The Big Bang Never Happened

■ MATTER ■tivity is true, and their results are contradictory. Therefore, logicdoesn't apply to the quantum world. Such a viewpoint amongscientists has served as an open invitation to all sorts of irrationalismand occultism. Quantum mechanics has been used to justifythe existence of extrasensory perception, telepathy, and otherfantasies.This can't be considered strange, because the conventionalview of quantum mechanics, the view taught in every physicsdepartment today, introduces magic into the heart of science.Ultimately it is assumed that quantum phenomena are acausal—that there is no cause for the decay of a nucleus at a particularinstant, or the emission of a photon. These things "just happen."And when the basic principle of causality—that everything iscaused by something else—is abandoned, magic can becomequite acceptable. (To be sure, the majority of scientists who usequantum mechanics don't think about these matters very muchand don't believe in magic. But the magical nature of quantumtransition is central to the standard interpretation of the theory,nonetheless.)Like the other paradoxes of modern physics, the contradictionsof quantum mechanics are, in effect, swept under the rug. Manyarticles are written about them, but they tend to conclude, "Isn'tthe universe bizarre?" No articles within the mainstream of physicsview these contradictions as somehow implying that, despitethe theories' great success, they are limited in some fundamentalway.■QUANTUM ORIGINSWhat is perhaps most peculiar about this situation is that quantummechanics itself arose in response to the contradictions ofearlier theories, which its founders viewed not as indicationsof the limits of human logical understanding, but simply as limitsof a particular theory, and of the need to develop a new one.The first impetus toward the idea that energy comes in discretepackages, or "quanta," and can behave like particles, came fromthe study of black-body radiation—the same black-body radiationI discussed early in this book. At the end of the nineteenth century,scientists were studying the spectrum of light emitted by355