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physicsworld.com
Comment: Robert P Crease
Has the cultural impact of quantum
mechanics been simply to supply us with a
storehouse of unusual, vivid and sometimes
pretentious or even loopy images?
or whether any similar scrutiny of a minute
section of time and space would yield similar
strangenesses – gaps, inconsistencies,
warps and bubbles in the surface of circumstance.
Perhaps, as with the elements
of matter, investigation passes a threshold
of common sense and enters a subatomic
realm where laws are mocked, where persons
have the life-span of beta particles and
the transparency of neutrinos, and where a
rough kind of averaging out must substitute
for absolute truth.”
Years later, many frames turned out to
have rational explanations. The “umbrella
man” was identified – to the satisfaction of
all but diehard conspiracy theorists. Testifying
before a Congressional committee,
the man in question said he had been simply
protesting against the Kennedy family’s
dealings with Hitler’s Germany, with
the black umbrella – Neville Chamberlain’s
trademark fashion accessory – being a symbol
for Nazi appeasers. Far from heralding
a breach in the rationality of the world, the
umbrella man was just a heckler.
Barrett, being a philosopher, had proposed
that the cultural effect of quantum
mechanics was to strip us of illusions.
Updike, a novelist with a keen interest in
science who followed contemporary developments
in physics with care, reached a
different conclusion. His words above indicate
that he saw the impact of quantum
mechanics on culture to be deeper and
more positive than Barrett had. Indeed,
Updike often has his fictional characters
refer to physics terms in a metaphorical way
that allows them to voice their experiences
more articulately.
The novelist was fully aware that when
scientists look at the subatomic world
frame by frame, so to speak, what they
find is discontinuous and strange – its happenings
random except when collectively
considered. Updike also knew that most of
us tend to find our lives following a similar
crazy logic. Our world does not always
feel smooth, continuous, reliable, lawgoverned,
stable and substantive; close up,
its palpable sensuousness is often jittery,
discontinuous, chaotic, irrational, unstable
and ephemeral. Reality today does not
seem to have the gentle, universal continuities
of the Newtonian world, but is more
like that of the surface of a boiling pot of
water. Using quantum language to describe
everyday conditions may therefore be tech-
nically incorrect but is metaphorically apt.
In another essay, Updike wrote that “our
century’s revelations of unthinkable largeness
and unimaginable smallness, of abysmal
stretches of geological time when we
were nothing, of supernumerary galaxies
and indeterminate subatomic behaviour,
of a kind of mad mathematical violence at
the heart of matter have scorched us deeper
than we know”. The scorching brought
about by such scientific discoveries, Updike
proposed, had given birth to a “new humanism”
whose “feeble, hopeless voice” is provided
by the “minimal monologuists” of
the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett – and
which is also evident in the instantly recognizable
“wire-thin, eroded figures” of the
Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti.
The critical point
If only all human voices were as articulate
as Beckett and Giacometti! Too frequently,
the use of quantum language and concepts
in popular culture amounts to what the
physicist John Polkinghorne calls “quantum
hype”, or the invocation of quantum
mechanics as “sufficient licence for lazy
indulgence in playing with paradox in
other disciplines”. This is how it principally
appears in things like TV programmes,
cartoons, T-shirts and coffee cups.
Updike’s remarks, however, suggest that
quantum mechanics – a theory of awesome
comprehensiveness that has yet to make an
unconfirmed prediction – has does more
than help to deepen our knowledge of the
world and to expand our ability to manipulate
it. The novelist’s remarks suggest that
quantum mechanics – though a modification,
not a replacement, of Newtonian
mechanics – has provided us with a range
of novel and helpful images to interpret our
experiences of the world in a new way, on a
scale equal to or possibly even greater than
Newtonian mechanics. Quantum physics
is metaphorically appealing because it
reflects the difficulty we face in describing
our own experiences; quantum mechanics
is strange and so are we.
Someday, indeed, the era after the Newtonian
Moment may come to be known as
the Quantum Moment.
Robert P Crease is a professor in the Department of
Philosophy, Stony Brook University, and historian
at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, US,
e-mail rcrease@notes.cc.sunysb.edu
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