Everyday Quantum Reality

10. Wide-Open Reality

119 Plato is famous for his belief that humankind would never realize its dream of perfect government until “philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy .”1 Knowing firsthand the delights of reason, philosophers, he felt, transcend the emotional vagaries that undermine rational endeavor, vagaries stirred up by most types of music and poetry. Hence, in his state, Plato controlled the arts, particularly those that awakened passion at the expense of reason. Surprisingly, this tension between disciplined thought and impulsive feeling was old even in Plato’s day. He called it, nearly 2,500 years ago, “an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.”2 The quarrel is still very much alive, having picked up steam in the last 400 years as the advance of science (once called “natural Wide-Open Realit y I cannot count [to] one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. Henry David Thoreau 10 120 Everyday Quantum Reality philosophy”) has elicited both approbation and dissatisfaction. To be sure, most people see science as a public good, but not all see it as an unmitigated good. It cuts both ways, toward happiness and misery, and occasionally, perhaps, it leaves more misery in its wake than happiness. Think of the modern death technology that has changed the face of war (which now, more than ever, includes civilian populations) since the early twentieth century. But this—the idea that scientific progress comes with a price tag—is an old refrain, albeit one that once expressed the loss of poetic sensibility that comes with a scientific apprehension of nature. By positing a mechanistic cosmos, science had constrained a particular attitude toward nature: as a system of lifeless parts, nature could be understood reductionistically. Much of science, then, involved the systematic dissection of nature. This might be physical —as in the dissection of organisms, the isolation of elements from compounds, or the firing of neutrons into atomic nuclei to produce a fission effect. Or, once the elemental parts are identified, it might then be conceptual. In any case, parts were deemed the essential building blocks of nature and, by implication, the essen­ tial components of any correct understanding of nature. Still, as this outlook gained currency and began to pay scientific dividends, it met opposition from those who felt it too stark to fully account for the richness of human experience vis-à-vis the natural world. My intent is not to recount this opposition. It is too well known to require documentation. Most people know it firsthand, having at one time or another been in the middle of a tug-a-war between head and heart or between left-brain and right-brain thinking. Do we, while making a decision, stick to reason and fact, or should we also acknowledge what Pascal called “reasons of the heart that reason does not know”?3 Few people would suspect that quantum mechanics has something to say on this score. Not unequivocally, of course—it is too participatory in the life experience to hand down unequivocal judgments. But quantum mechanics as interpreted by Niels Bohr affords some insight into the perennial question of whether life is fully reducible to reason. Not that Bohr had all the answers, but his notion of complementarity does seem to capture nature’s elusiveness as it shows up in quantum mechanical experiments. This elusiveness, Bohr proposed, 121 Wide-Open Reality is the secret spring of life. In a lecture entitled “Light and Life,” he articulated a kind of biological uncertainty principle by explaining that the “minimal freedom” which allows nature to operate in ways that attract our interest also enables nature to escape our scrutiny once it becomes overbearing. In every experiment on living organisms, there must remain an uncertainty as regards the physical conditions to which they are subjected, and the idea suggests itself that the minimal freedom we must allow the organism in this respect is just large enough to permit it, so to say, to hide its ultimate secrets from us. On this view, the existence of life must be considered as an elementary fact that cannot be explained, but must be taken as a starting point in biology, in a similar way as the quantum of action, which appears as an irrational element from...