave this place we call home, but what if there’s more?
It’s simply the recognition that consciousness could be more fundamental than matter.
And it opens the door to afterlife theories grounded in physics, the idea that love, memory, even identity, aren’t erased, they're just rerouted, and a new kind of immortality, not one of flesh, but of awareness.
So… What Happens When We Die?
We don’t know. I don’t know, and you don’t, not yet anyway.
But maybe the big question we should be asking isn’t what happens, but it’s what continues? Does the data of your cells live on? The shape of your light and how your brain chooses to be optimistic in the face of total darkness? What about the memory of the universe, is that gone even though the calcium in your bones and every atom of your body started its life inside of a star?
If consciousness is quantum, then the self is not a body.
It’s a ripple, a rhythm, a song still echoing in a field of stars but now surrounded by soft grasses, tall trees, and oceans so vast we can’t see across them.
If death is a door, it might not lock behind us when it closes, if it’s an illusion, it may be the most loving one.
Death gives us a sense of urgency, poetry, the courage to truly live before we go onto the next phase of being. Not because the end is final, but because the infinite begins again.
I’ll end this post with my favorite eulogy of all time:
“You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.
And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.” - Aaron Freeman
Other Reads You Might Enjoy:
The Invisible Symphony: How the Universe Flickers Through Our Lives Without Us Knowing
Quantum Time Control: How Scientists Are Learning to Rewind Reality
When the Future Rewrites the Past: The Quantum Eraser Paradox
The Great Attractor: The Mysterious Force Dragging Our Galaxy Toward the Unknown
The Shape of Thought: OpenAI, Jony Ive, and the Birth of a New Kind of Machine
The Hibernation Code: Ancient Genes, Forgotten Powers, and the Silent Potential Within Us
The Forest That Never Dies: How a Single Tree Became 80,000 Clones
The Sound of Extinction: How Disappearing Animals Take Silence With Them
