Everyday Quantum Reality

12. Quantum Play, Quantum Sorrow

143 The thrust of this book has been to argue that quantum phenomena are all about us, and deeply informative of everyday experience. So deeply informative, in fact, that we simply stare past them until they are rediscovered at the extreme limits of our experience, whereupon they register as exotic and surprising counter-instances to the prevailing worldview. But that worldview, which portrays reality as fully logical and mechanical, is itself a profound counter-instance to, or misportrayal of, everyday life. To be sure, the worldview, as it has been fashioned and implemented by classical science, has reaped enormous dividends, but that is because it has blinked away a great deal of mundane experience. “The narrow efficiency of the scheme,” writes A. N. Whitehead, “was the very cause of its supreme methodological success.” Nevertheless, “when we pass beyond the Quantum Pl ay, Quantum Sorrow Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful. Proverbs 14:13 12 144 Everyday Quantum Reality abstraction, either by more subtle employment of our senses, or by the request for meanings and for coherence of thoughts, the scheme breaks down at once.”1 I have tried to indicate a few ways the scheme breaks down. Further , I have tried to dislocate quantum mechanics by relocating it in the sphere of the familiar. As a final effort in this regard, I attempt a couple of poetic images to drive home quantum theory’s centrality to everyday life. Niels Bohr once remarked to Werner Heisenberg that “when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry .” The mind-wrenching insights of quantum physics could not be contained within the bounds of ordinary discourse, and consequently one had to turn to poetry for “images and . . . connections” that would facilitate understanding.2 Nothing is more elemental to our being than play and sorrow, and even at these junctures quantum reality asserts itself. Quantum Play One of the revolutionary aspects of quantum theory is its emphasis on unpredictability or randomness. At the level of atomic and subatomic particles, it is said, some events happen at random. That is, they have no precisely defined cause or causes, but simply “pop” into existence. This implies that if somehow we could step back in time to replay a particular event, it might well turn out differently. Such random events are not fated or determined by prior events. This notion upended classical physics. As noted earlier, the traditional view was that physical events are entirely predictable—if not in practice then at least in principle. The universe could be likened to a huge pool table dotted with trillions of billiard balls. Each ball was an atom, and, given the laws of physics and knowledge of every atom’s location and velocity at a given instant, one could work out the entire history of the cosmos. Logistically, this might well be impossible, but theoretically it was plausible because physical reality was thought to be an aggregation of inert particles mechanically impinging on one another in a ceaseless flow of cause and effect. With quantum physics, this conceptually tidy, sharply detailed picture goes out of focus. In some instances it becomes difficult to talk of separable events and particles; things get blurry and con- 145 Quantum Play, Quantum Sorrow fused, i.e., interfused. In part, this is because randomness erodes the principle of causality. A tight, well-defined causal link between an event and prior events does not always exist. And without every link in place, science cannot become omni-science, cannot, even in principle, come to know the end from the beginning. For some physicists of the era, this new outlook was hard to accept because it was so contrary to their deterministic vision of nature. But a little reflection suggests that classical physics’ loss of absolute certitude opens space for the kind of poetic uncertainty that informs human experience. Most people have been to a movie or play whose dialogue was overly formatted or too predictable. Every remark seems to follow logically from the preceding remark. There are few if any miscues, false starts, coughs or sneezes, offbeat responses , verbal slips, or unexpected shifts in conversational mood or direction. Such dialogue quickly becomes tiresome because it lacks the little surprises that interrupt real conversation. Those surprises may distract, but they are also a source of novelty or variation. Music also depends upon the element of surprise or randomness . A melody line...