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physicsworld.com Comment: Robert P Crease Critical Point The quantum moment Quantum mechanics, says Library Robert P Crease, has finally Photo acquired as much cultural influence as Newtonian mechanics, though via a very Heller/Science J different path Eric On the outskirts of Cambridge, next door to the Lyndsey McDermott hair salon on Castle Street, is a pub called the Sir Isaac Newton. Ask those inside why it’s so named and drinkers are likely to stare at you, muttering something about British greatness, history or the small fact that Newton was educated at the university down the road. But the pub’s name reminds us that Newton not only is still a highly influential scientist, but remains a popular icon too. Indeed, his name has also been given to Cambridge University Library’s online course catalogue, to an orbiting X-ray observatory and a unit of force, as well as a computer operating system. But the use of Newton’s name as a recognizable “brand” is only the most trivial way in which his work has influenced culture. His greatest legacy – Newtonian mechanics – has affected all human life by deepening our knowledge of the world, by expanding our ability to control it, and by reshaping how scientists and non-scientists alike experience it. The arrival of the Newtonian universe was attractive, liberating and even comforting to many of those in the 17th and 18th centuries; its promise was that the world was not the chaotic, confusing and threatening place it seemed to be – ruled by occult powers and full of enigmatic events – but was simple, elegant and intelligible. Newton’s work helped human beings to understand in a new way the basic <strong>issue</strong>s that human beings seek: what they could know, how they should act and what they might hope for. The Newtonian moment The Earth and the heavens, according to Newtonian mechanics, were not separate places made of different stuff but part of a “uni-verse” in which space and time – and the laws that govern them – are single, uniform and the same across all scales. This universe is also homogeneous. It is not ruled by ghosts or phantoms that pop up and disappear unpredictably. Everything has a distinct identity and is located at a specific place at a specific time. The Newtonian world is like a cosmic stage or billiard table, where things change only when pushed by Abstract reality Eric J Heller is a Harvard University physicist and chemist who takes computer simulations of quantum processes and turns them into works of art, such as this piece based on a quantum chaos map. forces. All space is alike and continuous, all directions comparable, all events caused. This picture strongly influenced philosophers, theologians, writers, artists and even political thinkers. Indeed, the philosopher Richard Rorty once referred to “Newtonian political scientist[s]”, who centre social reforms around “what human beings are like – not knowledge of what Greeks or Frenchmen or Chinese are like, but of humanity as such”. Meanwhile, in 2003–2004, the New York Public Library staged an exhibition entitled “The Newtonian Moment” to showcase Newton’s cultural impact and illustrate the revolution in worldview his work brought about. Writing in the exhibition’s catalogue, the historian of science Mordechai Feingold declared that the name was chosen because the Enlightenment and Revolution comprised “the epoch and the manner in which Newtonian thought came to permeate European culture in all its forms”. Feingold was using the word “moment” in the way historians do, referring to special turning points in which a radically new idea recasts past conflicts and tensions to open up new possibilities for the future. These turning points are cultural paradigm shifts that change what human beings know and do, and how they interpret their experiences. Features of the Newtonian Moment include the assumption of universal continuity, certainty, predictability, sameness across scales, and the ability of scientists to “take themselves out” of measurements to see nature as it is apart from human existence. The quantum ambush The Newtonian Moment lasted for some 250 years until the start of the 20th century, when it was ambushed by the quantum. Many scientists initially hoped that they could find a comfortable place for the quantum on the Newtonian stage, but by 1927 it had become clear that the quantum undermined many features of the Newtonian world, raising unprecedented philosophical as well as scientific <strong>issue</strong>s. “Never in the history of science,” wrote the science historian Max Jammer, “has there been a theory which has had such a profound impact on human thinking as quantum mechanics”. Some scientists tried to explain what was happening by spreading word of quantum physics into ever-widening social spheres Physics World March 2013 25
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