Science
“Far from being completely counterintuitive and beyond our experience, the findings of quantum physics have many analogs in everyday life, which we have simply not seen because of the grip of the classical worldview on our thinking. . . . Everyday Quantum Reality makes
G r a n dy
Philosophy
Dav i d A . G r a n dy
an important and original argument.” —Alexander Wendt, author of Social Theory of International Politics
remarkable, well-nigh bizarre claims. And most people would assume that quantum reality describes a world quite different from ours. In this book, David A. Grandy shows that one can find quantum puzzles, or variations thereof, in the backyard of everyday experience. What disappears in transferring quantum theory to the everyday is the theory’s mathematical formalism, but that need not imply a loss of analytic rigor. If quantum reality is truly as elemental and ubiquitous as many thinkers suggest, then alternative or complementary perspectives ought to be possible, and with the proliferation of such perspectives, a more fully rounded understanding of quantum reality—and everyday reality—might emerge. This book is a step in that direction.
E v e r y d a y Q u a n t u m Re a l i t y
Most people have heard about quantum physics and its
E v e r y d a y Q u a n t u m Re a l i t y
David A. Grandy is Professor of Philosophy at Brigham Young University and author of The Speed of Light (IUP, 2009); Leo Szilard: Science as a Mode of Being; and (with Dan Burton) Magic, Mystery, and Science (IUP, 2004).
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E v e r y d ay Q u a n t u m Re a l i t y
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[email protected] © 2010 by David Grandy All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. ∞ â•–T he paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grandy, David. Everyday quantum reality / David A. Grandy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-253-35529-4 (cl : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-253-22242-8 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Reality. 2. Life. 3. Quantum theory. I. Title. BD331.G68 2010 110--dc22 2010005764 1 2 3 4 5 15 14 13 12 11 10
To Janet
We witness every minute the miracle of related experiences, and yet nobody knows better than we do how this miracle is worked, for we are ourselves this network of relationships. Maurice Merleau-Pont y
Co ntents
Prefaceâ•… xi
Ack nowledgmentsâ•… xv
Introductionâ•… 1
╇ 1 Qua ntum Uncertaint y╅ 11 ↜2 Wave-Particle Dua lit y╅ 21 ↜3 T wo Every day A na logues╅ 37 ↜4 The Double-Slit Experiment╅ 49 ↜5 Double-Slit A na logues╅ 65 6 Every day Superposition╅ 77 7 The Witness of Music╅ 83 8 Every day Relationa lit y╅ 93 9 Observer- Created Rea lit y╅ 107 10 Wide- Open Rea lit y╅ 119 11 Nonloca lit y╅ 129 12 Qua ntum Pl ay, Qua nt um Sorrow╅ 143
Notesâ•… 153
Bibliogr aph yâ•… 163
Indexâ•… 171
P r e face
In what follows I argue that everyday experience enacts or parallels puzzling features of quantum physics. Quantum uncertainty, wave-particle duality, nonlocality, and so on, can be apprehended in mundane and familiar settings. As I have presented these ideas to others, some have wondered how seriously I take this argument. That is, are the parallelisms or analogues nothing more than striking coincidences, or do quantum phenomena structure everyday experience? As I hope the text makes clear, I believe the latter. If quantum phenomena are as ubiquitous and fundamental as science indicates, why shouldn’t they figure into everyday experience? To assert otherwise is to artificially limit the quantum domain, to make it smaller and less elemental than what physicists and philosophers generally propose. This is to say that anyone can relive the mysteries of the quantum world by reflecting on age-old but routinely unacknowledged mysteries of everyday experience. Either set of mysteries plays off the other, since each is continuous with the other. Because reality hangs together as a whole, it subtly militates against our attempts to exempt ourselves from the reckonings of reality we inevitably develop. In science, this inclination to absent ourselves from the phenomena of interest—as if we were disinterested spectators—has resulted in a piecemeal or parthood ontology, one in which each individual part is deemed absent or isolated from all others, except when the parts physically interact. Thus nature has been portrayed as a mechanisxi
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Preface
tic aggregation of separate, self-contained parts. One of the great realizations of the quantum revolution, however, is the following: narrow-angle analysis can only be taken so far, at which point the phenomena of interest widely ramify into their contexts and become, in effect, context-inclusive entities. This book tracks quantum phenomena as they ramify into familiar, everyday contexts. The other question people ask me is what interpretation of quantum mechanics I embrace. I subscribe to the Copenhagen interpretation, at least to the extent that it affirms nature’s intrinsic chanciness. Not only is this view supported by empirical investigation but, just as important, it clears space for the kind of deliberations that follow. Niels Bohr, the principal architect of the interpretation, realized that quantum phenomena are not ultimately divorced from ordinary life, if only because our understanding of those phenomena must be expressed in language rooted in everyday experience. Science, even quantum physics, is not another way of walking and talking; because its specialized terms grow out of a fund of experience freely shared by all humans, the circuit of understanding is completed only as esoteric concepts are tied back to everyday life. This book is an attempt to offer a few “images and . . . connections,” as Bohr called them, in pursuit of that end.
Ac k n o w l e d g m e n t s
Many people contributed in an important way to this book. I thank an anonymous reviewer at Indiana University Press for offering encouragement and direction. Robert Sloan, Chandra Mevis, Nancy Lightfoot, and Elaine Dur�ham Otto also helped me by overseeing its improvement and conversion into book form. Closer to home, I benefited immensely from the friendship and assistance of Sarah and Marc-Charles Ingerson. In recent years they have graciously done much of the hard work on this and other projects. They have prepared indexes, clarified technical issues, offered constructive suggestions, and in many other ways improved the quality of the final product. I also thank Chad McKell, who carefully read and commented on much of the manuscript, tracked down sources, and produced most of the illustrations. I extend thanks to Brigham Young University for its generous research support. A good place to work, it offers many opportunities for stretching oneself in new ways. Lance Chase and Dan Burton also deserve special mention. Always gracious and stimulating, they have left a permanent mark on my thinking, not to mention my personality. Lastly I thank my family, particularly my wife, Janet. Her steadfast love is the backdrop against which this book was written.
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E v e r y d ay Q u a n t u m Re a l i t y
Introduction
Most people have heard about quantum physics and its remarkable, well-nigh bizarre claims. One effect of these claims is to suggest that quantum reality is a world apart from everyday experience, that the two realities are discontinuous. In this book I dispute this outlook by showing that variations of quantum puzzles have long been part of everyday experience. If one is inclined to puzzle over familiar concepts and experiences, puzzles inevitably emerge, and some deepen toward the kinds of issues now touted as unique to quantum physics. I hold that there is no uniqueness: one can find quantum puzzles, or variations thereof, in the backyard of everyday experience. One often reads that quantum physics is an abrupt departure from the commonsensical understandings of classical (pre-quantum) physics. While that may be true in certain instances, the foundational principles of classical physics, by positing a deterministic world filled with lifeless objects, directly contradict the stubborn everyday sense that we are something more than lifeless objects. Classical physics only makes sense because we implicitly exempt ourselves from its determination that everything issues up from the mechanistic interplay of material particles. And by freely exempting ourselves from this metaphysical postulate, we throw its limitations into relief. The postulate does not apply to us in every way; if it did, we would never be the wiser. To adapt one of Epicurus’s insights, if we were lifeless entities we could never know it, for we would be 1
2
Everyday Quantum Reality
dead even to death and, of course, to the question of whether we are lifeless automatons or beings whose fundamental nature transcends mechanical necessity.1 My point is that classical physics makes sense only if we overlook its assumption of mechanistic lifelessness, and often we do overlook that assumption. But quantum physics, by challenging the claim of a deterministic cosmos, gives us reason to reconsider the metaphysical foundations of classical physics, for the assumption of determinism interlocks tightly with that of mechanistic lifelessness. I hope to show that quantum physics opens space for ideas that are at once new and old: new in the sense that they run contrary to those of classical physics and old in the sense that they coincide with everyday experience—what some thinkers have called pre-conceptual or pre-theoretical experience. In the quantum tradition, theorists have long proposed that ordinary objects—tables, chairs, and so on—come under the sway of quantum reality, just as electrons, photons, and atoms do. They also are generally quick to add, however, that the extreme minuteness of quantum effects keeps them from playing into everyday experience, at least to a significant degree. As George Greenstein and Arthur Zajonc put it: Hidden behind the discrete and independent objects of the sense world is an entangled world, in which the simple notions of identity and locality no longer apply. We may not notice the intimate relationship common to that level of existence, but, regardless of our blindness to them, they persist. Events that appear to us as random may, in fact, be correlated with other events occurring elsewhere.2
On this account, while quantum effects operate subtly and ubiquitously, they do not, in any obvious way, play into everyday experience. Hence we are blind to them. I believe this is only partly true. Granted, quantum effects are minute when measured against, say, the stapler on my desk, but why should that fact keep them from figuring into the way I experience the stapler? Shouldn’t those effects, owing to their elemental ubiquity, figure not only into the microscopic structure of physical objects but also into the small-scale structure of our perceptual faculties and consequently into the ways we experience the world?
Introduction
3
If this is the case, then our blindness to quantum effects might have a twofold origin. First, they are too small to register at the macroworld level, at least if we expect them to show up as phenomena fully removed from us; second and more fundamentally, they have long been iterated out of sight by their deep familiarity. That is, they are not fully removed from us but rather intimately tissued into our being. They thus pattern the way we know things, the way we can know things, even as we do know them. Put differently, they take their place as things to be perceived and known even as they shape our perceptual and cognitive faculties. So instead of being esoteric phenomena on the fringe of reality, they are so close to home as to normally go unnoticed. This would be idle conjecture if I could not retrieve a few instances of everyday quantum reality and thereby demonstrate how quantum puzzles show up for all people, not just a select few with the right training and technology. That is the task of this book. At a minimum it can be understood as a nontraditional introduction to quantum theory. In trying to bridge the putative divide between everyday reality and quantum science, I examine experiences and concepts that are generally deemed puzzle-free and unproblematic. We deem them such because they are easy to talk about or carry out. But this ease is deceptive. For example, Saint Augustine stated that as long as no one asked him to define time, he knew what it was—he knew how to tell time and keep a schedule. But as soon as someone asked for a definition, he grew perplexed.3 Everyone would agree that time passes, but how quickly? “The question is devoid of meaning,” states Paul Davies. At best we may say that it passes at “one second per second” or “one day per day,” but these are empty formulations. What is wanted is an instrument that “can record the flow of time,” but this we do not have; clocks simply tick off “intervals of time,” says Davies.4 Their value lies in their regularity, in their ability to produce equal increments of time that we can track. But they do not allow us to step back from time to see it for what it is. If time is moving, we are immersed in that movement and cannot blithely grab on to a stationary, nontemporal platform from which to gauge time’s rate of passage. That is why
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Everyday Quantum Reality
Augustine found it difficult to define—because it is implicit in the thinking experience that aims to define it. If quantum theory has taught us anything, it is that we are threadÂ�ed into the phenomena we seek to grasp, and this threading, this mutual entanglement or interpenetration of subject and object, brings complexity and uncertainty in its wake. In brief, we are complicit with the world, and this complicity triggers all sorts of quantum-like effects, most of which we stare past with the greatest of ease. They are just part of the background against which less elemental but more mind-catching phenomena show up. In each of the following chapters I zero in on one quantum idea and try to relate it to an aspect of everyday experience. The book is thus a primer in quantum theory, although without a strictly scientific lens; other lenses are brought into play. This approach should not be understood as merely a way of accommodating readers innocent of quantum theory. As indicated, my thesis is that quantum reality, while traditionally associated with particle physics, can be mapped more broadly to ordinary experiences and concepts. What falls out of this mapping, of course, is the mathematical formalism of quantum theory, but that need not imply a loss of analytic rigor. If quantum reality is truly as elemental and ubiquitous as Greenstein and Zajonc suggest, then alternative perspectives ought to be possible, and with the proliferation of such perspectives, a more fully rounded understanding of quantum reality—and everyday reality—might emerge. This book is a step in that direction. Before diving in, however, let me outline the trajectory of the argument. The first two chapters probe core quantum concepts or puzzles, only to conclude that similar puzzlements issue up quite readily from everyday considerations. Neither quantum uncertainty nor wave-particle duality should surprise us. Uncertainty is an ineradicable aspect of mundane experience, so much so that we can never be sure of its provenance— whether it is built into the world at a fundamental level or is merely the result of our inability to grasp reality in all its aspects. While wave-particle duality might seem more impervious to everyday parallelism, it is not. Not only does the idea break down conceptually, but it is not too hard—as I show in chapter 3—to find familiar experiences that teeter back and forth between particle-like precision and wave-like ambiguity.
Introduction
5
In chapter 4 I look at the double-slit experiment and argue that the wave-interference pattern is no more surprising than a statistical bell curve marking the distribution of so-called chance events like coin tosses. Both outcomes are the result of what Erwin Schrödinger called “the order from disorder principle,” an utterly remarkable principle or realization if taken at face value, and one that coincides with the quantum-inspired proposal that reality is held together by some sort of non-causal or pre-causal cement.5 The follow-up to this proposal is found in chapter 5; there I delineate three everyday analogues to the dynamic of the wave-interference pattern, each of which reenacts the shift from causally unrelated events to a pattern or moment connoting pre-causal interaction and expansive unity. This pre-causal unity is easy to miss because it does not obviously prevail among the material objects of ordinary experience. Golf balls, say, manifestly fall under the sway of space and time in ways that keep them from freely interpenetrating—no two balls, each remaining perfectly intact, can occupy the same space-time location. If this were true of everything in the world, then certainly we could say that causal interaction—interaction governed by spacetime constraints—is the universal rule. But quantum entities often appear indifferent to these constraints. Unmeasured particles exist in superposition states, in some sense spreading out in space and time beyond their classical point-like characterization. Said another way, they probabilistically embody numberless space-time possibilities, all mutually exclusive from a classical perspective. This bizarre mode of action naturally sets atomic particles apart from golf balls, but that need not imply that everyday experience is not similarly bizarre in some way. The parallel is found not as we compare microworld objects with objects of the macroworld but as we contemplate the fundamental experience of consciousness—our mind-given apprehension of nature. Unlike classical particles, quantum particles have a mind-like aspect, and mind or consciousness is, in some ways, unmindful of space and time. This is the thrust of chapter 6. In chapter 7 I broach the subject of quantum entanglement— the way particles interact timelessly across arbitrarily large spatial intervals—by arguing that a similar entanglement or interpenetration of successively played tones constitutes our experience of music. We derive special pleasure from music because it nullifies the mecha-
6
Everyday Quantum Reality
nistic conception of time and thereby teaches us that events, though we may mark them off in space and time, are not fully separable and self-contained. In music, past and future rush in upon each presently played tone as the whole composition is newly invested with fresh possibility and meaning. As Nietzsche proposed, music is a key to living in the present because it collapses the imagined distinctions between past, present, and future and thereby puts us in touch with life’s primitive dynamic.6 Experiments affirming quantum entanglement, while mute on the question of how best to live one’s life, nevertheless compel us to rethink our understanding of time and space. Chapter 8 addresses the allied issue of relationality, the quantum-motivated sense that relations or correlations are at least as fundamental as objects tied together by those relations. The argument is straightforward: some properties are, by their very nature, relational. That is, as they inform one object they inexorably and immediately relate it to a second object. I give several examples of everyday relational properties, one of which—color—is not obviously so. Contrary to first-blush thinking, colors are not isolated facts; each springs from the ongoing equilibration of our overall color experience, the way our physiology balances one color off against others to ensure maximal involvement of all colors. Here the argument explicitly ties into visual experience, and increasingly I rely on that experience to develop my ideas. The key point is that optical vision leans on light, and light’s enigmatic nature, as elaborated by modern physics, carries over into the everyday seeing experience. Since, however, light-mediated vision feels so ethereal, so physically nonintrusive, it is hard to countenance the quantum possibility that we change things merely by looking at them. In some circles this controversial proposition is called observer-created reality, and it is the subject of chapter 9. While not wishing to go the full distance with this proposition, I insist that the opposite stance—the myth of the perfectly uninvolved spectator—is deeply flawed and that, whatever the truth of the matter, our participation in nature is originary and therefore inescapably impactful. Even vision leaves its mark on the world, something we know from our evolutionary understanding of nature’s visual splendor.
Introduction
7
In chapter 10, I affirm the point, often made by students of quantum theory, that reality is more wide-open than we suppose, but this I do by arguing that quantum reality coincides with the wide-eyed, wide-open innocence of early childhood. For newborn infants the possibilities of nature have not been narrowed down. In time, of course, some eventualities will be ruled out (nature will be said to behave one way rather than another), and as adults we try to sift quantum phenomena through an overly narrow sieve of possibility. Hence we have difficulty understanding the double-slit experiment, which is a throwback to the sieve-less experience of early infancy. In chapter 11, again with light-mediated vision in mind, I take a look at nonlocality. This is the biggest bombshell of the quantum revolution, but it is not without parallel in daily life. I argue that the concept of atomistic light (our sense that photons are bullet-like capsules of light) becomes logically incoherent once one considers light’s role in the seeing experience. And with the collapse of this concept, a new idea of light begins to register, one that comports with the quantum determination that different parts of light (i.e., photons) are able to interact timelessly across arbitrarily large spatial intervals. This strikes most people as incredible, owing to Einstein’s dictum that no causal influence can propagate faster than light speed. But, as suggested earlier, here we seem to be dealing with some sort of precausal unifying principle; that, at least, is what some thinkers propose. My submission, following Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is that this principle accounts for the seamless unity of the visual expanse where different elements of the expanse interact visually—not causally—to bring off the seeing experience. Without timeless visual interaction among various objects distributed across space, intelligent or meaningful vision does not occur. Seeing, then, is an everyday analogue to quantum nonlocality. The last chapter celebrates play and sorrow, two mood opposites, from a quantum perspective. My intent is to propose that quantum physics redramatizes some of the oldest and most universal experiences of everyday life. So to reiterate: quantum phenomena are closer to home than most people suspect. We have been led to believe that they show up against a backdrop of non-quantum real-
8
Everyday Quantum Reality
ity, that they are exotic exceptions to the rule of mundane human experience. My thesis is that they are not remote or exotic at all; rather, having settled into our nature from the start, they have disappeared from view. But now that science has rediscovered them at a higher turn of the spiral, we can return to the landscape of everyday experience with fresh eyes.
1
Q u a n t u m U n c e r ta i n t y
Without this measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed. Winston Churchill
Life is all about uncertainty. Upon awaking in the morning, we never quite know how the day will go, even when it is carefully planned. The next hour, the next minute, even the next second may bring surprise. Hence, to follow St. Paul, “we see through a glass darkly.”1 Faith and forethought only dimly illuminate the future. In the face of life’s elemental uncertainty—something we all know firsthand—why should the concept of quantum uncertainty hit like a bombshell? Two reasons may be given, both of which go back to the purported elimination of uncertainty by science. The first has to do with the nature of the cosmos. Classical (prequantum) science defined the universe as a mechanical system or machine. In principle, machines are predictable. They instantiate rules of operation—mechanical laws—that never fail. When part
11
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Everyday Quantum Reality
A strikes part B with x force, part B moves y centimeters, and this happens invariably and universally. Since the universe is a lifeless machine with no initiative of its own, nothing else could happen. From this, certainty follows, at least for anyone who knows the mechanical laws. That person can, in principle, simultaneously measure the position and momentum of every particle in the cosmos, feed the data into equations that embody the laws, and perform calculations for any given situation. The future then could be totally predicted and the past totally retrodicted or filled in. Uncertainty would be completely eliminated. Here is how Pierre Laplace, an eminent eighteenth-century scientist, put it after insisting that all events necessarily follow from prior causes: We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.2
The second reason that figures into the prospect of eliminating uncertainty ties in with the first reason. The omniscient party—the person comprehending “all the forces by which nature is animated” —is a spectator of nature. That is, he does not include himself in the system, for that would ratchet up the complexity of things. Or, if he does include himself, he assumes that his presence makes no significant difference. He gets away with, or thinks he gets away with, the pretense of playing the role of the magisterial spectator. In the wake of quantum theory, all this sounds a bit naïve. Is the universe nothing but a sophisticated machine? Can we really view nature as if we were aloof from it? Some bright people still answer yes to the first question. The second question, however, elicits general denial: most would say we are part of nature whether we like it or not. I hold that both attitudes—the mechanistic cosmos and the spectatorial outlook—are simplifying assumptions about the world that have paid tremendous scientific dividends for several centuries. Now, however, they are challenged by science itself, quantum
Quantum Uncertainty
13
physics having taken them to the limit of their truthfulness—and then some. To return to the larger point, however: life is shot through with uncertainty, and so it is quite surprising that quantum uncertainty should now be held up as something anomalous, something that goes against the grain of everyday understanding and experience. But quantum uncertainty and everyday uncertainty, I believe, are different pieces of the same puzzle. In either case, the quest for certainty leads to uncertainty. Whence Quantum Uncertainty? The most familiar expression of quantum uncertainty holds that one cannot simultaneously measure a particle’s position and momentum with complete precision. This is a central aspect of Werner Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle, developed in the mid-1920s. Early on, Heisenberg illustrated the principle with the following thought experiment. Imagine a scientist trying to simultaneously measure a moving electron’s position and momentum with perfect precision. To measure position, she must illuminate the electron with at least one photon, ideally one whose short wavelength snugly fits over the electron to capture its precise location. But short wavelength photons are highly energetic, and so the aforementioned ideal photon turns out to be anything but ideal for the measurement of momentum. Hitting the electron with a bang, it will alter its momentum uncontrollably. Of course, we can get a better fix on momentum by reducing the photon’s energy, but that implies a longer wavelength which in turn implies a less precise position measurement. There is always a trade-off, a built-in limitation to how much overall precision can be achieved. The more we choose to learn about one property, the less we can learn about the other. Working out the details of the uncertainty principle, Heisenberg discovered a small but ineradicable quantity of uncertainty associated with these kinds of dual measurements. At first he thought the uncertainty was epistemic—merely a function of our inability to measure the electron in all of its aspects. At any moment in its flight,
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Everyday Quantum Reality
in other words, the electron has precise position and momentum. It’s just that nature conspires to hide some of its detail from us, at least at the quantum level. The detail is there, but some of it slips from view as we intervene with our technology. In short order, however, Heisenberg gave up the interventionist or epistemic model of quantum uncertainty. Along with Niels Bohr and others, he opted for the more radical ontological model. This outlook proposes that the position-momentum trade-off is inherent in the electron itself: to a small degree that corresponds with the aforementioned minimal quantity of uncertainty, the two properties are mutually exclusive. For an electron, then, precise position and precise momentum do not simultaneously exist. Put another way, precision is shared between the two properties, and to the extent that one property exists precisely while being measured, the other exists imprecisely. There is never enough precision—enough certainty—to sharply define both properties at the same moment. What does it mean to “exist imprecisely”? Heisenberg likened such existence to Aristotelian potential—that is, a kind of tendency or potential to exist.3 Measurement, he further asserted, actualizes or completes the tendency by selecting a single position value, say, from an ensemble of position possibilities. Whereas prior to measurement an electron is probabilistically smeared or distributed across many positions in a schizophrenic sort of way, upon measurement it immediately assumes a single, well-defined position. This is to say that, when unmeasured, an electron has no preÂ�cise position and momentum. It “exists imprecisely” across a spectrum of position and momentum possibilities. The salient point is that uncertainty or imprecision is built into nature itself; at the quantum level, imprecision is nature’s default state with respect to position, momentum, and several other properties we need not mention here. This outlook, of course, contrasts sharply with Heisenberg’s earlier proposal that uncertainty arises from our inability to simultaneously catch an electron in its position and momentum aspects, both of which are said to exist precisely prior to measurement. Is nature at bottom (prior to measurement) precise and sharply edged, or is it blurred and indeterminate? While thinkers still debate this question, evidence seems to favor the latter alternative: quantum uncertainty is inherent in nature. But if this is true, it may be that
Quantum Uncertainty
15
we cannot, for that very reason, know this fact for certain. Even in the realm of everyday reality, I will try to show, there is uncertainty. What is more, there is uncertainty about uncertainty: Is it a function of our inability to fully know what’s going on? Or is it simply a fact of nature? Zeno’s Arrow However one defines quantum uncertainty with regard to momenÂ� tum and position, a similar puzzle arises out of any attempt to ascribe exact position values to everyday moving objects—objects possessing momentum. To illustrate this point we turn to Zeno of Elea, an ancient Greek famous for generating paradoxes that resist easy resolution. One philosopher of science likened them to an onion whose skin keeps showing up every time it is peeled away. Solve Zeno’s paradoxes at one level, and deeper puzzles emerge.4 Here we look at Zeno’s paradox of the moving arrow, which challenges conventional notions of space, time, and motion.5 Does a moving arrow, at any given moment in its flight, occupy a space equal to its length? Answering yes to this question would seem to commit one to the view that at that moment, the arrow is definitely located in space and therefore at rest. It is not in two places but just in one, at least for the briefest of instants. But since that particular instant is no different from any other instant in the arrow’s flight, it follows that the arrow is at rest during its entire flight. That is, if the flight interval is entirely composed of homogeneous instants, all of which find the arrow at rest, when does the arrow ever find time to move? This conclusion, of course, is counterintuitive, but that is because we generally don’t think carefully about moving objects. Like Augustine with respect to time, we just move about in a world of moving objects and then assume that our success in this regard counts as understanding. Try, however, to imagine absolutely precise position values for a moving arrow. We instinctively try to do this by imagining ourselves measuring the ends of the arrow within the briefest possible moment. But if the arrow’s motion is continuous or smooth, we will always get arbitrarily many position values, no matter how small the time interval. (For, in the spirit of another of
16
Everyday Quantum Reality
Zeno’s paradoxes, we can mathematically subdivide any temporal interval arbitrarily many times and then pair each time value with a corresponding position value.) Of course, since this is a thought experiment, we may imagine ourselves executing an instantaneous measurement and thereby come away with a single value. But now Zeno can counter that if such measurements are possible, how do instantaneous moments—temporally unextended moments—pile up temporally? Moreover, supposing instantaneous measurements were somehow possible, could we really come away with a precise position value? All measurements of physical objects, even of stationary objects, involve approximation, however small. Since the tip of the arrow is a physical, not mathematical, point, it occupies space, and space—that is, spatial extension—implies arbitrarily many position values. Given its spatial extension or magnitude, the tip of the arrow cannot be given an absolutely precise position value, even when the arrow is at rest, and if it is moving, additional difficulties emerge. One may reply that measurement errors of this sort are so slight as to be negligible. This, of course, is true in most situations, but what may be negligible in the macroworld often turns out to be significant in the microworld. The point, in any case, is not the size of the error but that error or uncertainty is an inevitable and routinely overlooked feature of everyday reality. And note that even on the everyday level, one cannot determine whether uncertainty is intrinsic to nature or merely the result of imperfect measurement. I may imagine that my umbrella possesses an absolutely precise length, but lacking the measurement technology to prove this—no technology is absolutely precise—I can just as easily imagine that it does not possess a precise length. There is, in other words, uncertainty about uncertainty. So going back to Zeno’s first question, “Does an arrow in flight occupy a space equal to its length?” one may reply: “Perhaps, but since its length cannot be precisely known, neither can its position in space.” In sum, uncertainty is an inescapable feature of life. We know this instinctively because we know from everyday experience that life cannot always be reduced to careful planning. But having embraced the scientific proposition that we are remote spectators of machine-like reality, we have come to assume that uncertainty is
Quantum Uncertainty
17
our fault: if only we could see to the bottom of things, we would never be surprised. Quantum mechanics challenges this outlook, however, and, as I have suggested, so does analysis of any supposedly certain macro-level event. Whether in quantum physics or the familiar realm of everyday experience, the quest for certainty is one of endless surprise and uncertainty. The Uncertain, Everyday Shape of Quantum Reality Although uncertainty about uncertainty (our inability to know wheth-Â� er uncertainty is solely our fault or an intrinsic feature of reality) has always informed human experience, in recent centuries we have blinked that uncertainty away by imagining a scientifically abstract world where all things behave deterministically. Now, however, quan-Â� tum mechanics is forcing science back to what A. N. Whitehead called the “stubborn facts” of ordinary life and thus causing science to mesh with everyday experience. For despite lip service to the scientific platitude of a deterministic universe, life does not feel deterministic. That is, it does not feel linear and lockstep. Stephen Jay Gould, a renowned paleontologist, put it this way while speaking of the evolutionary process with all its contingencies or chanceful turning points. Rejecting determinism and its polar opposite—all-out randomness—he stated that the diversity of possible itineraries does demonstrate that eventual results cannot be predicted at the outset. Each step proceeds for cause, but no finale can be specified at the start, and none would ever occur a second time in the same way, because any pathway proceeds through thousands of improbable stages. Alter any event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into a radically different channel.6
In Gould’s mind, evolutionary process is evolutionary drama because “any pathway proceeds through thousands of improbable stages,” and the same may be said of life at the level of individual organisms. Reflecting on the past, we sense that things might have worked out differently. We regret past mistakes and feel grateful for events, some of them improbable, that have swung things our way. Anticipating the future, we feel that life, as William James put it, is “a real adventure, with real danger” that may or may not “win
18
Everyday Quantum Reality
through.”7 Of course, we sometimes try to undo these feelings by declaring that fate, atoms, environment, or genes rule our lives, and hence our life stories are scripted from the outset, but the feelings themselves are elemental and stubborn. They persist in the face of such declarations and thereby prompt uncertainty. One may compare this residual uncertainty to the irreducible quantity of uncertainty discovered by Heisenberg. Bohr, Heisenberg’s colleague, saw quantum uncertainty as the spark of life,8 and our everyday inability to put uncertainty to rest—to stamp it out as if it were a fire that might burn us—might be that spark at a higher turn of the spiral. We do not seem to be able to fully extinguish it, either as we try to predict and control the flow of daily events or as we try to suppress feelings or fears that life is an intrinsically uncertain, chanceful, open-ended process. We need to point out at this juncture that quantum mechanics not only highlights uncertainty but also embodies it. This is because, more so than any other scientific theory, it implicitly acknowledges its human provenance by bringing (human) observers into the embrace of nature, and not as innocuous spectators but as active participants. Michael Lockwood insists that quantum physics “embodies within itself, as no other scientific theory does, a radically new conception of the relationship between observer and reality. . . . [It], in effect, incorporates a physics of observation or measurement as an integral part of the theory itself.”9 So for the first time in Western science, physicists, while developing quantum mechanics, included themselves in their own model of reality, and thereby complicated that model in lifelike ways. And since ordinary life is shot through with uncertainty, should it surprise us, given our inevitable involvement in nature, that microscopic reality is similarly affected by uncertainty? If there is no way of not being involved in nature, should not the uncertainty we find in one realm also prevail in the other? I hold that the uncertainty discovered in the quantum realm can also be discovered in the everyday realm, at least if we attend to everyday experience without importing into our interpretation of that experience ideas from classical science that quantum physics now refutes. The so-called misalignment between everyday experience and quantum theory occurs only because the grip of classical
Quantum Uncertainty
19
science—its metaphysics—is much greater than we normally acknowledge or even realize. In contradistinction to the world imagined by classical science, everyday life has an uncertain feel and flow, and this uncertainty is part and parcel with quantum theory. Consider Bohr’s oft-cited claim that anyone not shocked by quantum theory doesn’t understand it.10 Bohr is proposing that quantum physics involves more than cognitive mastery of rules and principles, the like of which is a soft pillow for drifting off into ideological slumber. Rather, it involves nature’s perpetual capacity to surprise, to shock, to engender paradox and uncertainty, and to wake us up anew. A better description could not be given of life: anyone not occasionally shocked or surprised by it does not grasp its essential nature—does not realize that it cannot be reduced to the kind of perfect understanding that would strip life of its capacity to shock, surprise, and engender uncertainty. Nick Herbert writes that “the search for quantum reality is the search for a single image that does justice to our new knowledge of how the world actually works.”11 Up until the seventeenth century, people likened the cosmos to a divine organism; after Galileo and Newton, they compared it to a machine; with the development of thermodynamics in the nineteenth century, it began to look like an engine that performs work while dissipating energy. But, says Herbert, quantum physics gives us no single image into which we can metaphorically collapse the cosmos. I believe this is because quantum reality is too close to home—too bound up with the conundrums of everyday experience—to be held apart for independent or objective viewing. Hence it is not so much a set of problems to be rendered puzzle-free through well-defined solution procedures; rather, it is continuous with the ongoing, uncertainty-laced experience of life itself.
2
Wav e - Pa r t i c l e D u a l i t y
We may look forward with undiminished enthusiasm to learning in the coming years what lies in the atomic nucleus—even though we suspect that it is hidden there by ourselves. A. S. Eddington
Even if they know little about modern physics, most people have heard of wave-particle duality. What is more, they know it is a very puzzling concept, even if they may not know how to puzzle over it. But with a little direction and motivation, they could puzzle over a related issue—and one reaching back to the origins of Western science—whose unsuccessful resolution foreshadows wave-particle duality: does reality have a smallest part, or can it be broken down into ever smaller parts? The ancient Greek atomists posited a smallest, indivisible part —an atom—as the fundamental building block of reality. Other thinkers like the Stoics countered that reality is infinitely divisible or continuous. While neither school of thought could prove its hypothesis, each saw its stock rise and fall over the centuries. What was
21
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Everyday Quantum Reality
clear to everyone was that both outlooks couldn’t be right: nature couldn’t have a smallest part and yet not have one. In the early twentieth century, however, this possibility asserted itself. We now refer to this assertion as wave-particle duality. To fully appreciate wave-particle duality, one must unpack each concept—wave and particle—philosophically. A particle is an atom (in the ancient Greek sense), an indivisible building block of nature. As such it exists in its own right: snatch away the rest of the universe, and it would still be there. It also has a precise location and precise, sharply edged boundaries. Finally, when thinking of particles, we reflexively imagine material entities. Particles have mass; they are physical things. This last feature, the materiality of particles, is part of the legacy of nineteenth-century physics, which affirmed the ancient Greek idea of material atoms. With respect to energy, however, nineteenthcentury physics took a different tack. Energy came in waves, which had no smallest part and which were imprecisely bounded. Waves, moreover, did not exist in their own right. They were parasitic on a material medium. The standard example of a nineteenth-century wave phenomenon is light. Scientists took it as a vibration in the universal ether, which was said to be a very subtle material substance filling every nook and cranny of the cosmos. Light did not vibrate independently of the ether. It was the ether vibrating or waving. And while the ether, being material, was generally deemed particulate or atomistic, the wave action of light, being immaterial energy, was thought to be non-atomistic. This tidy scheme—atomistic matter and non-atomistic energy —began to break down when physicists failed to detect the ether experimentally. Most, nevertheless, continued to believe in its existence, for the alternative was unthinkable. If it did not exist, then, of course, it could not vibrate, and light would be impossible. But light is ubiquitous, and science had long confirmed its wave nature. Young Albert Einstein found his way out of this impasse by dismissing the ether and positing the constancy of the speed of light in all inertial reference frames. This move, however, did not make the concept of light more intelligible. On the contrary, it made light
Wave-Particle Duality
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less intelligible, for imagining light waves without the ether was like imagining water waves without water. All the same, once physicists came around to Einstein’s theory, this loss of intelligibility seemed a small price to pay for the tremendous gains realized. Not only that, it prepared them for other startling revelations about light, all of which, like Einstein’s theory, obscured the tidy picture of light embraced by nineteenth-century science. Coming from quantum theory, these revelations pointed toward light as a particle phenomenon. Steeped as they were in the lightas-a-wave tradition, most physicists initially found this proposition unpalatable. Also disturbing was the growing realization that light is dualistic: in some circumstances it shows up as a particle, in other circumstances as a wave. As noted, these two concepts were long deemed mutually exclusive. So as evidence of light’s particle aspect emerged, physicists wondered how light could embody so many oppositional qualities. How could it be atomistic yet non-atomistic, precisely yet imprecisely bounded, and self-existing yet dependent on something else for its existence? After more than a century of pondering these questions, scientists have yet to fully wrap their collective mind around light’s wave-particle nature. But their failure in this regard may have less to do with light per se than with the concepts or categories they try to squeeze light into. That is, certain aspects of the wave and particle concepts may not stand the test of philosophical scrutiny: they may be incoherent. One of these aspects, I will argue, is the atomistic thesis upon which the idea of a particle rests. The self-existing, precisely bounded atom has had a storied history, of course, but when scrutinized, it breaks down toward wave-particle duality just as light does. The Breakdown Louis de Broglie, one of the architects of wave-particle duality, was the first to argue that the idea of an atom or particle is self-eroding.1 Why? Because the two ways of thinking about physical matter—as either continuous (non-atomistic) or discontinuous (atomistic)—in fact lean into one another.
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Everyday Quantum Reality Reality cannot be interpreted in terms of continuity alone: within continuity we must distinguish certain individual entities [atoms]. But these individual entities do not conform to the idea which pure discontinuity would give us of them: they have extension, they are continually reacting on each other and, a still more surprising fact, it appears to be impossible to localize them and define them dynamically with perfect exactness at each instant. This conception of individual entities, rather vaguely outlined against the background of continuity, is something entirely novel for physicists and seems to be a slightly shocking suggestion to some of them. Yet surely it harmonizes with the conception to which philosophical considerations might lead.2
The ancient atomists neatly separated discontinuity from continuity by situating indivisible particles in a void whose very nothingness offered no resistance to the prospect of continuity or infinite divisibility. But in modern physics, this dichotomy cannot be sustained because particles sometimes behave as if they were continuous or wave-like. As de Broglie suggests, this blurring of categories, while surely the result of scientific discovery, is nonetheless a consequence of imprecise thought, for the concept of a discontinuous particle is pregnant with philosophical conundrums that erode the distinction between continuity and discontinuity. In de Broglie’s mind, the primary conundrum is this: if atoms are indivisible and have spatial magnitude (as they were anciently conceived to have), it would seem that their inner structure must be homogeneous or continuous throughout. But then continuity becomes descriptive of fundamental reality, and we are faced with the task of explaining why the inwardly continuous atom can’t be subdivided. Why is there continuous matter for parts but no parts? What is more, should parts be found—should the atom be found to be not fundamental—what then? Well, says de Broglie, we then encounter a “vicious infinite, since the new elementary particles of which the original particle, now seen to have been falsely so called, is supposed to be formed, will be faced with the same questions and the same difficulties.”3 Let us try to pose the argument more rigorously. Physical matter is either continuous or discontinuous. By assuming that it is discontinuous, we end up with atoms, indivisible bits of matter. But atoms take up space, which implies that their atomistic surface bounds either (1) continuous matter or (2) discontinuous matter. If it bounds
Wave-Particle Duality
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(1), the atom cannot be said to be fully atomistic, for its inner structure is continuous. If it bounds (2), the atom is not atomistic at all, for its inner structure is discontinuous, and the smaller atoms upstage the original atom, so assumed, that contains them. Furthermore, since the smaller atoms are no more resistant to this line of analysis than the original atom, we are now faced with an infinite regress of discontinuities, which is exactly what continuity entails. In either case, the classical atom implodes upon itself toward continuity. Had physicists, by probing the idea of the atom, discovered this conceptual breakdown, they would have been less surprised by the emergence of wave-particle duality. This is de Broglie’s broader point. Making that point in a slightly different way, let us note that the word analysis has two general meanings, one describing mental inquiry and the other, as in chemical analysis, describing the breakdown of physical things into constituent parts. With respect to the classical atom, de Broglie is pointing out a parallelism between mental and physical analysis. What doesn’t hold up mentally won’t hold up physically, and had thinkers been more alert to the conceptual difficulties of the atom, they would have been less surprised by its physical failure to remain intact when subjected to experimental scrutiny. Even today the tendency is to express surprise that entities like electrons and photons, routinely described along atomistic lines, should exhibit wave-like or continuous properties—as if this were at odds with the clear and distinct ideas we have about the world. Thereby a wedge is driven between everyday experience and quantum reality when in fact there is no wedge. The real problem lies in those ideas which are muddled rather than clear and which continue to colonize our thinking even after they have been rendered philosophically and scientifically suspect.
The Testimony of Experience, Exhibit A Is nature infinitely divisible or only finitely so? This question has been around for millennia, and so there is no reason to suppose that it will be conclusively answered anytime soon. In fact, wave-particle
26
Everyday Quantum Reality
duality implies that nature is not ultimately reducible to either wave or particle. Because nature is more complex than the categories into which we try to fit it, we should not be surprised that intimations of waveparticle duality show up in everyday experience long before that idea registers as a distinct feature of the quantum world. Think back to Zeno’s arrow-in-flight paradox. Does the arrow move smoothly through space, or does it, as Zeno proposed, get stuck at each instant of time (and, by implication, at each point in space) owing to its well-defined position in space? Of course, we see it moving smoothly through space, and for most people that decides the issue, never mind what Zeno and the philosophers may say. This response is a concession to perceptual experience, which comes off as smooth and continuous—the arrow, or our consciousness thereof, does not jerk along from one point in space to the next. So while the arrow may be deemed a discontinuous part- or particle-like object, its motion is wave-like in the sense that it is not broken up into discontinuous parts. More to the point, our experience of the arrow, regardless of its state of motion, is smooth and continuous; reality does not stutter as movie projectors occasionally do. And so to generalize we might say that while material objects invariably strike us as parts, the stream of our experience, wherein these objects show up as parts, just as invariably strikes us as smooth, seamless, and unified. This is an issue of ongoing concern for philosophers—the problem of “the knowing of things together,” as William James put it.4 “It remains the case that our streams of consciousness have parts,” writes Barry Dainton, “and even if these parts are not individual experiences, they are nonetheless unified in a distinctive way, and the question of what unifies them remains very much alive.”5 Given that we experience many things simultaneously as the world opens up for us visually, audibly, tangibly, and in other ways, what ties all these different aspects of experience into an unfragmented whole? Not only that, but how does consciousness cohere temporally (incrementally) as well as spatially (expansively)? Why do we see a single table persisting through time rather than a series of different, disconnected tables, each one corresponding to a different moment
Wave-Particle Duality
27
in time? The world, after all, is an aggregation of distinct parts evolving or changing from moment to moment, or so we think. But our experience of the world, quite surprisingly, is unified and continuous, and it remains that way no matter how disjointed we imagine reality to be. With this simple excursion into experience we are already in the thick of wave-particle duality. Material objects strike us as parts, although on further reflection we might characterize them as parts seamlessly embedded in a conscious stream of experience. The socalled parts, in other words, swim in a stream of experience, and that is how we know them in the first place—as primitive elements of experience rather than as things we assume to exist beyond experience. It is only after assuming that they exist independently of experience that we turn them into self-contained parts and thereby oversimplify reality. For all we know, they may be self-contained parts—that is, they may exist independently of our apprehension of them—but since to apprehend them is to find them seamlessly absorbed in the stream of experience, it should not surprise us that these putative parts might, on occasion, be found widely and deeply articulating into the workings of nature or our experience thereof. We can, of course, readily imagine electrons, for example, as self-contained parts, but the surprise of wave-particle duality comes when we test this characterization against the reality we experience—that is, when we devise ways of finding electrons in our experience. Then, in some circumstances, they come off as wave-like rather than particle-like, owing to the fact that electrons are now, first and foremost, elements of the stream of experience, and that stream is wave-like in the sense that it is seamless and expansive. Note that in developing this analysis I have equivocated between two epistemological attitudes. The first has to do with material objects in the world, and the second steps back to consider our perception of these objects, the manner in which they show up as elements of conscious experience. Traditionally science has adopted the first attitude, but, owing to quantum mechanics and its puzzles, it is now being pushed toward the second. Here is how Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes the relative merits of each attitude:
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Everyday Quantum Reality Scientific points of view, according to which my existence is a moment of the world’s, are always both naïve and at the same time dishonest, because they take for granted, without explicitly mentioning it, the other point of view, namely that of consciousness, through which from the outset a world forms itself round me and begins to exist for me.6
Science, Merleau-Ponty says elsewhere, is thought “which is not alive to its own existence.”7 It is alive only to entities that it deems self-existing and therefore independent of conscious experience. The difficulty with this stance, as already noted, is that for all we know, arrows, atoms, and the like might exist independently of our apprehension of them, but since to know them is to have conscious experience of them, it is “naïve and dishonest” to talk as if they existed for us beyond the bounds of experience. Such talk assumes too much and furthermore stares past the fact that experience precedes and gives birth to the scientific assumption of self-existing objects. To follow William James: “concepts [positing self-existing objects] are like evaporations out of the bosom of perception, into which they condense again whenever practical service summons them.”8 Experience is the matrix from which self-existing theoretical entities issue forth, even those that fail to acknowledge their experiential origins. But getting those entities—or getting ourselves—to make that acknowledgment is not easy. Why? Because, said Alfred North WhiteÂ� head, by its very nature the discrete moment of experience, whose selectivity tilts us toward the thought of self-existing parts, eclipses the “bosom of perception,” that primitive manifold of experience whose trademark is stream-like coherence and unity. Each moment, he wrote, “contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional elements deepening its own peculiar nature,” and these elements spark a sense of self-containment within the experiencing agent, thereby drawing her away from the originating manifold. The consequent “task of philosophy,” concluded Whitehead, “is to recover the totality obscured by the selection”; that is, to retrieve “what has been sunk deeper by the initial operations of consciousness.”9 Concerned with the same issue, Merleau-Ponty tried to push human understanding back to “the things themselves”—the world of pre-conceptual experience—that precedes scientific theory, which theory for him was always a “second-order expression” of reality. Quantum physics appears also to be pushing us in that direction.
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If scientific theories are maps (second-order expressions) of reality, quantum physics seems to be a map that edges us back “to the things themselves.” That is, back to experience before it got covered over by abstract explanation. “To return to the things themselves,” says Merleau-Ponty, “is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, . . . and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign language, as is geography to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie, or a river is.”10 So back to the countryside before it got turned into a geographic map or, alternatively, back to pre-conceptual experience before it got taken over by explanation unmindful of its experiential origins. This was Merleau-Ponty’s destination, and it seems to be the epistemological thrust of quantum mechanics, which has compelled physicists to question whether objects exist without experiencing observers— as if reality is jointly compounded of observer and object. I am not saying that quantum mechanics gives a conclusive answer to this question. I am rather echoing Merleau-Ponty’s proposition regarding the primacy of conscious experience and noting that quantum physics has stirred up much debate about the role of consciousness in the structure and evolution of reality. I am also proposing that the aforementioned second attitude—the one that acknowledges material objects as, first and foremost, elements of experience—is an important corrective to the traditional scientific attitude that defines objects as part-like and self-existing. This is to say that whereas preconceptual experience is wave-like in the sense that it is seamless, unified, and continuous, once the elements of that experience are conceived or interpreted as self-standing objects, reality appears to us in a very different light: we grasp it as an aggregation of parts. Quantum physics, upon affording us unprecedented intimacy with nature, is a site at which pre-conceptual, wave-like experience intersects with particle-privileging conceptions of reality.
The Testimony of Experience, Exhibit B The foregoing implies that waves are more fundamental than particles, or that pre-conceptual experience, which precedes theory and
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Everyday Quantum Reality
explanation, is thoroughly wave-like. This is not completely correct and needs to be qualified. Even pre-conceptual experience has a particle-like aspect, but that aspect is not fully particle-like, for it embodies wave-particle duality. Around the turn of the twentieth century, William James took up the study of perceptual experience and wrote that “a discrete composition [of indivisible units] is what actually obtains in our perceptual experience. We either perceive nothing, or something already there in sensible amount. This fact is what in psychology is known as the law of the ‘threshold.’ Either your experience is of no content, of no change, or it is of a perceptible amount of content and change. Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds or drops of perception.” James went on to note that while these discrete increments of experience—which he compares to indivisible atoms—can be subdivided “on reflection,” as “immediately given” they “come totally or not at all.”11 Citing this passage approvingly, Henry Stapp writes that a “similar discreteness is the signature of quantum phenomena.”12 When measured or observed, quantum phenomena manifest themselves in distinct, particle-like ways. Electrons and photons, for example, hit a piece of photographic film and leave precise, point-like marks. All the same, in the quantum world these particle hits are not fully independent of each other, and the same holds for James’s indivisible increments of perceptual experience. “Perception,” he wrote, “changes pulsewise [that is, atomistically], but the pulses continue each other and melt their bounds.”13 The pulses or drops of perception, though minimal and indivisible quanta of experience, melt the bounds that would otherwise render each a fully independent or isolated unit of perception. What, then, is the nature of perceptual experience? Is it continuous (wave-like) or discontinuous (particle-like)? It is both. That is, we can pick out either characteristic as each plays off the other. The stream of experience, or as James calls it, “the perceptual flux,” contains “innumerable aspects and characters,” though “all these parts leave its unity unbroken.” Within this stream “nothing intervenes save parts of the perceptual flux itself, and these are overflowed by what they separate, so that whatever we distinguish and isolate conceptually is found perceptually to telescope and compenetrate and
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diffuse into its neighbors.”14 Moreover, each incremental or part-like addition to the stream of experience seems similarly to “diffuse into its neighbors.” This wave-like interflowing of perceptual parts is so deeply familiar that it takes a special effort to pick it out as characteristic of everyday experience. Having made that effort, Whitehead, like James, arrived at conclusions that foreshadow wave-particle duality. As we know it pre-conceptually, Whitehead said, reality consists sequentially of discrete “drops” or “moments” of experience. But, he added, far from being self-isolated, each moment is “complex and interdependent.”15 Within these three words lies a wealth of philosophical deliberation, but, to follow Thomas Hosinski, Whitehead’s point in a nutshell is that a “single moment is complex, because it bears within it relationships to all the moments that occurred before it and to all the moments that occurred after it in that person’s life. It does not exist in isolation but in relation to other moments.”16 Put differently, each moment of experience is inclusive of all others, even though each is an incremental, part-like addition to reality. Although the present “now” is distinct from the already realized past and the yet to be realized future, it is nevertheless “mindful” of both, at least at the level of lived experience. Each present moment “lives” because it is alive to past and future: it freshly synthesizes the past while seeding the future with new possibility. Past and future, in other words, are newly informed by the fresh difference of the present moment. Whitehead’s belief that all moments are mutually informative doesn’t make much sense if we define a moment as the tick of a clock, that is, if we see time as a linear sequence of fully discrete temporal units, each lasting a brief interval and then slipping away as if it never occurred. But recall that for Whitehead, a moment, although of temporal duration, is fundamentally a drop of experience, and experience (to adapt Merleau-Ponty’s formulation) is reality alive to its own existence. Such reality anticipates wave-particle duality in that therein we find seemingly part-like moments diffusing or melting into other moments so as to constitute a flowing, wave-like stream of consciousness. Not only that, but this is the essence of everyday experience: the point-like now experience is fleeting, elusive, and impossible to cordon off from past and future. It seems all
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Everyday Quantum Reality
slippage and no substance because by the time I pause to grasp it in its immediacy, it is gone, having died, as it were, a quick death that quickens my passage into the future. This ongoing, ever-growing interfusion or inter-quickening of moments is an elemental aspect of reality, said Whitehead, notwithstanding classical science’s tendency to define time as a mechanical succession of clock intervals. The problem with this latter characterization of time is that it replaces the lived experience of time with a machine metaphor that then constrains a conceptual simplification of reality. That simplification was in place at the turn of the twentieth century when physicists, finally compelled to question their simplifying assumptions, began to recapture some of the primordial essence of everyday experience. The Testimony of Experience, Exhibit C Whitehead’s assertion regarding the mutual immanence of different moments of experience might seem an extravagant claim, but he insisted that this is “a stubborn fact” that cannot, in any ultimate sense, be ignored. Each moment flows from and into other moments, and without such interflowing there would be no stream of experience. As James Mill pointed out, should consciousness be a succession of fully self-contained moments of experience, “we never could have any knowledge, excepting that of the present instant. The moment each of our sensations ceased, it would be gone forever; and we should be as if we had never been. . . . We should be wholly incapable of acquiring experience.”17 So while it is obvious that each moment or drop of experience has an atomic or discontinuous character, it is equally obvious that each moment has also a wave-like, continuous character. That we all know experience as an assortment of different things coincides with nature’s particle aspect, but that we all know experience as a single flowing stream coincides with nature’s wave aspect. Wave-particle duality, in other words, is as elemental as everyday experience, no matter what the content of that experience may be; we need not think about photons or electrons. Just reading this sentence projects us into wave-particle duality, because to read is to assimilate
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one part-like idea into another so that a unitary wave-like idea coalesces at the end of a sentence or paragraph. This is to acknowledge that past and future moments of experience are implicit in the present moment. William James put it this way: “The knowledge of some other part of the stream [of consciousness], past or future, near or remote, is always mixed in with our knowledge of the present thing. . . . Part of the complexity [of any state of mind] is the echo of the object just past, and, in a less degree, perhaps, the foretaste of those just to arrive.”18 We do not consciously recall the past or anticipate the future; they are there subliminally, as it were, always informing the now of our experience and thereby turning it into a continuous stream that is flowing from the past and into the future. One of the conundrums of quantum mechanics is the ability of particles to interact timelessly across seemingly insuperable spatial intervals. I will say more about this later on, but for now let me suggest that if reality is nothing more than an aggregation of distinct parts, each cut off from its immediate predecessor as one isolated moment replaces the next, such interaction should be impossible. If, however, physical reality is just what we know or experience it to be—a continuous stream of part-like events—then the conundrum is less puzzling. Streams, even physical streams like rivers, flow in virtue of their continuity with past and future, where they have been and where they are going. The stream itself, that is to say, might facilitate instantaneous interaction between particles, which as parts of an evolving, wave-like flux are already diffused into each other. But here is a question. Two objects floating along in a river do not timelessly interact, so why should timeless interaction occur between particles in the stream of experience? The question points up an important difference between physical streams and the stream of experience. Whereas a river is a part of reality that can be added or merged with other parts (a stick, say), the stream of experience, according to James, is not added to the contents of consciousness. It is not, like a river, distinct from the flotsam that floats in it; it is not one thing vis-à-vis other things but rather a “unison of being” (Whitehead’s phrase) brought about by the mutual overflowing of parts. Moreover, the stream of experience is not, like a river, con-
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Everyday Quantum Reality
tained or channelized by banks and a bed; as far as we know, it is its own backdrop. These differences suggest that the stream of experience, consisting of nothing but mutually overflowing parts, might be, at some level, the perfect moving platform for the detection of mutually involved particles—particles interacting timelessly across arbitrarily large distances.
3
T w o E v e r y day A n a l o g u e s
For two thousand years, Gardeners have been taking inspiration from the current view of cosmos. Today this has changed from the view that only particles are fundamental. What we now know is that waves, or wave forms spreading throughout the universe, that unite events in the universe, are equal to the particles. This is called the wave-particle duality. So I saw that the wave form was a metaphor of nature that was as deep as the particle and this led to the metaphor for the whole garden of a landscape of waves. Charles Jencks
In chapter 1 we noted that quantum uncertainty can be understood in two ways. The first assumes that while nature is, at bottom, precisely detailed, we are limited in our capacity to fully grasp it. The second asserts that nature is intrinsically imprecise, at least with respect to properties like position and momentum. In either case, absolute knowledge of reality is impossible, but in the second instance reality itself—not just our knowledge of reality—is the culprit. I say “culprit” because science has traditionally aimed for certitude, and the suggestion that reality fuzzes out at the quantum level seems almost subversive. Einstein famously dismissed such thinking by remarking that “God does not play dice with the cosmos.” Einstein’s comment notwithstanding, the majority opinion is that reality does fuzz out at the quantum level. What this means is 37
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Everyday Quantum Reality
that even if God does not play dice, something random or probabilistic is going on. An electron’s position, for instance, is not well defined but spread out over an ensemble of possibilities, some more likely than others. To indicate the relative likelihood of each possibility, one could plot a probability curve. Taking an overly simple case, suppose that an electron’s position is spread over three values in the following way: it tends toward position x with a 50 percent likelihood and toward two other positions one micron on either side of x with a 25 percent likelihood. Graphically we imagine something like this:
The middle dot marks x, and its larger size indicates the electron’s 50 percent tendency to exist at this location. The smaller dots reflect lesser tendencies at different locations. This is an overly simple case because the electron’s position would be probabilistically distributed over many locations in a wave-like fashion. Indeed, the distribution pattern, being wave-like, would embody wave interference, that is, the capacity of waves to interfere constructively and destructively with one another. When two water waves meet in phase (crest meeting crest), their energy combines to create a single larger wave, whereas when they meet out of phase (crest meeting trough), their respective energies cancel out as a flat surface—no wave at all. In the first instance we have constructive interference; in the second, destructive interference. And if we can control the situation (if we produce the waves and know how they will meet), we can predict where we will find larger waves, smaller waves (produced by mixtures of constructive and destructive interference), and no waves at all. The same holds for unmeasured particles, which, being wavelike, interfere to create regions of varying particle probability. That is, as we measure particles in order to discover their locations, they are more likely to show up in some places than other places. This is because, like water waves, unmeasured particles are responsive to overall context, even derivative of context, and that context dictates where they are likely to be. In brief, unmeasured particles are not,
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Figure 3.1. The wave-like or contextual nature of unmeasured particles dictates the likelihood of finding particles should we look for—that is, measure—them. Owing to constructive wave interference, we would be very likely to find particles at B and less likely to find them at C. Owing to destructive interference, we would expect to find few if any particles at A.
despite our tendency to call them particles, self-contained entities occupying precise positions. They are context-inclusive entities and hence able to show up only as context dictates. If it seems the discussion has already gotten out of hand, that is because it has. We have just run up against the difficulty of trying to talk clearly about waves and particles when, in fact, the two phenomena are not, at the quantum level, clear and distinct entities. But we saw in chapter 2 that the classical particle (atom) is an idea that implodes toward non-particle or wave-like properties, so this interpenetration of concepts—wave and particle—should not startle us. Nor should we be surprised by the proposition that unmeasured or unobserved particles are inherently different from measured particles. Saying unmeasured particles are wave-like is just another way of stating Bohr’s hypothesis that until particles are measured, they lack precise position and momentum values. With respect to these properties (position and momentum), unmeasured particles are probabilistic entities. Let us look at the position of an unmeasured particle. Figure 3.1 shows the probability of finding a particle within a particular swath of space-time. The middle peak, corresponding to B and distinguished by its superior height, is a place of maximal constructive interference and, by implication, a place where we would be very likely to find particles should we look for them. We might also find particles at C, but the smaller peak indicates less constructive interference and a correspondingly lower probability of finding particles. At A there is zero or near-zero probability of finding particles, for this is where destructive interference prevails.
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Figure 3.2. The dots indicate the positions of measured particles, with the number of dots corresponding to the peaks and valleys of the probability curve.
Note that this curve does not portray the distribution of particles as they are measured; rather, it portrays the relative probabilities of particle occurrence according to region. Particle occurrence or distribution correlates with the curve but is not curve-like. The middle peak implies a band of high particle density, the lower peaks lower density, and the valleys very low or zero density. So the distribution of measured particles consists of alternating bands of high and low particle density, corresponding to the peaks and valleys of the probability curve (Figure 3.2). One may easily imagine the probability distribution extending beyond the limits depicted above; after all, we have shown just several bands, and the bands will continue on out as the probability of finding particles tapers to zero.1 Compared to the size of a single particle, this swath of space is immense, and given an unmeasured particle’s failure to show up at a single, distinct position anywhere therein, researchers sometimes talk as if the particle is “everywhere at once” until it is measured. What they really mean is the particle is wave-like and therefore exquisitely sensitive to multiple position possibilities, all of which are mutually exclusive from a classical point of view and none of which is fully realized until the probabilistic wave
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collapses to a non-probabilistic particle—to an entity with a precise position value—once it is measured. When first confronted with this outlook, many people argue that while our pre-measurement knowledge of a particle’s position is probabilistic, the particle itself has a precise—that is, non-probabilistic—position. This difference in viewpoint is just what is at issue. It is old hat that our knowledge of nature is imperfect or probabilistic; now, however, we have to deal with the unsettling suggestion that our knowledge of nature is probabilistic because nature itself is probabilistic. As absurd as this seems, experiment confirms it, and so we have to revise our picture of atomic and subatomic particles. They are not little bullets moving on precise trajectories and occupying precise positions. They spread out probabilistically in a manner befitting our probabilistic knowledge of them. They are just what we know them to be, if we confine our thinking to the probabilistic information at hand and resist the tendency to liken them to bullets and other well-defined (as we suppose) projec-Â� tiles. But this is just half the story. The other half involves the fact that we do get precise information from subatomic particles when we measure them. True, we can’t get precise information about momentum and position at the same moment, but we can measure one or the other with absolute precision. Given this and the foregoing claim that unmeasured particles are inherently probabilistic, we must alter our notion of what quantum measurement entails. When we measure quantum entities, we do not merely disturb things in the way we disturb furniture by accidentally bumping into it. Rather, we change the ontological character of the things involved. We transform electrons from wave-like to particle-like entities. A probabilistic cloud or ensemble of position possibilities suddenly collapses with full force upon a single possibility. We thus come away from the measurement with a precise position value. Thinkers call this transformation the collapse of the wave function or the collapse of the superposition—“superposition” referring to the wave-like stacking up of multitudinous, mutually exclusive possibilities which, when pricked by measurement, immediately reduces to a single value. This is a strange scenario, but it is not without analogue in everyday—or every night—reality.
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Wave Function Collapse Wave function collapse is a hotly debated topic. Einstein, of course, saw the collapse as epistemic, that is, the point at which our probabilistic knowledge of reality, thanks to measurement, catches up with sharply detailed, non-probabilistic reality. His great opponent on the issue, Niels Bohr, countered that measurement converts probabilistic superposition states to well-defined (non-probabilistic) values. As indicated, most thinkers now side with Bohr, but if he is right, an additional question or problem emerges. Since humans are the only species that measure things like electrons, it might seem that only they can collapse wave functions. The one who measures, the observer, consequently becomes a kind of creator, or at least one who is uniquely privileged to collapse superposition states. Bohr sometimes (but not always) talked this way, and John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner unapologetically insisted on it. Others, while holding to Bohr’s notion that quantum reality is inherently imprecise, have rejected the implication that humans are so central in the cosmic scheme of things that only they can collapse superposition states. This position, they say, rolls back the Copernican thesis that humankind does not enjoy a special place in the cosmos. Whatever the truth of the matter, humans have no choice but to access reality through their own experience, and within that experience we catch sight of wave function collapse. For virtually everyone this involves dreams, although for some it may also involve meditation and trance states. Before proceeding, however, I need to acknowledge a debt to Carl Jung, one of the first to mine quantum theory for psychological insight. As he got to know Wolfgang Pauli, a well-known physicist (later a Nobel laureate) with an interest in Jung’s depth psychology, Jung conjectured that quantum phenomena might spill over into everyday experience. This spilling-over helped him explain synchronicity (meaningful coincidences) and the collective unconscious, a kind of shared existence in which universal archetypes and motifs eclipse ordinary individuality. These are ambitious explanations that have received mixed reviews. What follows is much more modest. Instead of attempting the broad connections Jung makes, I will merely elaborate an aspect of his thought that we all know firsthand: the alternation between
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waking and unconscious experience. Jung grasped this alternation as a complementarity relation, an idea Bohr developed while trying to make sense of quantum phenomena. A kind of qualitative equivalent of the uncertainty principle, complementarity is sometimes illustrated by drawings like the following.
Figure 3.3. An illustration of complementarity. One sees either the vase or the two faces, but never both images at the same time.
The illustration is two images, but never at the same moment. If we see the vase, we do not see the two faces, and vice versa. In a similar fashion, quantum phenomena manifest themselves as waves or particles, but never at the same moment. And as one image comes to view, the other image dissolves. In brief, we cannot grasp the illustration in its totality at a single moment but only sequentially by flipping back and forth. Something like this, Bohr insisted, prevails as we try to grasp quantum phenomena. As with the images in the illustration, the wave and particle concepts exist in interface, and to give oneself over to one reading of the interface is to preclude the other reading. Nevertheless, we would not get one reading—wave or particle, vase or faces—without the other as it slips from view. So in that sense we may say that the two images complement or complete each other. As Bohr liked to say, “opposites are complements.” They are the means by which one possibility completes its opposite. Examples of complementarity inform ordinary experience, said Jung. Think, for example, of what happens as we fall asleep. For sleep
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or unconsciousness to come, consciousness must dissolve, and there might be a half-remembered moment of transition where both states coexist, albeit each in a weak, shadowy sort of way. In any event, consciousness is never there at full alert to observe the passage into unconsciousness. At the critical moment, the moment of interface, it lets down its guard, and that lapse shifts us over into the world of sleep. If waking experience is sharply detailed and carefully laid out in space and time, not so sleep. Dreamless sleep does not register at all, except upon waking when we realize we’ve had a good night’s rest because we can’t remember anything. The memorable aspect of sleep is dreaming, but dreams, while they often point back to waking reality, take all kinds of liberties therewith. Things freely interpenetrate, geography gets jumbled, the dead return, faraway friends appear, long-forgotten experiences drift up, several individuals merge into one, and one person morphs into another. It is as if space and time, absolutely inviolable during consciousness, no longer hold sway. Or, as Jung says, “the space-time barrier” is “annulled” by an unconscious psyche for which space-time is “at most . . . a relative and conditioned quality.” This is remarkable, he adds, for “consciousness in space and time is such an overwhelming reality” as to normally persuade us that it is the only reality.2 Dreams, nevertheless, make a hash of space and time. Indeed, it is as if the dreaming mind is in a superposition or wave-like state where, thanks to the absence of critical or objective faculties, weird, mutually exclusive possibilities freely mix and multiply. Because our waking tendency to measure and analyze switches off as we fall asleep, things we normally know to be tightly localized spread out, liquefy, and intermingle in ways impossible during consciousness. And as long as the intermingling goes unscrutinized, the delicate dream-bubble evolves in a wave-like fashion. But once the dreamer begins to question its reality, begins to interpret the dream as an illusory departure from the truth of waking reality, her narrowly focused objective gaze pops the bubble and delivers her back to particle-like consciousness. As Pauli put it: “The mere apprehension of the dream has already, so to speak, altered the state of the unconscious, and thereby, in analogy with a measuring ob-
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servation in quantum physics, created a new phenomenon.”3 Now things come off as sharply demarcated and self-existing, exactly as we imagine particles to be, and so it is easy to insist that particles are the building blocks of reality. By contrast, dreams and waves are sites of surreal complexity: they gather together what space and time hold apart during consciousness. They come into play, or come out to play, only as consciousness, with its analytical separating tendencies, dissolves. And since dreams and waves are delicate blooms that fade with the first glimmer of critical light, they never seem quite real to scientifically minded observers who innately privilege the particle-like space-time world of conscious experience. But dreams and waves do not exist, let alone flourish, in the particle-privileging spacetime world of conscious experience. In that world they are merely collapsed residues of their former selves. Multifaceted waves, when measured, leave well-defined particles in their wake, and dreams, when brought into the sober, hard-edged realm of consciousness, come off as too wildly luxuriant, too dream-like and insubstantial, to be real. Figure-Background Duality The last section echoes Carl Jung’s proposal that wave-particle duality carries over into the alternation of night and day, dreams and waking reality. In what follows I suggest that this dichotomy, like most dichotomies and certainly like all quantum dichotomies, is not quite so clean. Wave-particle duality, or something like it, also informs waking experience and in a very obvious, elemental way. Indeed, its very obviousness normally keeps it from being noticed; as part of the structure of the seeing experience, the duality is generally glossed over with the greatest of ease as we zero in on things that seem to lie outside that structure. Still, once pointed out, the duality is easy to appreciate, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a twentiethcentury philosopher with an interest in perception, helps us out in this regard. In terms suggestive of the way physicists have learned to talk about wave-particle duality and the indeterminacy that attends that
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duality, Merleau-Ponty spoke of figure-background interchange and reciprocity—the fact that “vision is an act with two facets.” To see something, he said, “it is necessary to put the surroundings in abeyance the better to see the object, and to lose in background what one gains in focal figure, because to look at the object is to plunge oneself into it and because objects form a system in which one cannot show itself without concealing others.” And “I have visual objects because I have a visual field in which richness and clarity are in inverse proportion to each other, and because these two demands, either of which taken separately might be carried to infinity, when brought together, produce a certain culmination and optimum balance in the perceptual process.”4 Somewhere between the two demands optimum balance settles in, at least temporarily. The two facets, figure and background, flow into each other to bring off a moment of maximal seeing, albeit one limited by the way each facet takes from, cedes to, and offsets the other. This give-and-take ensures that both demands—pinpoint clarity and expansive diversity—are never simultaneously realized or “carried to infinity.” Each is realized only at the other’s expense; mindfulness of one implies forgetfulness of the other. And so an elemental indeterminacy, a kind of epistemic slippage, informs the seeing experience. This perceptual give-and-take recalls wave-particle duality. Neither concept—wave or particle—fully and unequivocally captures light’s reality, and each is realized only at the other’s expense. We must consequently tack back and forth between both concepts, ever mindful of an ineradicable observational indeterminacy that fosters the strange duality (strange by the standards of classical physics). To come close to understanding light it is necessary to attend to both concepts, but that plunges us into the puzzle of how a single reality can show up in mutually incompatible ways. Not surprisingly, the light-mediated seeing experience reenacts the same puzzle, as we see the world by negotiating optimum balance between ill-defined, wave-like background and well-defined, particle-like figure. In conclusion, note that when we try to pin the world down with a measurement or precise observation, it reacts accordingly and behaves as a particle. If, however, we forego measurement, the
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world spreads out like a wave. So instead of returning with a clear and consistent picture of nature, the mind wins from nature only its own epistemological stance. Pinpoint curiosity, manifesting itself as precise measurement, produces a particle; a more relaxed, widely focused attitude affords the revelation of a wave.
4
T h e D o u bl e-Sl it E xperi m en t
At first we just see some dots, apparently at random locations on the screen. By the time there are close to a hundred electrons, however, the interference pattern begins to emerge: The incoming electrons seem to arrange themselves both randomly and in accordance with a pattern! Shimon Malin
Light taxes our ingenuity by presenting itself in two seemingly mutually exclusive ways: particle and wave. We have already indicated what particles are like (at least as they were originally conceived). They are indivisible units and as such the fundamental building blocks of material reality, the place at which the subdivision of nature grinds to a halt. Moreover, even though particles are normally pictured as parts of a larger whole, they are also regarded as objects in their own ontological right. Snatch away the rest of the universe and one last particle could remain. Finally, particles are well defined: they have precise position and momentum values. That, in any case, was the consensus before the quantum revolution. Waves are very different. For one thing, waves do not exist in and of themselves. They require a medium of propagation, something
49
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Everyday Quantum Reality
to wave through. A sound wave, for example, cannot propagate— cannot even exist—in a vacuum. Similarly, water waves require water and crowd waves at football games require people. Since a wave is merely a pulsation of energy through an already existing substance, it can no more exist on its own than the smile of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat could exist without the cat. Another dissimilarity between waves and particles is that waves have imprecise boundaries. They are diffusely spread through their media, never quite tapering off to nothingness. Where does a single wave in the ocean begin and end? One may divide up waves by their crests and troughs, but the division arbitrarily ignores the way a wave is dynamically blended into its watery context. Indeed, the blending is so perfect, so free of natural boundaries, that the notion of outside context becomes inappropriate. Even when the ocean ends, it still interacts with land masses, whether by splashing against them or by registering earth tremors. And then there are atmospheric interactions like wind and rain, which, like tremors, tissue into waves so as to turn them into context-inclusive entities. In brief, there is no obvious end or stopping point to waves. We stop where our patience or resources or ability to make useful observations run out, not where the wave itself runs out or reduces to nothingness. This, then, is a wave—something that may manifest itself dramatically at a particular place and time (as when the surf crashes against the beach) but which shades or fuzzes off into many places and times. So unlike discrete particles, waves are not easily confined. Their energetic nature allows them wide extension, for all material substances are responsive to transfers of energy, however minute. What is more, waves incorporate changing ensembles of values; their far-flung, protean nature keeps them from being pinned down by, say, a single momentum value. One may, of course, come up with an average value, but averages, while useful, can always be improved by attending to particular details. And in the case of waves, the details are as particular—as arbitrarily small—as one might wish for. Since waves are not things in themselves but manifestations of how other things (water molecules, for example) collectively behave, they should be infinitely divisible. After all, having no intrinsic real-
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51
ity, they have no bottommost level (or any level at all) to stop the division process. With these distinctions in mind, one may grasp the import of the double-slit (or two-slit) experiment, which indicates (to paraphrase Wallace Stevens) that the squirming phenomena of the atomÂ�ic world exceed the squamous minds of human researchers.1 According to Richard Feynman, those phenomena are “impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way.” Therefore, “We cannot make the mystery go away by ‘explaining’ how it works.” All we can do is “just tell . . . how it works.”2 The telling of the mystery, however, is invaluable, for it clears space for wider thinking, thereby looping us back to everyday experience. This does not mean that I propose to solve the mystery, only relocate it in a broader, more familiar milieu. The Experiment Suppose you shoot a pellet gun at the side of a barn having two windows. If you are a reasonably good shot (let’s assume you can hit the barn), only three possibilities, all mutually exclusive, exist for each pellet: (1) it strikes the wall of the barn and bounces off; (2) it goes through the window on the right; (3) it goes through the window on the left. This is all very straightforward, but suppose after firing several hundred pellets and having put up some cardboard in the barn to intercept them, you decide to examine the shot pattern of those pellets which went through the windows. The lower left quadrant of Figure 4.1 portrays what you expect to find: two groupings of pellets roughly opposite the windows. But suppose after finding a few pellets in these places, you also find other pellets in places inaccessible from your angle of fire (the pattern shown in the lower right quadrant of Figure 4.1). One band or concentration of pellets, in fact, occurs right behind the boards that separate the windows. But you were standing in front of these boards as you fired your gun. What happened? Nothing like this ever occurs in the everyday world of barns and pellet guns. But things like this happen routinely in the world of photons and electrons, and physicists have decided that, when we
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Figure 4.1. Pellets are shot through windows of a barn. Inside the barn the pellets strike a piece of cardboard and create a shot pattern. In the macroworld we find the pattern on the left (where the pellets strike roughly opposite the windows) and, assuming that subatomic particles are pellet-like, we expect to find the same pattern at the quantum level. Surprisingly we find the pattern on the right, which implies that the particles are wave-like.
leave them alone (do not observe them), subatomic particles behave in strange, un-particle-like ways. Going back to the mysterious situation just outlined, what if somebody offered a solution by proposing that each pellet, after “spreading out” to pass through both windows simultaneously, strikes the cardboard as a wave front whose energy is concentrated in places other than those required by normal pellet behavior. One might reasonably object that this is not a solution or explanation at all, for now we must rethink our understanding of a pellet, an understanding deeply grounded in everyday experience. And if pellets are not what they seem—if they spread out like waves when unwatched—what about other pellet-like objects?
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Figure 4.2. Light hits the barrier and emerges through the two slits. Since a wave interference pattern registers on the photoplate (dark regions representing high energy concentrations), we assume that light left the source as a wave and split apart at the slits to become two waves, which then interfered with each other to create the interference pattern.
When the double-slit experiment was first performed about 1800, a beam of light was directed toward a two-slitted barrier (analogous to the two-windowed barn). Some of the light was blocked by the barrier, but some passed through the slits and was then stopped by a light-sensitive photoplate. The result was a pattern like that in Figure 4.2. Since a beam of light, however, was employed—not tiny projectiles—an explanation for the pattern could readily be invoked. Scientists recognized the effect as a wave interference pattern. When a water wave is made to pass through a two-slitted barrier and then intercepted on the other side, it produces just such a pattern since the initial wave is split in half while passing through the slits. The two waves emerging from the slits interact with each other, sometimes interfering constructively (when waves meet in phase to form one highly energetic wave) and at other times interfering destructively (when waves meet out of phase to cancel each other
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out). The result, similar to that depicted in Figure 3.2, is a series of high and low energy regions that makes sense once we understand the dynamics of wave interference. Although scientists could not see light waves passing through the slitted barrier, they surmised as much from the wave interference pattern. So throughout most of the nineteenth century, no one questioned the wave model of light. The crisis began in the early twenÂ� tieth century when Max Planck and Albert Einstein solved major problems by assuming that light breaks apart into indivisible chunks. These smallest parts of light, comparable to classical atoms in the physical sphere, were dubbed photons in 1926, about the time physicists learned to isolate them experimentally. The question of their fundamental nature—are they really particles or merely particlelike manifestations of wave action?—motivated a new version of the double-slit experiment. In the new version researchers fired solitary photons toward the two-slitted barrier. If light is fundamentally wave-like, each photon should demonstrate its extensive and divisible nature by spreading out and passing through both slits simultaneously, thus allowing itself to be cut in half. But if light is fundamentally particle-like, it should resist subdivision by moving through just one slit. As it turned out, each photon initially appeared to move through just one slit because it registered its presence on the photoplate as a single, discrete spot. In other words, light seemed to hit the photoplate as a small object, and no object that small could pass through both slits simultaneously. No one, of course, ever saw the lone photon in transit or midflight, but the fact that it both left (the release point) and arrived (at the photoplate) as a particle seemed to clinch the matter. Until, that is, a fair number of solitary photons had been released. Thereupon a wave interference pattern began to emerge on the photoplate as spots of light clustered in high-energy regions (Figure 4.3). With this surprising development, some physicists imagined that each so-called particle spread out to simultaneously pass through both slits and thereafter interfered with itself—how else to explain the alternate bands of constructive and destructive interference? Moreover, since many photons were involved in the creation of the inter-
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Figure 4.3. A wave interference pattern, made up of particle hits, slowly emerges as solitary photons are released. The single hits imply self-contained particles, but the overall pattern implies relational or wave-like interaction among the so-called particles.
ference pattern (witness the many photon hits on the photoplate), the spreading out of each photon seemed greater than whatever extension might be required for passage through both slits: each photon spread into the others, it seemed, apparently indifferent to time lapses between individual experiments. This was wave action in the widest sense. To put the matter metaphorically, each photon appeared mindful of the others, even though time lapses would seem to rule out the possibility of mutual interaction. Each photon, though independently released and therefore, it would seem, outside the others’ sphere of causal influence, nevertheless appeared to behave relationally rather than independently. The proof of this relational or collective behavior was the wave interference pattern, which makes sense only as we imagine one thing interfering with another. And yet with the new version of the double-slit experiment, one thing—one photon—could not in any conceivable way interfere with another. To put a finer point on the puzzle, let us follow Paul Davies. He writes that the collection of separate and distinct events, involving only one electron [or photon] at a time, still shows the phenomenon of interference. Moreover, if instead of repeating the experiment, electron by electron, a whole collection of laboratories try it out independently, and they each just pick one photograph [photoplate] at random, then the collection of all these separate, independent photographs also shows the interference pattern!
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In brief, Davies is amazed that the interference pattern should arise from apparently random, unrelated events. He goes on to write: These results are so astonishing that it is hard to digest their significance. It is as though some magic influence was dictating events in different laboratories, or at different times in the same equipment, in conformity with some universal organizing principle. How does any individual electron know what the other electrons, maybe in other parts of the world, are going to do? What strange influence discourages electrons from visiting the dark [low energy] areas of the interference fringes and directs them toward the more populous areas? How is their preference controlled at the individual level? Magic?3
My contention is that what happens in the double-slit experiment—how individual electrons or photons find their way toward “the more populous areas”—is no more astonishing than many other events that we witness every day. The “magic” we find in the quantum sphere is all about us. But first a word about causality, a concept that must be questioned if are to gain deeper understanding of what the double-slit experiment might be saying. The One and Only Universal Cement? It is a truism that quantum mechanics gives us a probabilistic or statistical vision of the world. Whereas physicists once aspired to fully certain, sharply detailed explanations of nature, the rise of statistical science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries engendered the thought that even so-called absolute or universal laws of nature are, at bottom, probabilistic. In the decades leading up to the quantum revolution, for example, some physicists argued that the second law of thermodynamics—stating that closed systems invariably become more disordered over time—issues up from populational averages rather than universal compliance with law. For the law to be true at the macro or observational level, in other words, not every micropart of a system need drift toward disorder all of the time—only most parts most of the time. We can imagine, for instance, an ice cube being dropped in a glass of water. The second law states that over time the temperature
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difference between the water and the ice will even out. (Whereas once there was a distinct or ordered difference between the two temperatures, that difference—that order—fuzzes out as the ice melts.) What this implies at the micro-level is that the various water molecules (some initially warm or high-energy and others initially cold or low-energy) will randomly collide with each other, the more energetic losing energy to the less energetic, until all have about the same energy. The upshot of all this, of course, is a glass of water with uniform temperature throughout. But even after this has occurred, it may be that several water molecules, each being slightly more energetic than average, will randomly cluster together to momentarily create a warm pocket in the system. Strictly speaking, this is a violation of the second law, but only at the micro-level and only briefly so. At the macro-level, nothing changes. Indeed, the short-lived warm pocket might be statistically offset by a comparably short-lived cold pocket somewhere else in the system. Note that in this example we typically imagine the water molecules to be deterministic entities with well-defined properties. They themselves are not probabilistic, but since there are so many of them, they are best treated collectively rather than individually, and such treatment entails probabilistic mathematics. This all makes sense. What doesn’t make sense, or at least didn’t make sense to Einstein and Schrödinger, was Bohr’s insistence that the micro-parts of a system (atoms, electrons, photons, etc.) are intrinsically probabilistic. It seemed to them that probabilistic thinking had gone too far. It was no doubt descriptive of populations of atoms, and it afforded approximate statistical data for the analysis of individual atoms, but to say that nature bottoms out in a kind a probabilistic haze was unacceptable. While it is easy to suppose that the question at issue is whether individual parts of a system are inherently probabilistic, the better question, I believe, is whether parts of a system cohere or hang together by some power more fundamental than causal necessity. If we imagine each part as a self-existing, freestanding entity, then of course we will be surprised when various parts of a system interrelate sans causal interaction—that is, when we have designed an experiment, like the one above, to rule out the possibility of causal
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interaction (all photons being spatially and temporally cut off from each other), and yet evidence of photon interaction (the wave interference pattern) emerges. This is surprising because we reflexively assume that two things can’t interact except as space and time allow for causal interaction. This is what Einstein called the “locality principle”—causal influences propagate no faster than the speed of light, which precludes the possibility of instantaneous interactions across space. Causality, moreover, is assumed to be “the cement of the universe,”4 the agency whereby reality coheres, and there is no other cement. Either things hang together causally or not at all. This is the classical (pre-quantum) outlook, and it is still highly regarded. Many if not most thinkers yet insist that causal influences can’t propagate faster than light. But in the wake of the double-slit experiment and many other tests, some also propose that non-causal influences propagate instantaneously. Or better said, perhaps, a kind of non-causal cement holds the world together—although cement, connoting as it does something easy to detect, is not quite the right word. Nevertheless, we may imagine that before reality gets cemented together by causal effects, it already hangs together in a way that enables the instantaneous, non-causal interactions that quantum mechanics has thrust upon us. Upon interrogating the concepts of parts and wholes (sysÂ�tems), one may glimpse what is at stake here. We normally assume that parts (photons, electrons, atoms, etc.) self-exist and that wholes or systems arise derivatively from those parts. But if we turn this assumption upside down (assign priority to systems and let parts be derivative), we broach the following possibility: if the system as a whole plays into what it means to be a part of the system, then no part would be fully self-existing and all parts, embodying the system to some degree, would be immediately responsive to changes throughout—even in the absence of causal interactions. To reiterate, this is not the way we normally think of parts and systems. But quantum mechanics challenges this parts-first/systems-second outlook, for parts often seem to hang together systemically even when causal influences are not there to link things together. The double-slit experiment is a case in point, particularly when a wave interference effect arises from individually released particles.
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The Law of Large Numbers Another case in point is the law of large numbers, and here we loop back to everyday experience.5 Discovered by thinkers seeking to reduce apparently unrelated events to mathematical rule, the law of large numbers indicates that while one event may seem isolated and therefore unanalyzable except as a single, self-contained fact, that event takes on a very different configuration—one suggesting collective order and intelligibility—when linked with a large number of comparable events. To take a simple example: throw ten coins and count how many come up heads. Since each coin falls independently of the rest, one might naïvely guess that any number of heads from zero to ten is equally likely. This is not correct. Numbers in the middle range—four, five, and six—will be more probable, as anyone can discover for herself. And as the experiment continues— as the number of coin tosses gets larger—a bell curve emerges that gets smoother over time. This curve expresses a law of averages, or, to use a more curious locution, a law of chance. It is a fact about the world, or at least about large numbers of coin tosses, but it stands mute before a single coin toss, which is often described as a “chance” event.6 One may recall this or a similar example from an elementary statistics class wherein the teacher or textbook explained that even though a single coin toss is independent from all others, the probability of successive heads or tails is increasingly remote—as if the coin somehow “remembers” previous tosses so as to vary its routine.7 At least that thought occurred to me, but I quickly set it aside. Interestingly, when the law of large numbers was first finding confirmation and application, some people expressed astonishment that regularity and rule should emerge from such seemingly haphazard events as suicides, burglaries, and dog bites.8 Today most people, mathematicians included, take the law in stride—that is, consider it unmysterious—although a few contemporary thinkers still marvel at the transformation of single-event chance into multi-event law and order. Children or, as Arthur Koestler puts it, “mathematically naïve” people seem “to have a more acute awareness than the specialist of the basic paradox of probability theory, over which philosophers
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have puzzled ever since Pascal.”9 In his study of the development of thermodynamics, a branch of science that engenders probabilistic thinking, Hans Christian von Baeyer relives the paradox through his two young daughters, whose amazement grows as a bell curve takes shape while charting 200 trials of ten simultaneously thrown coins.10 I had a similar experience upon introducing my own daughter to the basic principles of probability. She could accept that one coin toss is independent of another; what baffled her was how, given that independence, anyone could predict statistically the number of heads after, say, 100 tosses. After she had thrown a penny ten times and gotten only three heads, I told her that she should get more than three heads on the next ten tosses—that, at least, is what the law of large numbers dictates. That prediction surprised her, but sure enough, she got six heads, and as she continued throwing, the ratio of heads to tails converged toward 50/50. Neither side ever got very far ahead of the other (at least in terms of percentage), and apparent deviations from the norm—a run of four tails, for instance—became less remarkable (and more likely) as the significance of each toss was absorbed into the growing totality of tosses.11 Is there really a mystery or paradox here? In language echoing that of Davies regarding the double-slit experiment (“What strange influence discourages electrons from visiting the dark areas of the interference fringes and directs them toward the more populous areas?”), von Baeyer asks: “What power guides the pennies, whose individual motions are completely random, to fall in such a predictable way? What intelligence orders them to fill in the valley of the sixes [in a bell curve] instead of digging it deeper? How does this exquisite order emerge from the chaos of pennies tumbling pell-mell out of a cup?”12 But almost in the same breath, von Baeyer suggests there is no mystery. He points out that while there are 252 ways to get five heads out of ten coin tosses, there are only ten ways to get a single head (each coin corresponding to the lone head) and just one way to get no heads.13 And with every outcome equally likely, chance favors an even distribution of heads and tails. Still, for von Baeyer, this does not quite dispel the mystery. He cannot get past the question we started with: How do individual random events add up to something more than randomness? How do “chance” events get assimilated into large patterns of non-chanceful
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(predictable) significance? And for him, as for Davies, there is a certain magic to it all: “The way the bell curve emerges is nothing short of magical. . . . The literature on the calculus of probabilities is vast, but it is powerless to dispel the magic. Since the eighteenth century, mathematicians have derived increasingly general propositions, collectively known as ‘central limit theorems,’ to explain the astonishing universality of the bell curve, but its reappearance, over and over again, in the most diverse circumstances, still excites our wonder.”14 What is at issue here is whether the world hangs together by some other—some deeper and less obvious—means than physical causality. No one, to my knowledge, has given a causal interpretation of the law of large numbers—has proposed, for instance, that individual coin tosses physically affect each other across empty reachÂ�Â�es of space and time. Any such explanation would in fact violate the supposed independence of individual coin tosses. And yet because collective order emerges from individual disorder, some have intuited a deeper unity to nature than that given by causality. Schrödinger called the law of large numbers the “order from disorder principle,” adding that it has “allowed us to look behind the curtain, to watch the magnificent order of exact physical law coming forth from atomic and molecular disorder.”15 No one, however, has adequately explained the law’s origin, though some have felt pressed to offer comment. Jacob Bernoulli, the man most closely associated with the early formulation of the law, attributed its surprising result to “Fate” or a “certain necessity” governing “the most apparently fortuitous things.”16 This explanation goes nowhere, for as Robert Harvie points out, “The laws of probability describe how a collection of single random events can add up to a large-scale certainty but not why,” and appeals to Fate just push the question into another black box. He then adds: “The ‘order from disorder’ principle seems to be irreducible, inexplicably ‘just there.’ To ask why is akin to asking ‘Why is the universe?’”17 Whatever the law’s origin, it seems as ubiquitously operative at the macro level as at the micro level. At both levels it governs the way “random” and seemingly unrelated events gather into patterns (whether bell curves or wave interference patterns) denoting order and predictability. “Every now and then,” writes von Baeyer, “we
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must remind ourselves that the toss of a penny, the cooling of a cup of tea, and the twinkle in the eye of a child are mundane miracles we would do well to celebrate as undeserved gifts.”18 Being mundane, such miracles are easily overlooked, and yet they parallel the doubleslit experiment, the outcome of which is widely regarded as exotic and counterintuitive. But in either case, whether in the macro or micro realm, we find multi-event order emerging from causally unrelated single events. And upon witnessing this transformation, we feel the ground slipping beneath us as old concepts give way to new possibilities. These are generally dubbed quantum possibilities, but they are as old as human experience and are now being rediscovered at a higher turn of the spiral.
5
D o u bl e-Sl it A n a lo g u es
Seeing the two-slit experiment is like watching a total solar eclipse for the first time: a primitive thrill passes through you and the little hairs on your arms stand up. You think this particle-wave thing is really true and the foundations of your knowledge shift and sway. Reader of physicsworld.com
In the last chapter I proposed that the world is held together by a non-causal or pre-causal cement. How else, one might ask, to account for the quantum determination that various events or entities, all regarded as causally independent, organize themselves in patterns? The double-slit experiment is the stock example here: particles released independently appear to gather together interdependently to form a wave interference pattern. In the experiment there is no allowance for causal interference, and yet interference of some sort occurs. So, of course, we must revise our picture of what is going on before the particles strike the photoplate. Each so-called particle must have, in wave-like fashion, passed through both slits and thereafter interfered with itself while moving toward the photoplate. Upon measurement—that is, upon
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striking the photoplate—the wave-like entity collapsed to register itself as a particle-like dot, albeit at a place that contributed to the buildup of the wave interference pattern. However, that pattern, like all statistical patterns, is not selfexplanatory. We may take it as a given, but there is no obvious reason why causally unrelated or “random” events (in this case, the particles hitting the photoplate, each on its own space-time trajectory) should build up in nonrandom, organized ways. That is the deep puzzle of the double-slit experiment, but it is not unique to that experiment: we find it whenever we group similar but causally unrelated events together. Invariably statistical patterns emerge; intelligible order emerges from mindless disorder, or what we thought was mindless disorder. If anything, the double-slit experiment is less mysterious than, say, the tossing of coins, for it explicitly steers us toward the idea of a wave, and waves bespeak wide relationality and unbounded or imprecisely bounded context. Thinking in this key, we might be able to make some headway. That is, we might be able to find everyday analogues to the wave interference pattern, experiences where causally unrelated entities spontaneously interrelate in highly meaningful ways. This is to suggest that there is a deeper bottom to the world than that given by causality. Double-Slit Geometry As recounted in chapter 2, Louis de Broglie argued that had physicists been more alert to the philosophically puzzling nature of the classical atom, they would have been better prepared for wave-particle duality. While the atom was said to be indivisible, it was also imagined as having spatial or physical magnitude, which made the atom conceptually divisible, even if by definition or fiat it was indivisible. This uncollapsed tension between definitional indivisibility and conceptual divisibility, de Broglie insisted, foreshadowed the ambiguity of wave-particle duality. If we try to collapse the tension by stripping atoms of spatial magnitude, we turn them into dimensionless points. This is an inviting prospect because dimensionless points are geometric or mathematical points, and for centuries mathematics has struck thinkers
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as elemental reality or, as Galileo put it, the language in which God has written the universe.1 But the tension doesn’t collapse as we turn atoms into geometric points, for geometric points are themselves tinged with ambiguity. Not only that, but all geometric constructions are so tinged because their fundamental building blocks— geometric points—shape up as mathematical entities without physical dimension. Yes, the points are something, at least in the minds of those who use them to construct lines, planes, and solids, but physically speaking, they are nothing at all. What gives them birth is the geometer’s ability to strike a parallel between vanishingly small physical objects—atoms, say—and mathematical objects that have no physicality whatsoever. This might seem regrettable. (Why does there have to be this kind of slippage at the very foundations of geometry?) But it is fully representative of what happens whenever we model reality with abstract theory: some sort of conceptual sleight-of-hand or sleightof-mind occurs. Without this sleight-of-mind, theories would never take flight. If Greek mathematicians had balked at the physical imÂ�possibility of geometric points, Euclidean geometry would have gone unrealized. All the same, it is easy to overlook the metaphysical leaps of faith taken at the outset of any intellectual endeavor— leaps that render our theories more richly ambiguous than we may suppose. Expressing this point while speaking of geometry, Robert Tubbs writes: “The most basic of all geometric objects are line segments and points, and given their central roles in geometry, it would seem that they would be the best understood of all geometric entities. Surprisingly, they are not now nor have they ever been.”2 The problem, he notes, lies in the definitions of points and lines, which play havoc with our physical intuitions. Points, having no physical magnitude, have no parts (are indivisible), and lines are “breadthless” lengths. Owing to their one-dimensionality, they have length but not width. It is just as hard to imagine a line without width as it is to imagine a point without length and width. And yet to get the game of geometry under way, we must gloss over such difficulties by positing a realm where such entities exist. First, dimensionless points; second, one-dimensional lines made up of points, it would seem; third, two-
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dimensional planes made up of lines; and fourth, three-dimensional solids made up of planes. This all seems straightforward, at least once we get past the initial difficulties, which, as Tubbs says, have never been resolved. Exploring these difficulties leads to the following questions: Are line segments wholly made up of points? (Try to imagine how dimensionless entities aggregate together to form one-dimensional lines.) Or do they exist in some way independently of the points they contain? Tubbs responds by speaking of “the dual nature of line segments” and likening line segments to light in the double-slit experiment. In that experiment photons are released individually with the intent of determining whether light is nothing but photons—nothing but an aggregation of point-like constituents. If this is all light is, then, of course, photons should hit the photoplate roughly opposite the slits to form two parallel bands. But instead of this result we get the wave interference pattern, which implies that light exists in some way independently of its point-like or particulate nature. Similarly, says Tubbs, lines, though containing points, exist apart from those points in some way. If we were to perform a “mathematical analogue” of the double-slit experiment by lifting points from a line and then casting them individually at a blank sheet of paper, they would not scatter aimlessly about the paper.3 Instead, they would form a line, each point “knowing” its place in the line segment just as each photon seems to know where to strike the photoplate so as to make a wave interference pattern. Granted, it is hard to imagine how one would ever perform this version of the double-slit experiment, but Tubbs’s point is that geometric line segments have a light-like, dualistic nature. On the one hand, they strike us as mere aggregations of points, but on the other, they obviously possess or instantiate (linear) form and consequently shape up as organized aggregations of points. Thus, according to Tubbs, a simple line segment is analogous to the wave interference pattern: each bespeaks an organizing principle, an imposition of form or pattern on what we might first suppose to be unrelated or accidentally related points or parts. One might object that all this is artificial: geometry, after all, sprang from the human mind, not from nature itself. But quantum
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physics has blurred the assumed divide between nature and mind, and here is a good, everyday way of experiencing the quantum tension between point and pattern, part and whole. When regarded as a mathematical entity, something as seemingly simple as a line segment defies straightforward comprehension. Why? Because the mathematical points or parts from which we construct the segment are themselves imprecisely conceptualized, just as the classical atom was. What is more, without that imprecision or sleight-of-mind we would never get epistemic purchase on the world. Something must slip a little at first before traction builds up, and that slippage, I believe, is the slippage or uncertainty that quantum physics now highlights, whereupon we realize that “the laws [of physics] leave a place for mind in the description of every molecule.”4 Many thinkers celebrate this realization as new and stunning, but that is because they assume that molecules, atoms, and mathematical points, are puzzle-free entities. They are not. Each embodies a primal slippage, ambiguity, or sleight-of-mind that now plays itself out in physics. This, however, need not imply that only physicists and philosophers may grasp the drama. Those willing to ponder the interplay of geometric points and lines will find themselves reflecting on issues germane to the double-slit experiment. What is more, upon pondering that interplay, one catches sight of the possibility that quantum uncertainty, while absolutely real, is not absolutely new or unprecedented. As A. S. Eddington proposed, we find in the atom—and by extension, in the world of particle physics—what we ourselves once put there.5 The sleight-of-mind that helped produce that world ultimately registers as quantum unÂ� certainty. Double-Slit Seeing Assume we perform the double-slit experiment using photons but replace the photoplate with a human eye. Would the eye see a wave interference pattern? There is no reason to suppose so. When photons strike the eye, we don’t see photons per se but the world about us. Of course, with just a few photons striking the eye, we wouldn’t see much of the world (just as we don’t see much in a dark room), but the principle of seeing things other than photons
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would still hold. And as the number of photons increased, the effect would approximate the normal seeing experience. Among other things, we would see a double-slitted barrier in front of us. So, no, we would not see a wave interference pattern; we would see images of distant objects. These images, however, betray light’s capacity for expansive unity even more effectively than the wave interference pattern. They are a first-order manifestation of that unity while the pattern is a second-order manifestation, something caught on the visual rebound.6 The wave interference pattern is a beautiful fireweed sprung up from something like Heraclitus’s logos, which he described as an elemental fire imparting stability to the cosmos while also keeping it in combustive process. As an artifact of elemental or firsthand experience, it points back to the way we visually experience the world, and the salient idea is this: we see things together. Different things, some far, some near, simultaneously populate our field of vision. Even when we choose to focus on a single object, we see it against a hazy background of other things. Further, while all those different things may appear to be independent, self-standing objects, they nevertheless are caught in a single visual expanse, just as various particle hits, initially assumed to be separate and self-standing in the double-slit experiment, are caught in a single pattern betokening expansive unity. In brief, the various things we see at a glance are visually interactive even if they are not causally interactive, and that visual interactiveness does not stem from the accidental collocation of things. It connotes a cement older than that of causality, one that precedes and allows for the visual collocation of objects, which is accidental only in a causal sense. Visually, those objects impinge on each other to give us a wide-angle grasp of reality and to round out our apprehension of any one object, should we choose to focus on it. The wave interference pattern is a visible transcription of an experience almost too close to home to get intellectual leverage on. By teaching us that single photons are context-inclusive, it prepares us for a truth iterated away through long familiarity: photon-mediated seeing of a single object is also context inclusive. We can, of course, look through a straw to block out context, but this would quickly
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grow tedious and, more to the point, uninformative of the world. It would verge on blindness. Visual context is a precondition for seeing, and such context presupposes the gathering together of objects that may strike us as causally unrelated, even randomly aggregated. But this gathering-together signifies a deeper articulation to the world than causality with its assumption of self-standing parts or particles. That assumption takes us just so far, but then the parts organize in non-causal ways, and without that organization the world would be much less intelligible. What is more, that organization is a nod in the direction of expansive unity, something that visual experience embodies. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty puts it: “Vision alone makes us learn that beings that are different, ‘exterior,’ foreign to one another are absolutely together, are ‘simultaneity.’”7 To see that simultaneity, that togetherness, look at the wave interference pattern. Better yet, just look about. Double-Slit Sunset After discussing the double-slit experiment, H. P. Stapp writes, “QuanÂ�tum phenomena provide prima facie evidence that information gets around in ways that do not conform to classical ideas. . . . Everything we know about Nature is in accord with the idea that the fundamental process of Nature lies outside space-time (surveys the space-time continuum), but generates events that can be located in space-time.”8 Put differently, the fact that events show up in space-time need not imply their origination therein. In the double-slit experiment, particle hits seem to “condense” out of a non-particle ambience—an ambience, that is, that stymies the thought of particles moving along well-defined space-time trajectories. This, of course, prompts the thought of wave-particle duality. Looking only at individual particle hits on the photoplate, one finds evidence of particles. But looking at the overall distribution of those hits, one finds evidence of waves. Neither manifestation is more fundamental than the other. If particles were fundamentally wave-like, it seems that each would create a wave interference pattern (however faint) on the photoplate rather than a distinct, particle-like spot.
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But if they were fundamentally particle-like, how does one explain their collective, expansive wave-like action as evidenced by the wave interference pattern? My submission is that the double-slit experiment affords us a way of thinking about how information gets around in the world. A particle hitting a photoplate has the capacity to impress its viewer as a discrete, self-contained entity having arrived along a single path of travel. This impression, however, is only half the story. The other half—the wave half—necessitates more than one path of travel and opens out onto other events or entities having no apparent connection, causally at least, with the object of interest, which in this case is a single particle hit. This is to say that a particle hit is just the visible tip of a very far-flung array of events, all of which timelessly interrelate in some way that defies common understanding. Hence information does not “get around” in the conventional space-time sense because, as Stapp proposes, something is occurring outside the space-time regime to generate events within that regime. If such were part of everyday experience—if space-time barriers occasionally fall away to let events bespeak deeper origins—we would expect something similar to wave-particle duality: the gathering of various events, all apparently separate and unrelated, into patterns or moments of expansive unity. One such moment is sunset. In his book How Experiments End, Peter Galison tells us why sunset is not quite the mirror image of sunrise: “The sunset, refracted through the dust and droplets kicked up by all that has happened, recounts in compressed form the whole story of the day.”9 If sunrise holds forth multiple yet-to-be-realized possibilities, sunset captures all realized possibilities—all events— in a single moment. Or, to follow Sappho, sunset (announced by Hesper, the evening star) gathers together all that sunrise scatters abroad: Thou, Hesper, bringest homeward all That radiant dawn sped far and wide, The sheep to fold, the goat to stall, The children to their mother’s side.10
Another witness to sunset’s assimilative, unifying aspect is William Wordsworth:
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And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.11
What is at issue here is what L. H. Myers calls “the near and the far.” In his novel of the same name, Myers writes of desert travelers whose daily toil is redeemed by the sight of the setting sun. As the twelve-year-old Prince Jali watches the sun sink in the west every evening, the travail of the day is infused with an unsuspected vastness of meaning. Hence for Jali there are “two deserts”: one that is “weariness to trudge” and that makes him feel like “an insect” crawling across “a little patch of brown sand,” and another, brought on by “the red glitter of sunset,” whose “glory to the eye” turns “his whole body into a living arrow” ready to “flash into” the faraway vista.12 The near, of course, is the particle-like sense of being tightly circumscribed and thus cut off from other things in the spacetime regime, which seems to stretch off forever in an absolutely impersonal way; the far is the wave-like sense of expansive unity, of being gathered into some widely meaningful pattern of things. The far breaks the frame of the near; that is, the frame of ordinary or myÂ�opic reality. In the book, Hari, contemplating the landscape at sunset, yearns for the moment when “the knot of selfhood would loosen” so as to dissolve him into some larger pattern of possibility.13 Whether or not all people agree with the precise description, most have at one time or another been rescued from the daily grind by sunset or some other event that unexpectedly redeems their struggle. The sunset is a particularly apt illustration of wave-particle duality because it so nicely reenacts the focal shift from particle to wave as that shift occurs in the double-slit experiment. Early on in the experiment we see nothing but particle hits on the photoplate. But as these build up, they are eclipsed by a pattern implying wavelike interaction among particles, thereby helping us realize that no particle is wholly on its own. Each is somehow connected with all the rest. This is how the experiment ends, and it is as if the “knot” of each particle, or particle hit, dissolves into the larger possibility
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of the wave interference pattern. Something analogous may happen at the end of a long day as sunset triggers a similar dissolution of myopic selfhood. As Sophocles said, “One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.”14 Or, in the doubleslit experiment, until a sufficient number of individual particle hits indicate wide, wave-like unity.
6
E v e r y d ay S u p e r p o s i t i o n
It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole, where a head should have been, was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snow-peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world. Douglas E. Harding
In his modern physics lecture course, Paul Dirac, one of the architects of quantum mechanics, would break a piece of chalk while trying to explain the concept of superposition.1 That was the only way he could put the chalk in two distinct places—by breaking the original piece and moving the two halves away from each other. This wasn’t an illustration of superposition; this was just what happens when we break one thing into parts and then spread the parts out. Superposition, by contrast, occurs as one thing occupies many space-time locations, all mutually exclusive from the perspective of common sense, without being broken apart. Electrons can do this, said Dirac, but not relatively large objects like pieces of chalk. For some thinkers, notably Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger, superposition was merely an index of our uncertainty about the
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electron’s position prior to measurement. The electron, they said, is always precisely located; it’s just that, until we measure it, we have only probabilistic knowledge of where it’s at. If I close my eyes and toss a nickel, I will be in a state of uncertainty regarding the outcome of the toss; all I can say is that there is 50 percent probability that it landed heads or tails. My uncertainty regarding the outcome of the coin toss leaves me probabilistically suspended or superposed between two possibilities (heads or tails), and until I open my eyes and look at the nickel, I don’t know which possibility is real. Similarly, said Einstein and Schrödinger, the electron is somewhere—at one distinct place—but until someone looks at it (measures it), he or she is probabilistically suspended among different possibilities, even though, like the nickel, the electron realizes just one possibility. For those following Einstein and Schrödinger, then, superposition is nothing more than a reflection of our probabilistic (imprecise) knowledge regarding the electron’s non-probabilistic (precise) location. Though eminently commonsensical, this outlook has lost ground to the radical alternative view that unmeasured electrons exist in states of superposition, at least with respect to their location or position. Our probabilistic knowledge of their position, therefore, perfectly coincides with fact or reality. We know as much as we can know, because prior to measurement, electrons are schizophrenically smeared across regions of space-time in a manner fully coincidental with our probabilistic understanding of their position. It is as if the unobserved nickel lands both heads and tails in some sort of schizophrenic way; then, when we look at it, one outcome instantaneously materializes while the other collapses to zero probability. If this radical outlook is right, it would seem to count against my argument that quantum physics reenacts everyday experience. After all, as Dirac noted, pieces of chalk can’t exist in superposition states, whereas electrons can. This dissimilarity between everyday objects and quantum objects seems unbridgeable, and yet there is something about our everyday experience that aligns with superposition states. It doesn’t concern material objects as we normally understand them. It concerns the knowing of those objects and, speaking more broadly, our consciousness of reality.
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Superposed Minds Among other things, quantum physics narrows the Cartesian divide between mind and matter. For some thinkers, it has eliminated that divide. In his 1930 review of modern cosmology and physics, Sir James Jeans wrote: Thirty years ago, we thought, or assumed, that we were heading towards an ultimate reality of a mechanical kind. It seemed to consist of a fortuitous jumble of atoms, which was destined to perform meaningless dances for a time under the action of blind purposeless forces, and then fall back to form a dead world. . . . To-day there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.2
Jeans may overstate the case, but given the grave doubt that recently had been cast on long-standing mechanical assumptions, the basic sentiment is understandable. The classical atom, the secure foundation on which nineteenth-century physics rested, was no longer “something so fixed in the order of things that it has become independent of further dangers in the struggle for existence.”3 Thanks primarily to the quantum revolution, that atom had been compromised by and entangled with the knowing agency that posited its existence. It now appears that, to some degree, mind and matter lean into each other at the quantum level. Hence, as Freeman Dyson writes, “The laws [of physics] leave a place for mind in the description of every molecule.”4 Not only that but, as David Hodgson notes, the tables have been turned: “it is significant that distinguished physicists, who are researching directly the very physical matter whose behavior is supposed to explain mind, have found it necessary to invoke mind to explain the behavior of that physical matter.”5 Whereas mind and matter were once dichotomized, now they begin to interchange and coincide, and reality, as Jeans proposed, appears less mechanical and more thought-like than it did during the heyday of classical physics. As it is routinely understood, superposition affirms this point. There is perfect correspondence between what we know about an electron’s position and where the electron is. An electron has a 5 percent probability of being at position x because
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the electron is, in fact, there in a probabilistic way that amounts to 5 percent. This naturally doesn’t jibe with the material reality we are used to, but that is just the point: the material, sharply edged reality of chalk and chairs doesn’t hold at every level. At the quantum level, it fuzzes out into probabilistic tendencies, and these tendencies are fully consistent with our probabilistic understanding of the world. What gets lost in this transition, of course, is the world of material objects with their mechanistic properties and their seeming capacity for freestanding, self-contained existence. This is a world where a piece of chalk is either here or there, but not both places at once. It is a world, moreover, where two pieces of chalk can’t occupy the same location. Physical matter, as we normally know it, doesn’t play these kinds of games. It respects space and time, which governs and restricts the distribution of material bodies. If different apples could occupy the same space, I could fill my refrigerator with millions of apples and still have room for more. But this, one might protest, is patently absurd: nothing in the world comports with this proposition. Nothing material—that is, at least as materiality has conventionally been understood. But if material reality becomes increasingly mind-like as we approach the quantum level, we should not be surprised to find instances of superposition. Mind, after all, circumvents the space-time constraints that govern material bodies. Here is how William James put it: Each new mind brings its own edition of the universe of space along with it, its own room to inhabit; and these spaces never crowd each other,—the space of my imagination, for example, in no way interferes with yours. The amount of possible consciousness seems to be governed by no law analogous to that of the so-called conservation of energy in the material world. When one man wakes up, or one is born, another does not have to go to sleep, or die, in order to keep the consciousness of the universe a constant quantity.6
James is remarking on an aspect of everyday experience clearly at odds with the materialistic stance that reality is a zero-sum game wholly regulated by space-time constraints and energy conservation laws. While people worry about planetary overcrowding, no one ever worries about a mind population explosion or the over-proliferation of consciousness. That is because minds coexist differently than,
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say, apples. Unmindful of space and time, they crowd together and overlap without infringing on each other. Electrons similarly crowd together in superposition states, each probabilistic edition of an electron overlapping with but not infringing on other editions. James died just before the quantum revolution hit its stride, but that did not keep him from noting that certain aspects of our experience militate against the proposition (much in vogue at the turn of the twentieth century) of a deterministic universe ruled by mechanistic law. These aspects principally concern mind, whose way of being can’t be assimilated into the classical assumption that every object occupies a unique position in space-time. Quantum uncertainty, particularly as it entails superposition states, is a crack in this assumption. Stepping through that crack, we encounter mindlike quantum entities that proliferate as mind itself proliferates in the everyday sphere. It is as if we slip into a world where various possibilities, all mutually exclusive from a classical perspective, multiply without regard to time and space. But this world is not exclusive to the quantum realm. It also prevails at the level of consciousness as many minds—minds without limit—freely share the same universe.
7
The Witness of Music
After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears. I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations. Oscar Wilde
For some thinkers quantum entanglement implies that the uniÂ�verse is a unified whole. To an exquisite degree, so-called parts seem to hang together, even though no causal mechanism connects them. I say “so-called” because it is as if quantum entanglement dissolves parts into larger wholes, or at least dissolves the idea of self-existing parts, and this dissolution prompts the proposal that reality is ultimately one rather than many. Reflecting on his long study of quantum phenomena, Arthur Zajonc states: Try though we may to split light into fundamental atomic pieces, it remains whole to the end. Our very notion of what it means to be elementary is challenged. Until now we have equated smallest with most
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Everyday Quantum Reality fundamental. Perhaps for light, at least, the most fundamental feature is not to be found in smallness, but rather in wholeness, its incorrigible capacity to be one and many, particle and wave, a single thing with the universe inside.1
Classical physics deemed atoms the smallest parts of material reality, imagining them as the fundamental building blocks of nature. To be sure, this outlook is deeply intuitive if we reflect on the experience of building, say, a sandcastle. Grains of sand, properly arranged, add up to a castle, and it is easy to imagine even smaller grains—that is, atoms—constituting all material entities. But there are also experiences which suggest that parts are not absolutely fundamental. What is more, some of these experiences are quantumlike in that they seem to float above space and time strictures. In some ways they respect space and time and the manner in which these two great separating modalities parse the world into distinct elements, but in other ways they do not. David Bohm offers a case in point by arguing “that the significance of thought processes appears to have an indivisibility of a sort.” Thinking carefully about one’s ideas—analyzing them—can only proceed so far before meaning dissipates. Breaking those ideas into words and then, further, into letters, or into the different characteristics of a visual image, is counterproductive because, as Bohm notes, any idea draws its significance from the interrelation of its parts. Thus, Bohm concludes, “thought processes and quantum systems are analogous in that they cannot be analyzed too much in terms of distinct elements, because the ‘intrinsic’ nature of each element is not a property existing separately from and independently of other elements but is, instead, a property that arises partially from its relation with other elements.”2 The same is true of any material object, even the aforemen-Â� tioned sandcastle. Once its grains of sand are arranged to form a castle, they may be said to be entangled together as a relational pattern—one that pleases the eye. The difference with quantum entanglement is that no one previously expected entanglement in a realm deemed empty of interrelation beyond that supplied by mechanical causality. But this is just a difference of expectation, not a difference of physical fact, as we now know. The arrangement of grains of sand, and other kinds of everyday objects, puts them into re-
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lational patterns that lean toward unity and indivisibility. Something similar evidently happens with quantum objects. Each borrows some of its reality from the relational pattern in which it is embedded, a pattern that may ultimately entail nothing less than the universe. This should not surprise us. One sandcastle, after all, embodies many grains of sand, and although we may choose to highlight either the sandcastle’s unity or its composite plurality, neither of these aspects excludes the other. Unity and plurality coexist in every object we can name. Put another way, wave-like indivisibility and particle-like divisibility coexist in every object because, as Bohr insisted, each characterization implies its complementary opposite. Thinking along a similar track, A. N. Whitehead wrote that any truth that accommodates straightforward expression is but a half-truth. What he meant is that every truth exists in virtue of its flip side, its contradiction. He further stated that our inclination to canonize half-truths, to think in a single, univocal register, “plays the devil” with our worldview formulations. Eventually we pay a price for our theoretical oversimplifications of reality.3 But there is no reason to oversimplify reality, for everyday experience comes off as richly complex. Take music, for example. Its evocative powers are proverbial, and often these powers entail the dissolution of myopic selfhood. This is part of the reason music was long regarded as a universal precondition of reality. From Greek antiquity up until the early modern era, people believed in the music of the spheres, a cosmic harmony that informs reality and keeps it on track. While this tradition no longer prevails, it is still easy to grasp the complementary nature of music, the way a pluralistic succession of individual tones—each distinct in time—acts on and is reacted on ˇ by an emerging musical whole. Miliˇc Capek explains what occurs as each new tone issues forth: The quality of a new tone, in spite of its irreducible individuality, is tinged by the whole antecedent musical context which, in turn, is retroactively changed by the emergence of a new musical quality. The individual tones are not externally related units of which the melody is additively built; neither is their individuality absorbed or dissolved in the undifferentiated unity of the musical whole.4
ˇ Capek feels that this familiar musical experience has the potential of helping us break out of the blind alley of contemporary
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thought that privileges parts over wholes. Neither of these two aspects ultimately trumps the other, and the dynamic tension between the two is identical, in his mind, with the flow of reality. Hence we have a “successive differentiated wholeness” which “exhibits a synthesis of unity and multiplicity, of continuity and discontinuity.”5 Like notes in a melodic line, quantum objects, in one sense, stand out as different or differentiated parts. But in another sense they contribute to and participate in an emerging whole, and so it is not surprising that they should become “unbounded portions of the whole”6 by dint of interrelation. In musical compositions, individual tones do exactly the same thing. I propose that music is like quantum physics in that it lands us in the realm of pre-conceptual experience. Moreover, each endeavor highlights the complementary interplay of particle-like part and wave-like whole, an interplay that in some ways is indifferent to space and time as defined by classical physics.
Musical Waves We begin with a question: why is music so repetitive? “We are so accustomed to repetition in music,” writes Victor Zuckerkandl, “that we accept it as self-evident; that we never become aware of what an extraordinary phenomenon it is.” Unlike poetry or visual art where repetition quickly becomes senselessly monotonic, music seems to build on repetition—think of how many times a melody line may be repeated, often with little, if any, variation. As an example, Zuckerkandl offers the first movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. He describes it as a “brief tonal formula, comprising a mere five tones, in three variations—as if I should say: ‘I gave him apples, apples gave him I, I apples gave him’—repeated thirty-six times in all, followed by eight more repetitions of half the formula. . . . And hardly have we got through it before it begins again, and the whole thing is repeated tone for tone!”7 Zuckerkandl responds to the question of “why so much repetition” by insisting that each repetition is in fact a new event in time: “Measures, beats, groups of measures may be exactly alike so far as tonal content is concerned, but since they must occur at different
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times they can never be mere repetition; they are necessarily different, as the phases of a wave or the degrees of intensification are different.”8 What Zuckerkandl has in mind here is something very much like the dynamics of wave-particle duality, and though he knows little about quantum mechanics, his study of music propels him toward an understanding of time that might be described as quantum-like. That understanding hinges on his grasp of music’s metric wave or the wave cycle produced by the metrical rhythm of the composition. As we all know, the rhythm or beat drives the composition, but not in a flat, linear, purely reiterative way. Rather, as the composition unfolds, each wave gathers up earlier waves: “The first wave lives on in the second, the first and second together in the third, the first three in the fourth, and so on and on. . . . As measure follows upon measure, wave upon wave, something grows, accumulates.”9 In brief, musical time is not like clock time, or time as idealized by classical physics. Clock time is purely reiterative, a mere succession of isolated moments. Musical time is integrative of many moments. Zuckerkandl relates the growing, accumulative nature of music to the waves that successively roll into each other with growing force. He calls this intensification, and while it is not something we can measure or quantify, we all know it subjectively. Its objective counterpart in a scientific context is constructive interference, the addition of light waves to produce regions of brightness on a photographic plate. At the end of the double-slit experiment, we see these regions spread out in space on the plate, but it is hard to imagine how individually fired particles, or even individually propagated wave fronts, could build up over time to produce the regions: how can the particles interact with each other when they are fired at different times? And yet wave-borne musical tones, also played at different times, interactively build up or intensify over time to give us the deep satisfaction music offers. Not only is the past gathered into the flowing edge of music, but the future is as well. Again, we know this from everyday experience: while listening to music we feel stretched out toward a happy resolution, a return to the home key. And as musical tones integrate past and future to produce musical wholes, they trigger within the listener an expansive and heightened sense of the present moment.
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The experience of listening to music, one might suggest, is a kind of timeless or nonlocal activity in that past and future are experientially or subjectively present at every musical moment. Granted, music unfolds in time, but it is enjoyed in the here and now; as listeners we do not recall how beautiful a melody was two or three measures ago or anticipate how sublime it will be a few measures hence. In fact, to recall or anticipate, says Zuckerkandl, is to destroy the musical experience.10 Because these activities assume the unreality of past and future (which, therefore, must be conjured or imagined via recall and anticipation), they are at odds with music’s capacity to give us the past and future in the now of the lived musical moment. We therefore break the spell of music when we try to enjoy it through the conceptual lens of a scientific timeline. In essence, the moving edge of music, unlike the moving edge of time that science posits, folds past and future into the immediacy of the present moment. There thus seems to be a realm in which the three divisions or tenses of time—past, present, and future— remain primordially intact, a realm not yet broken by conceptual representation. Zuckerkandl states: “The present of musical meter . . . contains within it a past that is not remembered and a future that is not foreknown—and not as something to be supplied by thought but as a thing directly given in experience itself.”11 We do not call up or invoke past and future—they are there already, integral to the musical experience. A compelling case in point is that of Clive Wearing, a wellknown English musician who became profoundly amnesiac after encephalitis crippled his brain’s memory function. His wife writes that while “his ability to perceive what he saw and heard was unimpaired . . . he did not seem to be able to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink. Indeed, if he did blink, his eyelids parted to reveal a new scene. The view before the blink was entirely forgotten.”12 Eventually Wearing learned to function socially in a limited way by stocking his mind with facts about his past life, even though he had no recollection of them. He also learned to talk about certain subjects in a scripted fashion, albeit without realizing that these comments and conversations were repetitious. Providentially, there was one respite from this sequence of self-contained moments that never fused together, and that was music; it was, said
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Oliver Sacks, Wearing’s friend and neurologist, “a rope let down from heaven.”13 Although Wearing might claim beforehand that he did not know a musical piece, when he sat at the piano he could play it with feeling and intelligence. The same passion and intelligence kicked in when he sang a song or conducted a score. Sacks suggests that Wearing, “incapable of remembering or anticipating events because of his amnesia, is able to sing and play and conduct music because remembering music is not, in the usual sense, remembering it at all. Remembering music, listening to it, or playing it, is entirely in the present.”14 To hear a musical tone is to be picked up and carried along by the entire composition: “A piece of music is not a mere sequence of notes. Every bar, every phrase, arises organically from what preceded and points to what will follow.”15 Musical time, I submit, is a throwback to the grace or innocence of childhood—before we learned to break time into three parts and thereby emptied the present moment of its innate fullness.16 Scholars have linked music with language learning, noting that “linguistic prosody, which is analogous to the melodic and rhythmic contours of music, is extremely salient to young language learners.”17 Infants appear to have absolute pitch, an endowment that is generally lost during language acquisition owing to their need to parse sounds into syllables and ordered sequences so that they may enter the world of adult meanings, which does not depend on absolute pitch. “Infants limited to grouping melodies by absolute pitches,” write Jenny Saffran and Gregory Griepentrog, “would never discover that the songs they hear are the same when sung in different keys or that words spoken at different fundamental frequencies are the same.”18 Information would be exclusively tied to pitch, and that would lead speakers (singers?) into a linguistic world we can scarcely imagine, for even tonal languages depend on much more than pitch for the expression of meaning. The critical point is that what adults now deem a rare musical gift—absolute pitch—is something virtually all humans possess at birth but then lose while growing into a language keyed to other criteria. Further, the ability to parse experience according to these other criteria gives us a reality not exclusively musical, a reality in which music is just one of the world’s many facets, albeit one that has struck some thinkers as elemental and universal. It is a familiar
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observation that music, unlike the visual arts, lacks specific content. As Arthur Schopenhauer put it: Music does not express this or that particular and definite pleasure, this or that affliction, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, or peace of mind, but joy, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, peace of mind themselves, to a certain extent in the abstract, their essential nature, without any accessories, and so also without the motives for them. Nevertheless, we understand them perfectly in this extracted quintessence.19
Because music triggers passions and moods without referencing uniquely particular events or moments of experience, it seems to point back to a reality far less particularized and differentiated than the one we normally engage. Keying off of Gustav Mahler and Paul Hindemith, Martha Nussbaum calls this a dreamlike reality, or one in which musical emotions follow one another in rapid and sometimes surprising succession; they seem to lack rootedness in specific events and in the usual sequencing of events in space and time; they grow and fade with a bewildering rapidity. In all this they are like dreams, or certain sorts of memories; they have the characteristics of compression, multiple reference, illogical order, displacement, and rapidity that we associate with our experience of dreaming.20
Earlier I compared dream experience to wave reality, which in quantum physics lacks the well-defined space-time sequencing of particle reality. Nussbaum proposes that music, like dreams, offers occasional release from hard-edged, logically ordered, and fully differentiated particle reality (although she doesn’t describe the release in exactly this way), and this assertion comports with Zuckerkandl’s proposition that music short-circuits our sense of clock time (a mechanical succession of self-contained instants) by folding past and future into the flowing edge of the moving melody. Along with others, I am suggesting there is something primal about music,21 something embryonic of particularized possibilities which once realized tend to mask music’s wave-like structure. If we grow out of absolute pitch while giving ourselves over to languages keyed to particular objects, events, and experiences, it is likely that something elemental—something prior to space-time sequencing—gets left behind in the growing-up process. Pondering his childhood, Dylan Thomas tried to put his finger on it:
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I ran my heedless ways, My wishes raced through the house-high hay And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs Before the children green and golden Follow him out of grace, Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand, In the moon that is always rising Nor that riding to sleep I should hear him fly with the high fields And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.22
Classical physics is a “childless land” in that it valorizes past, present, and future as absolutely distinct times. Part of the magic of music is that it undoes the valorization, as does quantum physics in certain experimental contexts. Quantum particles sometimes come off as indifferent to time or to classical science’s imagined capacity to pin every event down to a single distinct moment. That events cannot always be pinned down with precision should not surprise us, for “every melody declares to us that the past can be there without being remembered, the future without being foreknown.”23 Quantum mechanics offers a similar declaration. In either case we discover parts expansively existing beyond their assigned locations in the space-time regime, whether those parts are separately played musical tones or distantly separated particles.
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E v e r y d ay Re l at i o n a l i t y
We cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connexion with other things. Ludwig Wittgenstein
Typically we view the world as an aggregation of things, each thing having its own independent reality. Quantum mechanics, however, nudges us toward a more relational outlook. Reality seems to hang together in some pre-causal way, and this hanging-together includes us, notwithstanding our age-old inclination to believe we can exclude or distance ourselves from nature. That we cannot step outside of nature’s embrace is one of quantum mechanics’ many lessons. Like “individual” particles in the double-slit experiment, or “individual” coins tossed many times, we as “individuals” get drawn into broad patterns that betray our prior complicity with the rest of the world. Thereby we discover that our putative individuality—our apartness from all else—is a fiction of limited utility. It can take us only so far, and then it must be abandoned if we wish to better understand nature and how we fit into it. 93
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This quantum-inspired outlook submerges distinct, freestanding objects—so assumed—into a net of relations, which then emergÂ�es as primitive reality. As David Mermin, in an article entitled “What Is Quantum Mechanics Trying to Tell Us?” puts it, “Correlations have physical reality; that which they correlate do not.”1 Here Mermin is thinking specifically of particles like electrons and photons, for under experimental circumstances different particles correlate or relate with each other across seemingly impossible space-time intervals. That is, they appear mindful of one another, and this correlative “mindfulness” falsifies the classical assumption that particles are distinct, self-contained entities. Rather, they are more like knots in a vast relational skein, those knots issuing up from the skein and thus borrowing their reality therefrom. Mermin admits that this is a “bizarre” proposition. For a culture that thinks of objects as self-standing entities, it is bizarre. But that, I submit, is because we stare past everyday phenomena that are patently relational. These phenomena imply that we are tissued into nature; they simply would not show up, as they so readily do, if this were not the case. And yet there is nothing causal about them. They affirm our pre-causal involvement in the world, just as correlations among subatomic particles affirm an underlying and far-flung mutual involvement on their part. Relational Properties If someone were to ask you if your backpack is “to the left,” your reflexive response would be: “To the left of what?” Since “to the left” is not an inherent property of your backpack, the question only makes sense when something else is specified. Until that specification, the backpack’s position, at least with respect to left and right, is indeterminate. Indeed, it may be said to exist in a state of superposition, schizophrenically poised between right and left, and thus ready to fall either way once another object is named.2 The same is true of “to the east” and any comparative property like “higher than.” If it is to achieve precision with regard to one thing, the property requires a second thing. And that second thing turns the first thing—the backpack, say—into a relational or contextinclusive entity. At least in some respects, it remains undefined or
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indeterminate by itself, ambiguously smeared across mutually exclusive possibilities. Another example is the half-moon, or the moon in any of its phases. Millennia ago people regarded the half-moon as a fully selfcontained object. Lunar phases were deemed intrinsic properties of the moon. Not until Parmenides, about 500 bc, did humankind broach the possibility that the moon borrows its light from the sun and that its phases are a function of its position relative to the sun and the earth. Parmenides has the moon “wandering” about the earth and “always gazing toward the rays of the sun,”3 a description that puts the moon in a context from which its phases can be seen as relational properties. For moderns this is old hat, but the ancient discovery that the moon, as we experience it, is partly a consequence of “outside” bodies with which the moon per se has no apparent relationship, was probably as galvanizing for Parmenides and his contemporaries as the modern discovery of particle correlations is for us.4 A final example is color. Is the yellowness of my pencil an intrinsic or a relational property? Many people, I suspect, would say intrinsic, believing that any color stands by itself. We all know, however, that various colors are said to clash or go together well, a fact suggesting that colors don’t always stand alone—they interrelate or correlate in pleasing or unpleasing ways. Put differently, while colored objects may have sharply defined boundaries (think of a red apple), our everyday experience occurs within larger contexts whose tone or mood is partly established by the way various colors play off each other (think of a red apple on a white countertop). To get a sense of what is at stake here, we turn to the color theory of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a thinker inclined to wide-angle vistas.5 Long before quantum physics, Goethe was already thinking in the key of relationality as he pondered the occurrence of color in nature. For him colors were “the deeds and sufferings of light.”6 They were combusted from the larger revelation of light and darkness (light’s complementary opposite), a revelation that enframes and suffuses human experience. To fully appreciate Goethe’s treatment of color, one must be willing to step outside of what he calls “insulated cases, opinions, and hypotheses.”7 By disregarding the wide context of the seeing
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experience, these cases suggest that colors are self-sufficient entities in the world: each bears a certain relation to the rest by holding a distinctive place in the color spectrum, but beyond that there is little reason to esteem a particular color as a “deed” or “suffering” of something more primordial. Each is a part of the whole, but not organically so. Isaac Newton, following this path in pursuing his prism experiments, saw colors as self-sufficient building blocks, and so inverted their relationship to colorless light (thereby making colors primordial, not light and darkness). This might be correct in a limited sense, said Goethe, but it cannot be the full story of color. What is more, by proposing that parts are foundational, this approach contributed to the growing fragmentation of human experience. Goethe sought to repair the damage by reaching back to wider connections, which, after all, is what the eye does as it seeks to make sense of the world. Goethe developed a color theory categorically different from that of Newton. To be sure, there are areas of evidentiary overlap and conflict, but these should not obscure the more fundamental difference in philosophical orientation. In sum, Goethe recognized in nature powers not acknowledged by Newtonian science. This recognition of powers opened the way for a living dialectic between eye and world. Not empty of intelligence, the world’s expression is the world expressing itself, speaking directly to the human observer and, in the case of vision, the eye answering back. A passive, mirrorlike eye would simply receive the world and add nothing of its own, but the human eye, Goethe insisted, is creative as well as receptive. Among other things, this means that the colorful world takes some of its coloration from the eye and that interior productions of the eye—so-called optical illusions—are as real and as worthy of study as sights streaming in from the outside. Indeed, since the two kinds of phenomena play off each other, they ultimately form an indissoluble unity. Goethe noted that some visual effects originate in the eye. Too much darkness—prolonged darkness—induces images of light, while too much light obscures one’s apprehension of the world. In either case, Goethe argued, the eye adjusts to an excess of light or darkness by producing the opposite effect. It thus strives toward a balance or harmony of light and darkness, apparently mindful of
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the elemental struggle between light and darkness that activates the cosmos. This striving occurs not only as the eye reacts to excesses of light and darkness but also as it responds to colors. The eye balances an excess of orange, say, with a shade of blue—blue being the optical afterimage of orange. Such striving or “balancing” occurs more often than most people suppose, says Goethe. To support this claim, he offers compelling instances from his own experience that illustrate an unusual ability to intermingle what some now call right-brain and left-brain thinking. For example, Goethe tells us that one evening, when the twilight was deepening into a clear night, as I was walking up and down the garden with a friend, we very distinctly observed a flamelike appearance near the oriental poppy, the flowers of which are remarkable for their powerful red color. We approached the place and looked attentively at the flowers, but could perceive nothing further, till at last, by passing and repassing repeatedly, while we looked sideways on them, we succeeded in renewing the appearance as often as we pleased. It proved to be a physiological phenomenon . . . and the apparent coruscation was nothing but the spectrum of the flower in the compensatory blue-green colour. . . . In looking directly at a flower the image is not produced, but it appears immediately as the direction of the eye is altered. Again, by looking sideways on the object, a double image is seen for a moment, for the spectrum then appears near and on the real object.8
Goethe explains further that the gathering darkness had thrown the eye into a “perfect state of repose” whereby it was made unusually susceptible to the poppy’s red brilliance.9 The result was a flamelike efflorescence as the red image of the flower combined with its blue-green afterimage. In a larger sense, this simultaneous blending of image and afterimage arises from the tendency of light to excite the eye and the counter-tendency of darkness to relax the eye and thereby render it susceptible to light’s excitations. At twilight, each tendency is operative, and so afterimages sometimes fleetingly combine with images. Normally an afterimage follows its image, but this makes it no less significant. Goethe recommends that, whenever possible, we should view nature in both modes, so that we can realize, among other things, that “peonies produce beautiful green, marigolds vivid blue spectra.”10
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Figure 8.1. Goethe’s color circle from his 1810 Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors). Colors are paired with their complementary or compensatory opposites. For instance, green at the top of the circle pairs with red at the bottom. Physiologically, the eye, upon experiencing an overload of red, compensates by producing a green afterimage, and vice versa.
Far from being illusions or defects, afterimages are indicators of a healthy eye, and seeing things in both their colors and their compensatory colors rounds out the human experience, according to Goethe. But that we hold compensatory colors in such low regard arises from our lopsided devotion to outer material reality. We can balance ourselves out, however, by learning to close our eyes, or look away at a drab background like a “gravel path” after viewing objects that interest us. This will produce their afterimages and allow us to view nature from an inner perspective. This tacking back and forth between inner and outer vision brings us in line with nature’s
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true operation, for nature itself—of which we are a part—also tacks back and forth between extremes of light and darkness, ever seeking wider unity. Expressed differently, nature seeks to heal its excess, and this involves reaching back for the wider unity of all colors when any one color is separated off from the rest. A “certain violence” is done to the eye when struck by a single color, says Goethe, and this shock “forces the organ to opposition.”11 In achieving this opposition, however, the eye does more than simply offset one color with another. Demanding “completeness,” it “seeks to eke out the colorific circle in itself.”12 Along with others of his day, Goethe insisted that the laws of vision are such that all of the primary or building-block colors— red, blue, and yellow—are inevitably involved in the production of an afterimage. For example, when blue strikes the eye, it will be balanced by orange, which is composed of yellow and red. In the case of green— a compound of blue and yellow—red is produced. No matter what the color of the image, the three primary colors figure into the act of seeing any colored object, at least when that act embraces the object’s afterimage. To follow Goethe: “The purple or violet colour suggested by yellow contains red and blue; orange, which responds to blue, is composed of yellow and red; green, uniting blue and yellow, demands red; and so through all the gradations of the most complicated combinations.”13 In a very real sense, then, the whole color spectrum—embryonically contained within red, blue, and yellow—is poured into our experience of any single color—if we are able to balance off images with their afterimages. This helps us understand the complementary color pairings of the color chart. Each pairing encapsulates the totality of our color experience by ensuring the ongoing presence of the three primary colors, which in turn imbues our experience with continuity and global stability. Blue must be paired with orange, for if it were combined with any other color, redundancies and omissions would occur. A pairing with purple, for instance, would amount to an overload of blue—since purple is a compound of red and blue— and an omission of yellow. Moreover, this unhappy pairing of colors would reverberate throughout the color chart so as to remove from our seeing experience the underlying constancy now provided by
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red, blue, and yellow acting in concert. As it is, however, these three colors are involved in every image-afterimage combination, without any superfluity or lack.14 Although Goethe lived a century before the birth of quantum physics and its revelations regarding particle relationality, his ideas ascribe to color a similar relationality. The particular colors we see are products of a vast economy of action that largely goes unseen. This is why the greenness of grass, say, is not a static quality; when stared at, it triggers a physiological reaction within the eye that ensures an overall balance of colors. Tiring of green, the eye compensates by producing a red afterimage. Thus a larger scheme or economy guarantees that colors do not senselessly or randomly populate sensory experience: ongoing adjustments occur as the eye creatively responds to the world. To be sure, single colors announce themselves, but they are incorporated into the wider unity of all colors. Analogously, a single photon “hit” in the double-slit experiment initially seems independent of all other hits. Eventually, however, we realize that the hits are relationally tied together in a wave configuration that bespeaks unity and unbounded context rather than self-bounded individuality. Everyday relational properties, which are more ubiquitous and elemental than we normally suppose, drive home the same point. Relational Wholes When he was four or five years old, Albert Einstein was shown a magnetic compass by his father. The needle, always returning to the same orientation under the action of an unseen force, taught the child that “something deeply hidden had to be behind things.”15 Just over twenty years later Einstein referred to a magnet while introducing his special theory of relativity. He wrote of certain “asymmetries” in contemporary physics that do “not appear to be inherent in the phenomena.”16 To be specific, when a bar magnet is moved through a stationary conductor (wire coil), the consequent effect, according to physics, is the induction of an electric field in the conductor and the generation of an electric current. When, however, the magnet is held fast and the conductor is moved, no electric field is said to be induced in the coil, even though an electric current still registers on a galvanometer.
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In either case an electric current is produced, but in the first instance by an electric field and in the second by a separate force called Lorentz’s force. And yet from the perspective of Newtonian physics, the two situations are exactly the same. Notwithstanding casual descriptions (such as those above) that assign motion to one entity and rest to the other, the laws of physics do not distinguish between rest and inertial (force-free) motion, so all we can say is that the magnet and the coil are moving relative to each other. And yet casual descriptions, the like of which Einstein felt had no place in science, were dictating different explanations for the production of an electric current. Einstein said he found this explanatory asymmetry “unbearable.”17 The problem, he believed, was not in the phenomena themselves, which, properly understood, would never admit such an asymmetry, but in physics. To repair the problem—that is, to restore symmetry—he developed his special theory of relativity. Einstein’s theory fosters relational understanding. It helps us to see, for example, that the length of an object, say, is a function of the object’s relation to a particular observer. As Peter Kosso puts it: “Things have length only with respect to a specific reference frame. This complication, this relativity, is not in how you look at things; it is in how things are.”18 The length of one’s umbrella, in other words, is always an observed (measured) length, and observation implies various observers with which the umbrella may have different relations and thus different lengths. In sum, there is no privileged or absolute length for the umbrella; there are just measured lengths, none of which is decisive for all observers, and each of which entails a relational coupling with a specific observer. It is fitting that this outlook issued up in part from Einstein’s concern with a problem involving magnets, for more so than most objects, magnets are obviously constituted by the relational interaction of their so-called parts. Every permanent or natural magnet has two poles, but neither pole, though spatially distinct from the other, exists independently of the other. Break a magnet in half and the halves become magnets, each with a positive pole and a negative pole. Magnets remain whole, complete with both poles, in the face of ongoing division or breakage, even though for any given magnet the poles lie apart from each other—at opposite ends of the magnet.
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What then gets broken apart? Not the phenomenon of magnetism, but the physical things we call magnets. If, however, we assign priority to physical reality as we break magnets apart, we may stare past magnetism’s resistance to subdivision. We may, that is, fail to realize that magnetic poles are not the physical ends of the magnet but rather complementary aspects of a phenomenon that is immune to physical breakage. Or, as David Bohm, puts it, after noting that one magnetic pole cannot exist without its complementary opposite: “So you can see that there is no separate magnetic pole. In fact you can consider that when it [a magnet] is not broken, every part is a superposition of north and south poles.”19 The salient point is that magnetism does not arise from the mechanistic interaction of separate parts. It is a complete package, and even though we may point to a magnet’s separate parts as they occupy different spatial locations, those so-called parts somehow include each other. Not physically, of course, but as a matter of the indivisible force or field that keeps the phenomenon of magnetism whole and intact despite a magnet’s physical breakage. Thus nature betrays “something deeply hidden . . . behind things,” a far-flung wholeness or relationality that survives our best attempts to separate nature into distinct—that is, unrelated—parts. Moreover, this relational wholeness might even bring about the putative parts—this was Michael Faraday’s insight. He proposed that in virtue of their widely relational action, magnetic fields come before, even bring into existence, the physical objects we call magnets. Sprinkle iron filings on a piece of paper above a magnet and you see the filings arrange themselves in curved lines as they are acted upon by a magnetic force. Normally we trace these lines back to the magnet. The force, we blithely assume, arises from the physical object. But we have already seen that the physical object is not reducible to separate parts or smaller physical objects, at least if we wish to grasp its distinctive nature—its magnetism. This fact alone throws doubt on the long-standing assumption that bedrock reality consists solely of physical matter with its separately interacting parts. Faraday, mindful of this assumption but inclined to doubt it as he studied magnetism and electricity in his laboratory, eventually proposed that physical objects arise or materialize out of an underlying, ever-shifting play of tensions or forces. The curved lines marked
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out by iron filings on a piece of paper, in other words, are more real, more elemental, than the filings. Indeed, every physical body might be said to be an intersection of forces, an object brought into material existence by the convergence of unseen, indivisible forces. Reconceptualizing atoms as points at which lines of force crisscross and centralize, he wrote: “The powers around the centres give these centres the properties of atoms of matter; and these powers again, when many centres by their conjoint forces are grouped into a mass, give to every part of that mass the properties of matter.”20 Faraday’s inclination to see physical bodies as nodes in a vast skein of force lines engendered modern field theory, the hallmark of which is the potential for far-flung relational action. Electrons, once conceived as context-free particles sensitive only to change in their immediate or local neighborhood, are now often regarded as context-inclusive entities, that is, local manifestations of global or field context. The field comes first—comes before its apparent parts or particles—because it is irreducible thereto, just as a common or everyday magnet is irreducible to its so-called parts. As noted, however, it is easy to stare past this irreducibility if we are keyed to a mechanistic understanding of nature. Mind-Nature Relationality We may similarly stare past the irreducibility or indissolubility of our own relationship with nature. That relationship is never threatened by the mechanistic impulse to break things apart. Note that while investing faith in the mechanistic manifesto we never go the full distance with it: we never propose that once we have reduced the world to all its separate, unrelated components, our involvement in the world will then blink out in virtue of our total isolation from everything else. To the contrary, we imagine that our involvement will be enhanced by our now-correct understanding of the world, never mind that that understanding defines the world as an aggregation of mutually unrelated, uninvolved parts. So here again, as with magnets, relationality invariably slips in the back door, even as it is ushered out the front door. Or, to vary the metaphor, the idea of separate parts lives off the top of the everyday fact of relationality. Absent our conjunctive relationships with things in the world, what
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ground would there be for proposing that all things are ultimately unrelated? The proposal itself, in other words, points back to some pre-given, spontaneous, relationally structured experience, one that remains in force or intact even as we devise mechanistic understandings to the contrary. Said another way, we know implicitly that our relationship with the external world is dipolar or pair-wise. The two ends of that relationship are inseparable, and this inseparability survives and even sustains our attempts to break nature completely apart so that we might then consider it as an aggregation of separate parts. How, after all, could such consideration occur without some sort of mind-world interpenetration that remains untouched and unthreatened by the mechanistic impulse? The common name for this interpenetration is consciousness, and the realization that the structure of consciousness is different from that of physical objects (as classical science had idealized them) is one of the central insights of modern phenomenology. In the classical tradition physical objects were self-standing, and so perhaps it was natural for Descartes and others to treat consciousness or mind the same way. Granted, mind, unlike material objects, had no spatial extension or three-dimensionality, but like objects, it was imagined to be self-contained, yet somehow able to take cognizance of the material world. Already there is tension in this picture of mind, for it is not clear how something self-contained and immaterial can break out of its self-containment to survey a world with which it has nothing in common (other than that both are self-contained). When, at the turn of the twentieth century, thinkers deliberately attended to the experience of consciousness, they noticed that there is wholeness to it that belies its myriad contents, each of which was typically regarded as a part. Mind or consciousness, in other words, was a “living, seamless flux”21 populated by various objects but not fully reducible to them. The objects of consciousness seemed to hang together in ways that implied something more than the mere aggregation of separate, self-contained bodies. Individual objects, as noted earlier, reciprocally contextualized each other, thereby infusing everyday experience with depth and meaning. What is more, mind and its contents struck these thinkers as an unbroken whole, something akin to the two poles of a magnet. Neither entity exists
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without the other; rather, each interpenetrates the other so as to accomplish the other. The result is human existence in the cosmos, an experience whose two poles—inner and outer (mind and world)— lean into and complete each other. This completion or coincidence of differences, though it has two ends or poles, cannot be teased or broken apart. Like a magnet, it is a relational whole, not an aggregation of unrelated parts. Quantum entangled particles fit into this picture. Quantum entanglement is elemental and spontaneous in the sense that we cannot manipulate it for informational purposes; its message is nothing more than relation. It is, in other words, a pre-informational urphenomenon that precedes Laplace’s mechanistic vision of perfect information arising from perfect understanding of all of nature’s self-contained parts. But despite its simple delivery of informationless relation, quantum entanglement is fully coordinate with our residency in an all-inclusive cosmos where so-called parts, owing to their mutual relationality, are “unbounded portions of the whole”22 and therefore able, in the right circumstances, to mirror or manifest universal context.
9
O b s e r v e r- C r e at e d R e a l i t y
They said, “You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are.” The man replied, “Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar.” Wallace Stevens
Before the twentieth century, some thinkers proposed that our ability to know the world is conditioned by our senses and mental apparatus (brain or mind). Immanuel Kant, for instance, insisted that the mind processes or organizes incoming sensory data so that the picture of reality that emerges mentally is, for all we know, very different from reality itself. The innate properties of the mind get blended into the mind’s picture of nature, much as the green tint of one’s sunglasses gets blended into one’s vision of a landscape. While this stance seemed revolutionary when advanced in the late eighteenth century, it now seems tame compared with the outlook of some modern thinkers as they consider quantum physics: the mind is an active agent, not just in constructing one’s private mental picture of reality but of reality itself as it is shared by all participants.
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“Is the moon there when nobody looks?”1 This is the title of an article in Physics Today, and it refers to a question posed by Einstein, who believed that unobserved or unmeasured objects are as real and well defined as observed objects. Challenging this view, Niels Bohr argued that subatomic particles do not possess precise characteristics or values until human agents observe them. Before they are observed, “particles” exist in wave-like states, spread out across space-time and ambiguously possessing many mutually exclusive values. Think of a coin tossed in the air. While it falls, is it heads or tails? Perhaps it is both heads and tails—each possibility being partially realized simultaneously. Then when it hits a flat surface, it loses its ambiguity by becoming either heads or tails. A similar sudden transition from ambiguity to single outcome, Bohr said, occurs when we observe or measure things. Bohr’s position, incredible as it sounds, is the one now supported by experiment. Yet a question lingers: what exactly causes the multifaceted wave to suddenly become a well-defined particle? Is it the equipment that “catches” or “intercepts” the wave, like a table top “catching” a falling coin? It might be this, but surprisingly a more widely credited—or at least more highly publicized—view is that human consciousness causes the transition from wave to particle. The catchphrase for this view is “observer-created reality.” Our observations of nature call forth single outcomes from a schizophrenic haze of possibilities. If this sounds far-fetched, that’s because we have fallen into a habit of thought that is at odds with everyday experience. We reflexively assume that spectators aren’t also participants, that they don’t make a difference in the way things turn out. But a moment’s reflection suggests otherwise. Local sports fans, for example, figure into a team’s home court advantage. Not that most scientists get as emotionally demonstrative as sports fans, but no scientist is an emotional blank. Each is passionately tied into nature’s passion play, and so brings to it unique predispositions that close off some possibilities while opening up others. Or, to vary the metaphor, if nature is an evolving, wave-like vision, one’s slender seeing of nature—the individual ray of attention each person directs toward the world—incrementally inclines that vision toward this or that end. After all—and this is one of the great insights to come out of
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quantum physics—we are already assimilated into the vision (already part of nature) by the time we begin to selectively observe it, and so our selections alter the vision’s flow. These are poetic images, but they should not be dismissed out of hand. As Niels Bohr proposed, poetry is, or should be, part of the tool kit of quantum science.2 As classical categories begin to blur, poetry can help us think more subtly. It can also bridge the artificial divide between mundane experience and the supposedly exotic world of quantum phenomena. Objectivity Philosophers make a fundamental distinction between the world and our ability to know the world. Ontology is the study of reality, and epistemology is the study of how and to what extent we can know reality. There is, of course, intersection between these two branches of philosophy or between mind and world. Without thinking too hard, we might say that the mind is a mirror that reflects the world. But then a question arises: is the mind part of the world, or is it somehow apart from the world? The traditional response, notably associated with René Descartes, a seventeenth-century thinker, has been that it is apart, that it is otherworldly or spiritual and therefore immune to the limitations and imperfections of physical reality, at least in principle. This stance, however, prompts the following question: if the mind is otherworldly, on what basis does it become aware of this world? A truly otherworldly mind, it seems, would be directed toward that other world, not toward this one. But suppose we say that the mind is part of this world. Then we are compelled to ask whether the mind is able to incorporate itself into its reflection of the world. Or does it somehow absent itself from that reflection and thereby give us an incomplete picture of reality? These are difficult questions, and much of their value lies in suggesting just how sticky the question we started with can get. Is the mind part of the world or apart from it? If the question is sticky, so, it seems, is the link between mind and world. That is the eye-opening realization thrust upon us by quantum mechanics. Contra Descartes, mind is part of nature, at least to some small degree that allows it to get epistemic purchase on nature. The catch,
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of course, is that mind’s participation in the world ratchets up the world’s complexity. The story of King Oedipus does not get interesting until we sense that his plight is more complex than he knows: feeling himself uninvolved and therefore above suspicion in his crime investigation, he will discover himself as the criminal and the perpetrator of the curse that plagues his community. Similarly, mind’s discovery of itself as a determining element of physical reality makes everything more complex and interesting, perhaps infinitely so. The story of King Oedipus calls up the origins of Western drama and the birth of the spectator attitude. The Greek word theoria harks back to ancient Athens, where citizens learned to be spectators during dramatic performances. Our word for this experience—theater— stems from theoria: “to be a spectator, to gaze on, contemplate.”3 One might add “from a distance,” for the viewer in this case is conscious not only of the stage performance but also of the interval that separates actors and audience. Across that interval one learns to mentally contemplate the performance, and this comes closer to the modern meaning of theoria or theory. The viewer becomes a thinker, an analyst or critic who passes the performance in mental review and pronounces judgment. This act of judgment or measurement according to preconceived standards may seem natural and benign, but it assumes the apotheosis of human reason: the knowing mind can rise above the world’s drama, can detach itself from the stream of lived experience. Our word for this stance or outlook is objectivity. An objective person adopts the “Olympian posture”4 of the Greek gods who, in principle if not always in practice, were able to dispassionately observe human activity from their lofty residence on Mount Olympus. All this takes us back to an earlier question: is the moon there when nobody looks? Does the moon, in other words, objectively or independently exist in the absence of observers? Classical physics says yes, for it assumes that scientific observers, by dint of their objective posture, effectively remove themselves from the stage of nature. Observation then is no different from non-observation; in either case the moon remains unaffected by the outside world. Quantum physics, however, equivocates. On the one hand, it is hard to believe that the moon is responsive to skyward glances. On
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the other, experiment implies that, prior to observation, subatomic particles exist in wave-like superposition states. Might this be true of all bodies regardless of size? While no one knows for sure, it is remarkable that the question even surfaces. Given our long-standing commitment to objectivity, it sounds almost childlike. But even if we can’t clearly decide the issue of the moon’s status when no one is looking, we can reflect on our own experience as spectators to decide which outlook is more plausible. Yes, as spectators we sometimes do feel separated from the performance, both physically and attentively. But when the performance “works,” and audience disbelief is suspended, separation becomes meaningless. Actors and audience exchange energy so that the performance turns all parties into participants: actors become the characters they portray, spectators drop their critical gaze and lose themselves in the drama, and afterward everyone goes home with understanding that is rooted in lived experience rather than objective rehearsal of fact and figure. Needless to say, the objective posture that props up classical physics is not fully faithful to everyday experience, and by reflecting on that experience, we can arrive at the quantum insight that nature’s drama—infinitely more compelling and enveloping than any stage production—permits no perfect spectators. To some degree, however small, we are all participants and all altering the flow of nature in one way or another. Observer-Created Evolution The alteration, of course, may be very slight, and that is why no one suspected it before the quantum revolution. After all, who would ever guess that we could change the physical world just by observing it? Optical vision feels so passive and insubstantial, so unable to make a dent in physical reality. Our eyes merely receive the world; they do not add anything to it—or so it seems. Thus sight strikes us as physically nonintrusive. Depending on light, which we know to be massless or immaterial, sight gives us witness of material reality without, it seems, weighting it down with change. But the witness is not perfect, for moving light has energy that, as we know from E = mc2 (energy = mass × speed of light
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squared), is interchangeable with mass. So, scientifically speaking, light has impact; it changes the world, however slightly, while giving us witness of it. But aside from this fact, there is another consideration, one that may help us appreciate light-cum-sight’s role in shaping the world of everyday experience. “If the eye were not sunlike,” asked Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “how could we perceive the light?” The question is rhetorical, for it was obvious to him that “the eye has light to thank for its existence. From undifferentiated tissue of the organism light calls forth an organ akin to itself; and so the eye is formed by light for light, that inner light might stream forth to meet outer light.”5 The eye, in effect, is one of the sun’s many evolutionary evocations. As it grew toward the sun, it grew into a world made visible by sunlight. Hence eyes, that is, those who have eyes, cannot be disinterested spectators of nature, for they are rooted in nature. Their participation in nature is originary. And if nature has called forth and shaped the eye, the eye has returned the favor by leaving its impress on nature. In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin reminds us of this fact: Flowers rank amongst the most beautiful productions of nature; but they have been rendered conspicuous in contrast with the green leaves, and in consequence at the same time beautiful, so that they may be easily observed by insects. I have come to this conclusion from finding it an invariable rule that when a flower is fertilised by the wind it never has a gaily coloured corolla. Several plants habitually produce two kinds of flowers: one kind open and coloured so as to attract insects; the other closed, not coloured, destitute of nectar, and never visited by insects. Hence we may conclude that, if insects had not been developed on the face of the earth, our plants would not have been decked with beautiful flowers.6
Playing into insect behavior, insect vision called beautiful flowers into existence in much the same way that the sun called vision into existence and, if Bohr is correct, in the way our optical powers (or those of our instruments) call wave-like entities into particle existence. The evolutionary evocation, of course, required millions of years, while physicists, working at a much smaller level of detail, bring forth particles almost immediately. But the process is the same: the curiosity and intelligence we direct toward nature reconfigures nature in virtue of our originary participation in nature. Being part of an ongoing, open-ended drama, we can’t help shaping the story.
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In brief, we do not passively view the world. Our ability to see things activates change in the visual environment, thereby promoting definition and diversity. Andrew Parker has developed this thesis in his book In the Blink of an Eye. He argues that the Cambrian Explosion—the rapid proliferation of species about 543 million years ago—occurred as increased sunlight called forth the dance of vision that now prevails among multicolored, multishaped organisms. Although light, routinely said to be immaterial, may not feel like a selective pressure, it upped the ante of evolution by projecting newly sighted organisms into a far-flung visual arena. Soon they became expansively mindful of each other, and mindful of each other in ways that involve color, camouflage, shadow, reflection, photosynthesis, and other light-related phenomena. Their learning to respond to each other in this new way—in a way that necessitates distinct behaviors, colors, and body shapes—sparked what scientists call “the big bang of evolution.” Parker insists that unsighted organisms living in dark environments “have barely changed from their primitive ancestors.” 7 Of course, natural selection still occurs, but at a much slower pace and within a much tighter compass, for such organisms are physically and perceptually circumscribed by their lack of vision. Like any other sense, seeing is a brave new world, but no sense is more expansive and therefore more shot through with the kind of life-or-death significance that marks larger spheres of action. To survive, species must quickly settle into well-defined niches, most of which involve sight-related characteristics and behaviors. Parker’s is not the only explanation for the Cambrian Explosion, but, in my opinion, it has the merit of relying on a selective pressure so ubiquitous as to reconfigure the evolutionary landscape. Light called forth the eye, and the eye in turn called forth nature’s distinctive visual characteristics from an undifferentiated manifold of embryonic possibility. What is more, consistent with light’s ethereality, this mutual evocation occurred almost effortlessly and invisibly, so much so as to be almost iterated out of sight. As noted, it is hard for us to grasp light as a selective pressure, but that is because it is so integral to our being as to feel like almost nothing at all. It exerts no obvious pressure, that is, no local pressure, but instead a kind of circumambient pressure that we do not experience as pressure but
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rather as visual presence, and this presence we take for granted as sighted beings. Owing to our immersion in light and the way that this immersion has configured us anatomically, it should not be surprising that light-related quantum phenomena should structure our existence. Many thinkers have proposed that quantum uncertainty, particularly as conceived by Bohr and Heisenberg, provides an escape from the classical prospect of a fully determined universe—one in which we would have no freedom.8 The guiding impulse is that there is something wrong with the idea of a deterministic cosmos because everyday experience involves choice, or at least it feels that way. Virtually everyone knows what it’s like to choose from a menu of mutually exclusive options. We feel that we are suspended between two or more possibilities; then, once we have made a choice, that choice alters the flow of reality while every other possible choice becomes, as Robert Frost said, a “road not taken.” The key point is that there is always a moment of indecision or equivocation before deciding, and that moment is integral to the life experience. Rocks, we imagine, do not equivocate. Quantum mechanics may be interpreted as reenacting this moÂ� ment of equivocation—and the ongoing succession of such moments that informs consciousness. That is, it seems to coincide with the life experience, wherein new combinations or superpositions of options continually arise for living creatures. I do not just mean that quantum mechanics suspends us between contradictory models of light, although this is indicative of deeper equivocations or suspensions. More fundamentally, I mean that slightly perturbed quantum systems (systems that evolve under the influence of perturbations too weak to collapse their superposition states) fluctuate back and forth between various possibilities or “choices” without definitely settling on one. Such fluctuations are sometimes called “virtual transitions.” It is as if the system is taking or exploring all roads, albeit virtually or equivocally. David Bohm states that the recognition of such fluctuations “involves the replacement of the classical notion that a system moves along some definite path by the idea that under the influence of the perturbing potential, the system tends to make transitions in all directions at once.”9 Put differently, a system is not determined
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by its initial state to follow a given trajectory. Instead, it sends out feelers, as it were, along all trajectories, and far from being inconsequential, these feelers or virtual transitions feed into the ongoing evolution of the system so that more than one trajectory is truly open to the system. Bohm compares this changing, self-reacting, self-compounding concatenation of possibilities not only to what goes on in the everyday experience of equivocating between several choices but also to what occurs during the open-ended evolutionary process: “In many ways, the above concept resembles the idea of evolution in biology, which states that all kinds of species can appear as the result of mutations, but that only certain species can survive indefinitely, namely, those satisfying certain requirements for survival in the environment surrounding the species.”10 Mutations are tentative explorations or virtual transitions that may or may not pan out. When they do, they actualize as real—rather than merely possible—species and thereby contribute to the flow of evolutionary reality. When they do not, they become a road not taken. Even then, however, they still produce “real effects,” says Bohm, owing to their fleeting viability as real options.11 Choices not realized are still real in the sense that they define the backdrop of possibility against which actual choices materialize. With quantum physics in mind, James Jeans wrote decades ago that “the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.”12 This sentiment has since been elaborated by thinkers who have turned to quantum mechanics to unravel (1) the mystery of consciousness and (2) the origin of living species on earth—what Darwin and others called “the mystery of mysteries.”13 My intent is not to try to solve either of these mysteries, but merely to point out that the evolution and collapse of quantum systems correlates nicely with the everyday experience of choosing or collapsing upon one choice after mulling over several. Not only that, but if Bohm and others are right, superposition states, or something like them, inform or boot the evolutionary process, a process that leads to consciousness and the everyday experience of exploratory equivocation and decision making. It is as if superposition states achieve self-awareness at a higher turn of the evolutionary spiral. One thinks of Hamlet’s soliloquy: his anguished superposition amid various possibilities is what makes him so endearingly human. Or to
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take another literary example, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, which illustrates how hard-edged reality may condense out of a softly focused reverie of probabilities: So, in an instant outside the boundaries of time and space, things appear to him too as unreal. Everything seems probable. He too could be Mustafa Sa’eed’s son, his brother, or his cousin. The world in that instant, as brief as the blinking of an eyelid, is made up of countless probabilities, as though Adam and Eve had just fallen from Paradise. All these probabilities settled down into a single state of actuality when I laughed, and the world reverted to what it had been—persons with known faces and known jobs, under the star-studded sky of Khartoum in early winter.14
Here is how Johnjoe McFadden puts it in his book Quantum Evolution: “Great ideas are not pulled out of the air; but out of a quantum multiverse. In a sense, our minds have recaptured the same evolutionary process [that] I believe propelled life from its origins billions of years ago and drove the evolution of living organisms toward increasing complexity.”15 Along with others,16 McFadden identifies superposition states as life’s seed crystal—the wavelike moment of teeming possibilities before all but one possibility collapses to zero probability, and well-defined, particle-like reality proceeds on its mechanistic way. To a small but utterly significant extent, then, we intimately participate in the mysteries of the quantum world, thanks in part to the way light—and our primordial immersion therein—has called us into visual existence and thereby turned us on, so to speak, to a larger, more interesting world. Again, all this, I submit, is almost too close to home to get perspective on, and that is why we normally do not trace it back to everyday experience. How could something so familiar—light—be a life-originating principle, a cradle of creation? But quantum physics seems to bring light forth as such. After describing how photons circumvent space and time in physical experiments, John Wheeler proposes that each photon constitutes “an elementary act of creation” when it finally strikes the human eye or some other instrument of detection. He then asks: “For a process of creation that can and does operate anywhere, that reveals itself and yet hides itself, what could one have dreamed up out of pure imagination more magic—and fitting—than this?”17 Wheeler is thinking of the double-slit experi-
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ment and its variations, but he could also be describing the seeing experience, which similarly entails “elementary acts of creation,” as photons strike the eye and incline the light-articulated world toward distinctive visual ends. That world already includes us, not as passive observers but as originary participants, and so we follow the flow of nature even as we contribute to it. What is more, thanks to light-enabled vision, our participation is far-flung: it reaches as far as the eye can see.
10
Wide- Open Re alit 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
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
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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 essenÂ�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,
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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 the point of view of classical mechanics, taken together with existence of the elementary particles, forms the foundation of atomic physics.4
One can hardly read this without reflecting on the old conundrum, oft enunciated by early modern writers, that life dries up at the disheartening touch of reductionistic science. Alexander Pope wrote: “Like following life through creatures you dissect / You lose it in the moment you detect.”5 More famous is William Wordsworth’s verse: Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:— We murder to dissect.6
Bohr, I suspect, would concur. Not that we always “murder” or kill an organism, but that we collapse life-stirring mystery upon trying to dissect it. There is a peek-a-boo quality to things that keeps nature interesting, and once we try to reduce that quality to mechanistic rule, everything goes flat. We chase away the effect that stirred our curiosity in the first place. This is a little like what happens when an overly affectionate child mauls a kitten and thereby provokes its flight. We all know that well-intentioned heavy-handedness can go too far—can in fact smother or chase away the phenomenon of interest. To follow Judy Sorum Brown: What makes a fire burn is space between the logs, a breathing space.
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The game of peek-a-boo is kept alive by the breathing space it permits between participants: neither is so aggressive as to fully discover the other. Peek-a-boo is also a children’s game or a game that adults play with young children. As such it is deeply familiar to virtually everyone, and something like it appears to characterize our interaction with nature at the quantum level. But we don’t know for sure. It may be that nature plays an even older and more adventurous version of the game with us, one coinciding with the way newborn infants perceive the world. To see what’s at stake, let’s take another look at the double-slit experiment, for it is this experiment, and others like it, that motivates these possibilities. Quantum Peek-a-boo On the question of quantum uncertainty, Einstein’s opposition to Bohr is memorialized in his assertion that “God does not play dice with the universe.” He meant, of course, that the apparent randomness we observe in nature is a function of our ignorance, not (as Bohr suggested) an intrinsic feature of reality. As already noted, most thinkers now side with Bohr on this issue, not because his arguments were more persuasive, but because quantum experiments produce ambiguous, Zen-like results, the like of which more readily comports with Bohr’s analysis. Whether these results imply a universe of blind chance is another question altogether. To me they more readily imply, as Bohr suggests above, an elusive universe whose spark or quantum of action can’t be traded against itself. So the better metaphor (better than blind chance) is something like peek-a-boo, a game that captures the surprising aspect of the double-slit experiment. What follows is a description of what happens in that experiment as we try to clear up ambiguities.
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Figure 10.1. To see whether each particle moves through only one slit or through both slits simultaneously, we put detectors at the slits. Only one detector beeps at a time, and the wave-interference pattern collapses. The moral of the experiment seems to be that our interest, once it becomes overbearing, causes the phenomenon of interest to slip away so that, as Bohr says, nature “hides its ultimate secrets from us.”
The central ambiguity involves the particles as they move through the double-slit barrier. By calling them “particles” we immediately prejudice the analysis, because that assumes they are particle-like. Nevertheless, we must start somewhere, and this is the natural place to start. Not only that, but when we first see tiny spots appearing on the photoplate, we link them to particles—what else would produce such an effect? As the spots proliferate, however, a wave-interference pattern emerges, and this undermines the assumption that each particle moves through one slit or the other as it travels to the photoplate. With the weight of evidence now shifted toward waves, we naturally cast about for a way to determine what exactly happens at the slits: does each “particle” pass through both slits simultaneously or only through one? To make this determination, we put a detector at each slit and send individual particles through. If just one detector
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beeps, we know the particle really is a particle—a small, indivisible unit of matter-energy. If both detectors beep, we know that the so-called particle is moving as a wave and thereby passing through both slits. As it turns out, just one detector beeps. But instead of allowing us to settle the wave-versus-particle question once and for all, this is where, in Bohr’s words, nature begins to “hide its ultimate secrets from us.” For with the detectors in place, the wave-interference pattern vanishes; after releasing many particles, all we see on the photoplate is a preponderance of hits opposite the slits. So it seems that our curiosity, piqued by the wave-interference effect, ultimately chases away that effect. To see it, we must back off—that is, remove the detectors—and let nature proceed unscrutinized. In brief, we can’t see everything we would like to see. To see the wave-interference pattern, we must forego trying to see what exactly goes into the creation of that pattern. There is always a tradeoff. The classical ideal was to fully dissect all of nature’s parts and processes. The quantum realization is that this approach sometimes backfires: our tools for dissecting nature too tightly confine phenomena that awake our interest, thereby causing those phenomena to collapse. In the wake of this collapse, we are forced back to inference, and the double-slit experiment prompts the inference that unobserved electrons, say, move as waves but hit (the photoplate and other measuring devices) as particles, whereupon they are observed as such. How does this relate to the game of peek-a-boo? Well, it is obvious that there is some sort of epistemic give-and-take here. What is more, peek-a-boo works only so long as neither participant encroaches too aggressively on the other. Each must keep her distance to keep the game alive and interesting. But aside from these considerations, there is another, more startling proposition. It may be that at the quantum level, nature does not play peek-a-boo exactly as we do. It only seems like it to us because we lack the imagination to grasp what is really happening. By “we” I mean human beings past the age of three months. Conceivably, we better understood the world as newborn infants, but then we quickly outgrew that understanding while losing our intuitive feel of quantum reality. And upon losing that feel, we de-
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scended to a less adventurous plane of understanding. Seth Lloyd describes the process: Tests of infant cognition show that the idea that an object cannot be in two places at once is ingrained in our psyches from the age of about three months. At the same age, babies become aware that objects exist even when they cannot be seen. Playing peek-a-boo with a child aged less than three months is intensely dissatisfying: when you cover your face, they exhibit no excitement or interest. Daddy is gone: so what? After three months, everything changes. When you cover your face, the child waits with eager anticipation for the “Boo!”: he or she knows you’re there behind the hands. In quantum mechanics, if you can’t see an object, you mustn’t assume it is there: an unmonitored electron can be, and generally is, everywhere at once. By the age of three months, children are better equipped to live in the macroscopic world, but their intuition for quantum mechanics is spoiled.8
An unmonitored or unmeasured electron’s position is indeterminate, not just because we don’t know where it is, but because it is probabilistically distributed over a wide region of space-time whose boundaries are imprecisely defined. In a word, the electron is moving as a wave—at least that is the inference we draw from the wave-interference pattern. But that’s not an easy inference because it contradicts our sense that if something enters our field of experience—say, a cat coming around the corner of the house—it is essentially the same thing that it was a moment earlier. The cat was not, just before it rounded the corner, a wave-like superposition of many cats distributed across a large region of space-time. Of course, we don’t know this for sure (because we can’t see the cat prior to seeing it), but this assumption holds up as we go about our everyday business. It also holds up while playing peek-a-boo, the fun of which is pretending you’re gone when you’re not. But it does not hold up in the double-slit experiment, which, according to Lloyd, is a throwback to reality as perceived by newborn infants. If you can’t see the object of interest, you can’t assume it is there, and hence you can’t play peek-a-boo with it. Being outside your field of experience, the electron is gone, not just from view but also from the reality that obtains when you see (measure) the electron. If, in other words, the electron is not manifesting itself as a precisely positioned particle, the question of its location is wide
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open, and so there is no single place toward which you can direct your playful interest. My sense is that quantum reality doesn’t invalidate the game of peek-a-boo; rather, it raises the game to the second or third power. The electron is not, probabilistically speaking, in one place but many, and by choosing to peek at it—measure it—here rather than there, we immediately contribute to the flow or evolution of reality. So this is not a game in the conventional sense; that is, it is not an activity that mimics reality. It is reality, and we are right in the middle of the scrum, always making a difference. Ironically, this game which is more than a game takes us back to the innocence of early infancy. Of course, we don’t know for sure how newborn babies experience the world, but consensus thinking posits an unstructured blitz of sense impressions—what William James famously described as “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.”9 This is reality before culture and socialization take over: a wide-open reality corresponding to the infant’s wide, unfocused, wholly uncritical gaze. At this point anything is possible, an outlook that coincides with the quantum proposition that reality is less fixed—more fluid, probabilistic, and open-ended—than we once thought. All this obliges us to rethink our long-standing predilection toward reductionism, mechanism, and the assumption that logic or reason should remain untouched by emotion. That orientation locks us into a worldview that is at odds with quantum mechanics and everyday experience, particularly the everyday experience of newÂ�born infants.
11
N o n lo c al it y
We see this nighttime world by means of light “carrying” the stars to us, which means that this vast expanse of sky must all be present in the light that passes through the small hole of the pupil into the eye. Furthermore, other observers can see the same expanse of night sky. Hence, we can say that the stars seen in the heavens are all present in the light that is at any eyepoint. The totality is contained in each small region of space. Henri Bortoft
Up until about 1935 scientists assumed that events impress themselves upon the world in spatiotemporal ways. Events, in other words, do not register or propagate instantaneously; they occur in space and time. Even so-called instantaneous events—a flash of lightning, say—is not instantaneous. It is just very swift, and swiftness makes sense only against a backdrop of space and time. In 1935 Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen (EPR) challenged the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics by arguing that it implied instantaneous action at a distance.1 In his reply to this challenge, Niels Bohr stressed the holistic character of the experimental system, which, among other things, incorporates choices made by human agents designing the system.2 In making particular choices, scientists forgo other choices or possibili-
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ties. Measuring a particle’s position precisely, for instance, entails not simultaneously measuring its momentum, and one should not (à la EPR) use unmeasured (but inferred) data to conclude that quantum systems embody more information than can be had experimentally. Our incomplete or probabilistic information about a system, in other words, is fully descriptive of the system, which itself is probabilistic. By not explicitly countering EPR’s point that the Copenhagen interpretation implies instantaneous action at a distance, Bohr left the possibility open. One might infer such action from Bohr’s emphasis on the overall unity of the experimental setup where certain parts of a system remain mutually intact even while moving apart.3 This outlook, owing to later tests designed to decide the issue, now appears correct. It seems that different parts of a system, though not collocated, may interconnect or “hang together” instantaneously. Here the word parts refers to photons, electrons, and other quantum entities. They may be locally situated, but in some circumstances their effects, or the effects (measurements) impressed upon them, are nonlocal—that is, immediately felt or registered elsewhere. Thus the parts are said to be “entangled” by virtue of statistical correlations that imply timeless interdependence. From a classical perspective this is puzzling and, some say, revolutionary. Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos propose that nonlocality “has more potential to transform our conceptions of the ‘way things are’ than any previous discovery in the history of science.”4 This assessment presupposes that modern science is fully responsible for the discovery of nonlocality. I disagree. To borrow a line from T. S. Eliot, nonlocality is “a music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all.”5 It is so deeply embedded in everyday experience that it normally never registers. Why does it fail to register? Because deeply entrenched worldviews can easily overpower pre-theoretical—everyday—experience of the world. If causality is taken as the sole means by which reality hangs together, then we have little choice but to be puzzled by nonlocal connections. And while puzzling over them, we may say that they are completely unprecedented and that humankind has never encountered anything like them. But this is our worldview speaking. If we could get out from under that worldview, we might well encounter something like nonlocal connections.
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Here I try to get out from under the prevailing worldview by showing that, as it breaks down, the concept of atomistic light (selfcontained, pellet-like photons) offers a glimpse of nonlocality. Recall de Broglie’s argument (chapter 2) that the concept of the material atom, when probed, offers a glimpse of wave-particle duality. In both cases, the atomistic thesis, when scrutinized, breaks down toward quantum possibilities: the physical atom (the concept thereof) breaks down toward wave-particle duality; the atom of light or photon breaks down toward nonlocality. In view of these breakdowns, I submit that wave-particle duality and nonlocality are counterintuitive only because our intuitions (worldview assumptions) are off track, not because they are at odds with everyday experience. I also want to suggest that while nonlocality is intellectually puzzling, it is the very stuff of everyday, pre-intellectual experience and therefore a precondition for the erection of intellectual puzzles. It is a flash of truth that precedes and fosters secondhand truth inquiries. It is the pre-given cosmos in which we find ourselves already textured, already interconnected, and therefore able to plumb the depths of that interconnectedness. The discovery of nonlocality, therefore, can’t be something wholly new; it must be a rediscovery or recovery of something we have always known or experienced, albeit in a different way. What might this something be and where might we find it? I propose that one place (but probably not the only place) to find it is in the everyday seeing experience. But first a bit more about nonlocality. Nonlocality Nadeau and Kafatos define locality as the assumption that “signals or energy transfers between space-like regions cannot occur at speeds greater than light.”6 Here space-like means that events are so situated as to preclude connection by a light signal: a photon generated at event A will still be moving toward event B when B occurs. Given this and our understanding that signals propagate no faster than light speed, one might justly conclude that two such events cannot instantaneously affect each other. The experimental determination to the contrary—that such effects do occur—is known as nonlocality.
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Nadeau and Kafatos argue that nonlocality teaches us that the universe is more than the sum of its parts. We can sometimes, of course, profitably regard it as a mere aggregation of parts, those parts being its primary constituents, but this outlook is complementary to the thesis that, in some sense, the cosmos is a seamless whole. Neither stance exhausts the reality we know, and no parthood ontology (one that privileges parts as ultimate ground) can adequately deal with nonlocality. At some level, then, the whole exists “within all the parts (quanta),”7 the universe being something like its own fundamental constituent. Nonlocality, say Nadeau and Kafatos, discloses this level, the mutual immanence of part and whole. This assessment, of course, goes beyond nonlocality proper—it is an interpretation thereof. And while it is surprising in its claims, those claims are no less surprising or counterintuitive than nonlocality itself. Hence it is difficult to assess nonlocality without reaching for unfamiliar imagery. After stating that experimental evidence of nonlocality teaches us that “two particles [otherwise thought to be spatially separated] are tangled together into a seamless unity,” George Greenstein and Arthur Zajonc go on to state: “Hidden behind the discrete and independent objects of the sense world is an entangled world, in which the simple notions of identity and locality no longer apply. . . . Events that appear to us as random may, in fact, be correlated with other events occurring elsewhere. Behind the indifference of the macroscopic world, ‘passion at a distance’ knits everything together.”8 The phrase passion at a distance, attributed to Abner Shimony, is used here in direct response to action at a distance, which historically has denoted the propagation of signals and causal effects. Such are not propagated nonlocally, and so do not violate Einstein’s postulate that information or causal influences can’t travel faster than light speed. By contrast, passion at a distance implies a certain passiveness in the face of preexisting unity or togetherness. No one can manipulate the individual parts of an EPR system (an experimental setup that affirms nonlocality) to timelessly transfer information or causal effects. What happens at my end of the system happens before I can take charge of things to communicate a signal to your end of the system. In other words, I am not outside the system manipulating its switches and levers. Nonlocality or quantum
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entanglement thus prompts the suggestion that ultimately there is no outside—those who witness nonlocality have long been drawn into its indissoluble unity. While nonlocality breaks the frame of classical science, I believe it is implicit in the concept of atomistic light. Put differently, the idea of atomistic light implodes toward nonlocality when subjected to careful scrutiny. My initial response to the puzzle of nonlocality, then, entails interrogation of the categories we use to frame the puzzle. Building on that interrogation, I propose that there is a nonlocal aspect to everyday visual experience. Atomistic Light People often explain wave-particle duality by saying that, depending on circumstance, light manifests itself either as a wave or as a particle. While this explanation may be a good first approximation, it is also misleading in that it preserves the idea of atomistic light; that is, indivisible, self-contained photons. Thinking in this register, we imagine discrete bits or pellets of light moving through space.9 One problem with this picture is that it cannot, even in principle, be empirically witnessed. Even if our eyes were sensitive enough to detect a single photon, how would they see a photon in intermediate space? There are two interlocking considerations here, the first going back at least to Plato and the second more recent. The first consideration entails the stance that light is a principle of seeing, not something to be seen. It was for Plato what we see by and therefore not fully commensurate with visible reality.10 Saint Augustine understood light similarly, and modern thinkers, less inclined to think about light’s religious or mystical possibilities, have straightforwardly asserted that light is not an object of vision but the invisible means by which vision is accomplished.11 One gets a sense of this by noting that light shone into darkness does not visually announce itself, just as a movie projector beam is not seen in a theater. Illuminated raindrops or dust particles may be seen, but that is light in conjunction with something material, not light per se. Another example is the sun seen from the moon. It is a material ball of light against the blackness of outer space; it does not visibly radiate light because the moon has no atmosphere to scatter light.
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The second consideration involves the fact, noted by John Schumacher, that “nothing, not even light itself, can bring us news of its upcoming arrival; it brings us news of its arrival only by arriving itself.” Nothing, that is, can outrace light (the fastest signal in the world) to announce its impending arrival. This implies that we cannot see light in intermediate space: light is its own messenger, and for this reason, Schumacher argues, it occupies “a unique place in our experience.” That uniqueness, he continues, entails (among other things) light’s ability to completely “drop out of experience” while effecting visual experience of distant objects.12 Let us consider how this is said to occur. That is, let us, with Plato and Schumacher in mind, review the standard account of photon-mediated vision and note how it breaks down toward nonlocality. Upon impinging on the eye, light announces things like trees and buildings—things physically remote from the eye. At least this is what we typically imagine: image-bearing photons impacting locally, as it were, on the retina to effect immediate visual experience of distant events. What is interesting about this account is that the posited but never-experienced local event—we do not see photons per se striking the eye—is simultaneous with a visual experience of something distant. In one stroke, photons exchange or give up their local presence—their contact with the retina—for the visual presence of distant objects. Physically absent, or at least distant, those objects are perceptually present, while photons, said to be physically present, are perceptually absent. Summing up these two considerations we may say that (1) photons per se are imageless or invisible and (2) photons are their own messengers, although they don’t announce themselves but other things. If both these claims are true, then it becomes hard to imagine how two quantum-entangled photons could interact across space and time as we might expect them to. That is, it is hard to imagine how such interaction, should it occur, could be anything but spaceless and timeless. Given (1), photons would have no images to facilitate the interaction across space and time (Plato’s point); there would be nothing to signal with. Furthermore, given (2), the photons themselves would have to act as their own messengers (Schumacher’s point), which would seem to imply collocation rather than interaction bridging two separate locations.
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The salient point is that when we consider what they can and cannot be visually, photons lack the resources with which to interact across space and time; by their very nature they must interact at the same place—that is, instantaneously. Granted, this does not make much sense if we are inclined to privilege space, time, and causality as ultimate principles of reality. But if we are persuaded that reality is held together at an elemental level by some kind of pre-causal principle that is subversive of space and time, then we are free to entertain other options. I believe that photon-mediated seeing comports with the impossibility outlined above. By their very nature, photons can’t interact across space and time; similarly, seeing does not, in one important but routinely overlooked sense, occur across space and time. Everyday Seeing The last claim—“seeing does not occur across space and time”— may be the most outrageous proposition of this book. And yet it is defensible. The key here is the uncanny nature of light. Aside from being puzzling from the perspective of modern physics, light has always intrigued and puzzled thinkers. As noted, Plato and Augustine characterized it as something that cannot be traded against itself. Light per se is never seen; it is never overtaken by the experience it fosters, whether that experience subsists in seeing things or in trying to step away from light in order to grasp it as if it were something apart from us. In the twentieth century Albert Einstein, thinking carefully about foundational issues in physics, contributed to our understanding of light, but that contribution is fraught with paradox. For example, Einstein insisted that the speed of light is the cosmic speed limit: no causal influence or signal can exceed the speed of light. This sounds very straightforward, particularly in view of light’s finite velocity; if light moved infinitely fast, we would prepare ourselves for paradox. All the same, paradox emerges because Einstein lets space and time fall away, so to speak, as speed increases, the upshot being that speed ceases to be an issue at the speed of light.13 Anything moving at light speed, in other words, doesn’t traverse space and time, the parameters against which movement (speed)
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is always plotted. So, unlike a traffic speed limit, the cosmic speed limit is in principle inviolable. What about light, which by definition moves at the speed of light? In what sense does it move? Of course we can imagine light moving across space and time, and we can even arrange things experimentally to measure the finite speed of light. We can fire, for example, a pulse of light at a distant mirror, wait for its return, and then divide the round-trip distance by the elapsed time. This will give us a speed value of about 300,000 kilometers per second. The result, it would seem, affirms the commonsensical notion that light moves through space and time. But note that the evidence is indirect. We don’t see light traversing space and time; we infer its space-time movement upon performing the experiment. Let us now try two other experiments, neither of which makes inferences or presuppositions about light. Just try to see light qua light (light in a vacuum) moving across space and time. You will see nothing at all. Or, as photons strike your eyes, try to see those photons apart from the images they putatively convey. Again, you see nothing at all. What you learn from these experiments is Plato’s thesis that light is an invisible clarity that permits clear seeing of things other than light. But this is not the end of the story. Most people assume light’s subordination to space and time. While Plato may be right—light may be invisibly resident in the world of space and time—it is still resident. With Einstein, however, light becomes a spaceless, timeless phenomenon, at least when moving at its characteristic speed. So now we have reason to wonder if light is fully resident in the spacetime cosmos. Light’s empirical no-show (its invisibility), in other words, might ultimately be traced back to its spaceless, timeless nature: light cannot be seen moving across space and time because it is not participatory therein. The speed of light, after all, is not just the cosmic speed limit but also the escape velocity of the space-time universe. For things moving at that speed, time and space simply cease to exist. The idea I am aiming at is this: light as described by Einstein is both this-worldly and otherworldly. On the one hand, it is an undeniable feature of everyday reality—just look about; on the other, it is very different from the material bodies that help make up everyday
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reality. While they are fully participatory in the space-time universe, light is only partly so. It does not show up on its own in that universe; furthermore, it is not part of that universe when moving at its own speed, according to Einstein. At that speed, writes John Wheeler keying off of Einstein, light makes “zero-interval linkages between events near and far,”14 an expression that calls to mind nonlocality or quantum entanglement. Going Further Suffice it to say, light, as one researcher puts it, “is always ready with another surprise.”15 And often the surprise clears space for alternative or complementary understandings. In this case, light appears to straddle two worlds, the classical world of physics in which bodies have distinct space-time locations and the quantum world where nonlocal correlations occur between spatially separated particles. The first world affirms the hegemony of space, time, and causality; the second bespeaks liberation therefrom. Whatever the truth of the matter, the vision of reality now given by modern physics is richly, even deliciously, ambiguous. Not surprisingly, a similar ambiguity informs light-mediated visual experience. If we imagine image-bearing photons moving through space and time to impart visual data upon striking the eye, then we may settle comfortably into a thought-world that gives pride of place to space, time, and causality. If, however, we attend to the seeing experience itself, not interpolating unseen entities like image-bearing photons, then we may be surprised to discover (or rediscover) that seeing entails a kind of instantaneous action at a distance. More correctly, it entails an instantaneous “having” at a distance. “To see is to have at a distance,”16 writes Maurice MerleauPonty, proposing that long before we begin to think of ourselves as spatially and temporally bounded beings, the unbounded visual sphere is already in place. That is, before we begin to size ourselves down to our physical bodies, we are perceptually and expansively connected to the world in ways that no conceptual sizing-down can nullify. Indeed, the word connected is not quite right here, for it suggests an aboriginal apartness (between us and the world) that light-medi-
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ated vision then bridges. A better expression is Shimony’s passion at a distance, which correctly underscores our passivity, our inability to undo the unbounded visual sphere that is spontaneously there from the start, and that gives us wide intimacy, even coincidence, with the world. This is the flash of truth from which secondhand truth inquiries arise, one of which is wonderment about nonlocal connections. There is, of course, a way of arguing against this outlook, but it is a secondhand protest against firsthand reality. It populates the unbounded seeing experience with unseen entities (i.e., image-bearing photons) moving across space and time, thereby bringing the world, and our experience thereof, under the hegemony of space and time. But given Einstein’s characterization of light as something that escapes that hegemony, we might well suspect that light-mediated seeing also escapes it in some way. What is more, should we interrogate the space-time argument, we find that it breaks down toward nonlocality in ways already indicated. Thinking carefully about our experience of light, we discover that light cannot be unequivocally pinned down to distinct space-time locations. To elaborate, let us try to locate light in our field of experience. Three possible locations present themselves. Light is (1) striking the retina, (2) striking a perceived object, and (3) traveling from the object to the retina. Given light’s uniqueness, none of these possibilities can be defended in conventional language that permits us to assert that thing x is at location y. Possibility (3) is rendered problematic by the aforementioned fact that light cannot be hailed in advance of its arrival. If indeed we could see it at a distance—see it passing through intermediate space—some light-like agency would have to present it to the retina, and then that agency would be light as we know it and just as immune to delimitation in intermediate space. Possibilities (1) and (2) may seem more straightforward, but in fact the two collapse into each other. Yes, (1) may be said to occur, but when it does we see (2), even though a space-time interval separates the two events. Thus the local presence of light (so imagined) implies its absence: it is here striking the eye but affording us immediate visual witness of what lies beyond while absenting itself as a local entity to be seen. In brief, light striking the eyes is completely given over to distant objects, and that “giving over” occurs instantaneously. To be sure,
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we may back away from the experience and posit various processes, all of which take time, whereby photons transfer their images to the eye or the brain, but in the moment of experience, we see things at a distance without feeling that we are visually processing them. They are immediately available and we, visually speaking, are widely present in the world. This is the experience that Merleau-Ponty sought to recover and valorize, an experience that lines up with William James’s claim that “the first time we see light we are it rather than see it.”17 Following Merleau-Ponty, I hold that, before it gets covered over by unexperienced theoretical processes and entities, the seeing experience is nonlocal. We cannot, even in principle, recover light as an intermediate, separate (and therefore separating) entity between perceiver and perceived. That is, it cannot be snatched out of the context of the visual experience and held up for independent scrutiny, for unless light first drops out of sight, no visual experience is forthcoming. What is more, by portraying light as a spaceless, timeless phenomenon, Einstein gives us reasons for suspecting that light does not reside in the space-time gap that separates viewers from the things they see: perhaps even in vision light “makes zero-interval linkages between events near and far.” Finally, this suspicion seems to be confirmed as we reflect on the visual immediacy of faraway events. In the moment of experience, we do not wait for images to travel across space and time. And if afterward we hypothesize photons traversing space and time to convey the images, it is remarkable that those photons timelessly exchange their local presence (their contact with the retina) for the visual presence of distant objects which, given the timelessness of the exchange, must now be regarded as nonlocal—that is, faraway objects registering here and now without any sense of waiting for them (or their images) to arrive on our part. So even if the prospect of nonlocality is forestalled by the theoretical interpolation of image-bearing photons moving through space and time, it yet registers when we consider that those photons, precisely delimited in space and time and therefore local, give us immediate visual witness of faraway (nonlocal) events. One way or another, whether we ponder our expansive visual coincidence with the world or try to nullify that coincidence by wedging space, time, and image-bearing photons between the eye
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and what the eye sees, we get a glimpse of nonlocality. This is not to say that space and time are not real in some way, only that they are not ultimately real in every way, and that while many of our relationships with the world are disjunctive (space and time really do separate things), vision is a conjunctive relationship owing to its dependence on light, a phenomenon that in one sense slips the tether of time and space. Merleau-Ponty writes that “instead of imagining [space] as a sort of ether in which all things float . . . we must think of it as the universal power enabling them to be connected.”18 Here he substitutes visual space for classical space, or space as classical science imagines it. In classical space differently located entities—say, two rocks fifteen meters apart—just “float” as if they were causally unrelated bodies, which, in fact, they normally are. But in visual space the rocks instantaneously interact to produce meaning, each rock supplying context for the other, each supplying contrast and background against which the other can show up as an interesting object; so interesting, in fact, that it seems to stand alone and hence to be the very antithesis of a quantum entangled particle. But the rock is also entangled with other elements of the visual expanse, for, as noted earlier, visual constriction—seeing the world through a straw—borders on blindness. In either case, whether visual experience or quantum entanglement, we have distant, causally unrelated objects caught simultaneously on a common expanse. The difference, of course, is one of familiarity. Visual experience is a miracle that engenders its own trivialization, something so deeply familiar as to be taken for granted. When, however, we detect the same miracle in an abstract and unfamiliar setting, many people profess amazement.
12
Q u a n t u m P l ay, Q ua n t um S o rrow Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful. Proverbs 14:13
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
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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-
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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 that initially pleases soon becomes boring unless it is modified or “re-created” in a surprising way.3 Such random re-creation is part of the recipe of life. Claiming that “the world is embodied music,” Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, “Melody is always a deviation from the keynote through a thousand capricious wanderings, even to the most painful discord, and then a final return to the keynote.”4 Quantum randomness, then, can be seen in positive, lifeaffirming terms. An event may lack a cause but still have a rhyme or poetic purpose, and that purpose may be the introduction of novelty to keep the world interesting. Indeterminate quantum entities like electrons and photons may be understood as little packets of surprise. They do not overwhelm us with chaotic change—they do not drown out the world’s melody line—but they do infuse variation. And the light touch, the grace with which they bestow their random novelty, bespeaks life, just as a script spiced with occasional random elements bespeaks human conversation. Perhaps random is not quite the right word here, for it suggests mindless chance or accident, and life is at odds with mindlessness. In the opinion of one physicist, Arthur M. Young, play is the better word:
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Everyday Quantum Reality Since the quantum of uncertainty manifests in particles and atoms in random fashion, it may be thought of as an accident, but this designation becomes inappropriate in later stages when higher organisms develop and invest the intrinsic randomness with a highly competent organization; for in this case, the intrinsic randomness seems more like “play” than accident, much as, in childhood, play results in mere accident, but in later life play can refer to the activity of a skilled athlete or a gifted virtuoso.5
Taken individually, quantum eruptions of “play” appear haphazard, but taken cumulatively, they seem to spell life. Little quantum hits of surprise add up to wholes greater than the sum of their parts. Young goes on to remark that “there is in all creation this transcendence of what is strictly rational or implied by its antecedents, and the word ‘play’ comes a little closer than the word ‘accident’ to describing the cause of new creations.”6 The random or uncaused event may be informed by the playful purpose of infusing novelty into a theme that would otherwise become monotonous or deadening. Not only that, but random or playful re-creation can be redemptive. What now seems senseless or random may in time acquire meaning; odd and jarring notes sometimes find a rhyme. Jazz musicians know what it’s like to reach for rhyme while playing notes that sound random and arrhythmic, even crippling. Eventually, however, the music heals itself at a higher turn of the spiral. A similar selfspiraling dialectic might be said to inform life. Over time the chaos or noise of unexpected setbacks gathers into rhythms of meaning, even as new chaos threatens to break those rhythms apart so that they may mend again at a higher level. Inasmuch as the uncertainty associated with this chaos is intrinsic—that is, absolutely unscripted and hence truly fresh and original—it may be said to be the free play, the give, the slippage, the wild card, the unsystematic element that keeps life interesting and meaningful. Quantum Sorrow Play, however, is a concept that does not stand by itself. Normally it is juxtaposed with work—its familiar opposite—but here I juxtapose it with compassionate sorrow, which might be regarded as its mood or humor opposite. Man “alone suffers so deeply that he had to
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invent laughter,” wrote Nietzsche,7 suggesting that while laughter is liberation from sorrow, laughter and sorrow are, at bottom, a single package. Schopenhauer hints at this unity when he insists that music is sustained by a thousand capricious or playful wanderings from a keynote “even to the most painful discord.” Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that in the quantum scheme of things, there is poetic space for pain or sorrow, just as there is for play. And quantum sorrow, as it were, points back to the way we visually experience the world. People often remark that quantum physics gives us a soft-focus vision of nature; no hard-edged boundaries but rather a kind of impressionistic blurriness. Underpinning this new view of reality is the recognition that perfect objectivity is impossible. No one can be the magisterial spectator watching the world from a distance. In realizing this, we edge away from the classical ideal of dispassionatespectator knowledge toward the quantum suggestion of passionate or even compassionate experience. It is a truism that quantum physics’ soft-focus, relational vision of nature compels us to rethink our assumptions about how we know the world. Actually, the significance of quantum physics extends even further than this: it encourages us to feel or re-feel the world. The classical pretense of aloofness spurs a sense of pure thought, even impassibility, but once that pretense is shattered, feeling or emotion reasserts its centrality. If we are blurring into the world as we look at it, we are poised to feel it in an expansive way that blurs the distinction between tactile sensation and inner emotion. Under the auspices of quantum theory, in other words, the outer- and inner-feeling experiences are allowed to grow back together, for the notion of remote, dispassionate observation is scuttled. As we touch the world with our senses, it touches us—our emotions—with its drama. Science, then, is a passion that spills us into the passion play of nature. The physical witness of this spilling is tear-blurred vision, which answers to the quantum ontology of a blurred, interpenetrating world. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this dynamic of mutual touching—mutual, interactive, interblending feeling—is elemental. “There is a human body,” he wrote, “when, between the seeing and the seen, between touching and the touched, between one eye
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and the other, between hand and hand, a blending of some sort takes place.”8 And this blending thickens into human experience, although indeterminately so. The interblending cross-situates us in a universe that retreats at our imperialistic touch. If, however, we are willing to let the universe touch back, life’s playful or indeterministic novelty reasserts itself. To make this point, Merleau-Ponty invokes his well-known hand-touching-hand illustration.9 One hand can touch the other, but neither can simultaneously feel itself touching and being touched. Each mode of experience short-circuits the other so as to keep things perpetually unresolved and in unceasing, ever-deepening alternation. What comes out of this fissile reversibility, says MerleauPonty, is the rupture or dehiscence of living experience. That is, the back-and-forth dissolution of both ends of the relation—subject and object—opens out as perceptual apprehension. It is this dissolution which softens the boundaries between things and enkindles our humanity—saves each of us, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, from having “an almost adamantine body, not really flesh, not really the body of a human being.”10 Prefiguring this outlook and echoing Plato’s view that understanding is combusted of the fusion of inner and outer light, Goethe wrote: In the contemplation of nature you must Regard the One as All; Nothing is within, nothing is without. Grasp thus without delay A holy open secret.11
Classical or pre-quantum physics assumed that knowing and feeling are distinct, mutually interfering experiences—I think most clearly when my feelings are put on hold. But quantum theory helps us understand that all is one: experience should not be cut in half to satisfy an erroneous worldview that would turn truth-seekers into emotional blanks, people with “almost adamantine bodies” who unfeelingly take in nature without being touched or moved by it. Indeed, quantum theory calls forth the suggestion that we know reality best when we melt emotionally, for there seems to be a melting, diffusive quality to reality at the quantum level. There is, moreover, an expansive, relational quality that is best understood
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through reference to emotional experience. When one is moved by compassion, tear-blurred vision signals sympathetic expansion and the dissolution of boundaries that normally protect us from each other’s inner experience. “One drop of pity is enough to lift our doing beyond intellectual distinctions,” wrote Johan Huizinga.12 That same drop of pity can also denote interpenetration or participation: as we melt tearfully, our egos melt or liquefy into the wide otherness of “outside” reality. Martin Buber writes of a rabbi so pure of heart he had to “restrain his spiritual vision” by putting on spectacles, “for otherwise he saw all the individual things of the world as one.”13 With matter-offact, 20/20 vision it is easy to “cut up” the world into separate things. But tear-blurred, compassionate vision gives us a better picture of reality because it, prefiguring quantum physics, suggests that things are not distinct or separable. The paradox, of course, is that by seeing less clearly we see more clearly, but this contradiction holds only as long as we neglect the idea of inner or spiritual light. If tears give us revelatory sight, it is because they issue up from inner light or emotion, so we feel the world emotionally as we feel or experience it sensibly—these two feelings or lights intermingle. When King Lear asks the recently blinded Gloucester how he manages to get by, Gloucester replies that he now sees the world “feelingly.”14 He gropes his way along, but he also understands life more deeply, more sympathetically than before. With his eyes intact and relying solely on outer light, he was a spectator of the drama he now participates in, and that participation gives him new powers of seeing and understanding. If there is a mystery or paradox here, it is one we have all experienced many times, and perhaps for that reason, it has been iterated away. According to Schopenhauer, compassion is not only the very coin of unconditional love but also the means by which “the distinction between I and not-I vanishes.”15 We normally assume that one person can only guess at another’s inner experience. Perhaps we cannot read each other’s thoughts very well, but on occasion we are readily drawn into each other’s emotional states. And once drawn in, we do not feel that we are reading anything, because reading presupposes objective distance or standing back. Rather, we feel we are co-participating, which is just what the words compassion and
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sympathy connote: the sharing of passion or pathos to the point of single but expanded identity. Milan Kundera calls this “emotional telepathy.”16 Given its deep familiarity and our sense that rational thought should always govern emotion, we have tended to disregard it in developing our theories of nature. But quantum physics may be the point at which the pendulum begins to swing the other way, thereby compelling us to take a wider, more relational, and more sympathetic view of things. Subatomic particles are even said “to feel at a distance.”17 My intent is not to propose that particles are sentient (although occasionally this suggestion comes up), but to observe that the reaching for emotional or poetic language to make sense of particle behavior signifies a breakdown of the traditional metaphor of a clockwork or mechanical universe. Particles do things we would never dream of them doing in pre-quantum or classical physics. They register themselves in random, playful ways, and they interact with one another in ways that bespeak far-flung, sympathetic connections. If life has an expansive quality about it—a tendency to largeness and fresh variation—that quality can be traced back to the intrinsically uncertain quantum entities that constitute our world.
N ot e s
Introduction 1.╇ Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceous.” 2.╇ Greenstein and Zajonc, The Quantum Challenge, 184. 3.╇ Saint Augustine, Confessions, book 11, chap. 16, 230–31. 4.╇ Davies, Other Worlds, 46. 5.╇ Schrödinger, What Is Life? 80. 6.╇ According to Kathleen Marie Higgins, Nietzsche sought a key to living in the present and found it in music. As Higgins puts it, “We enjoy the fullness of the present musical moment, even if it is dissonant, not for its efficiency in mov ing toward the evident musical goal, but for its own surprising present.” To live is to live in the surprising present, and music gives us that. See Higgins, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 184. 1.╇ Quantum Uncertainty The epigraph is from Churchill, The Gathering Storm, 181. 1.╇ 1 Corinthians 13:12. King James Version. 2.╇ Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities. 3.╇ Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 53, 70, 160. 4.╇ Salmon, Zeno’s Paradoxes, 43. 5.╇ Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 272–74. 6.╇ Gould, Wonderful Life, 51. 7.╇ James, Pragmatism, 112. 8.╇ Bohr, “Light and Life.” 9.╇ Lockwood, Mind, Brain, and the Quantum, 178. 10.╇ See Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond, 206. 11.╇ Herbert, Quantum Reality, xii. 2.╇ Wave-Particle Duality The epigraph is from Eddington, Relativity Theory of Protons and Electrons, 329. 153
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Notes to pages 23–40
1.╇ Much of what follows in this section is taken from my “Conceptual Non locality.” 2.╇ De Broglie, Matter and Light, 231. 3.╇ Ibid., 219. 4.╇ Here is William James’s explanation of the problem: “The nature of the synthetic unity of consciousness is one of those great underlying problems that divide the psychological schools. We know, say, a dozen things singly through a dozen different mental states. But on another occasion we may know the same dozen things together through a single mental state. The problem is as to the relation of the previous many states to the later one state. In physical nature, it is universally agreed, a multitude of facts always remain the multitude they were and appear as one fact only when a mind comes upon the scene and so views them, as when H-O-H appear as ‘water’ to a human spectator. But when, instead of extramental ‘things,’ the mind combines its own ‘contents’ into a unity, what happens is much less plain.” James, “The Knowing of Things Together,” in Writings, 1878–1899, 1057. Even our concepts swim and swarm in ways impossible to ultimately disentangle: “This multitude of ideas, existing absolutely, yet clinging together, and weaving an endless carpet of themselves, like dominoes in cease less change, or the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope,—whence do they get their fan tastic laws of clinging, and why do they cling in just the shapes they do?” James, The Principles of Psychology, 1:17. 5.╇ Dainton, Stream of Consciousness, 253 (emphasis in original). 6.╇ Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, ix. 7.╇ Ibid., 23. 8.╇ James, Some Problems of Philosophy, 107. 9.╇ Whitehead, Process and Reality, 15. 10.╇ Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, viii, ix. 11.╇ James, Some Problems of Philosophy, 154–55. 12.╇ Stapp, Mindful Universe, 8. 13.╇ James, Some Problems of Philosophy, 87–88. 14.╇ Ibid., 48–49. 15.╇ Whitehead, Process and Reality, 18. For clarity I am avoiding Whitehead’s “actual occasion” and “actual entity,” which are routinely explained as a discrete drop or moment of experience. 16.╇ Hosinski, Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance, 21. 17.╇ Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 1:318. 18.╇ James, The Principles of Psychology, 1:571. 3.╇ Two Everyday Analogues The epigraph is from Jencks, “Garden of Cosmic Speculation.” 1.╇ Some quantum concepts are notoriously ambiguous, and I will be relying on that ambiguity throughout this book while talking about unobserved particles. This particular explanation splits the difference between physical and mathemati cal reality. Do unmeasured particles spread out in physical space, or merely in mathematical space, like a falling die probabilistically or mathematically distrib uted over six equal possibilities until it hits a solid surface? Although both char
Notes to pages 44–59
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acterizations show up in the literature, the latter characterization coincides with the mathematical formalism of quantum theory and makes fewer assumptions about unseen particles. It also, however, robs us of any visual crutches as we try to imagine the particles’ physical behavior. To facilitate my explanations, I hang on to some of those crutches, recognizing their fragility. In any event they do not mili tate against my central argument, for their macroworld parallels are no less fragile. 2.╇ Jung, Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 412-13. 3.╇ Pauli, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 153. See also Pauli as quoted by Jung in Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 229–30, note 130. 4.╇ Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 67–68, 318. 4.╇ The Double-Slit Experiment The epigraph is from Malin, Nature Loves to Hide, 45–46. 1.╇ Stevens, “Connoisseur of Chaos,” in Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 215. 2.╇ Feynman, Leighton, and Sands, Quantum Mechanics, 1-1 (emphasis in origÂ�inal). 3.╇ Davies, Other Worlds, 66. 4.╇ Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 198. Hume undermined conventional faith in causality by observing that we do not experi ence causal relations per se but only conjunctions of events, which conjunctions become so familiar as to persuade us of their inevitability, and we treat that sup posed inevitability as causal necessity. Notwithstanding this error, causality, or the assumption thereof, is “to us the cement of the universe.” 5.╇ Much of what follows is taken from my article “Merleau-Ponty’s Visual Space and the Law of Large Numbers.” 6.╇ In rehearsing the achievements of Jacob Bernoulli and Abraham de Moivre (early pioneers of probability theory), Edward Beltrami expresses this point in a slightly more quantitative way: “What Bernoulli showed is that as the sample size n gets larger, it becomes increasingly likely that the proportion of heads in n flips of a balanced coin (the sample average) will not deviate from onehalf by more than some fixed margin of error. . . . A few years later, de Moivre put more flesh on Bernoulli’s statement by establishing that if the average number of heads is computed many times, most of the sample averages have values that clus ter about 1/2, while the remainder spread themselves out more sparsely the further one gets from 1/2. Moreover, de Moivre showed that as the sample size gets larger, the proportion of sample averages that are draped about 1/2 at varying distances begins to look like a smooth bell-shaped curve, known either as the normal or the Gaussian curve (after the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, whose career straddled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries).” Beltrami then re marks: “Taken together, the assertions of Bernoulli and de Moivre describe a kind of latent order emerging from a mass of disorganized data, a regularity that mani fests itself amid the chaos of a large sample of numbers.” What Is Random? 5–6. 7.╇ I put remembers in quotation marks to indicate that I am taking poetic license with the description. Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler do the same thing in their book, Laws of the Game, 42. Explaining the concept of “random walk” (a succession of random steps), they write: “The time it takes—or the num
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Notes to pages 59–61
ber of rolls of the dice required—for one distribution to recur is, in the long run, the same for all distributions. There is, however, a ‘short-term’ memory for any distribution that has just occurred.” The “short-term memory” is there to prevent too many repeat occurrences. 8.╇ Giberenzer et al., The Empire of Chance, 40–41. The dog bite example is a modern one. I threw it in for its seeming triviality, which does not exempt it from the law of large numbers. Warren Weaver writes: “The circumstances which result in a dog biting a person seriously enough so that the matter gets reported to the health authorities would seem to be complex and unpredictable indeed. In New York City, in the year 1955, there were, on average, 75.3 reports per day to the Department of Health of bitings of people. In 1956, the corresponding number was 73.6. In 1957 it was 73.2. In 1957 and 1958 the figures were 74.5 and 72.6.” Weaver prefaces this example by remarking, “One of the most striking and fundamental things about probability theory is that it leads to an understanding of the otherwise strange fact that events which are individually capricious and unpredictable can, when treated en masse, lead to very stable average performances.” Lady Luck, 361–62 (emphasis in original). 9.╇ Koestler, The Roots of Coincidence, 25. 10.╇ Von Baeyer, Warmth Disperses and Time Passes, 87–91. 11.╇ Contrary to what one might expect, the numerical gap or difference between heads and tails tends to increase with the number of tosses; even so, the ratio of heads to tails, expressed as percentages, converges toward 50/50. 12.╇ Von Baeyer, Warmth Disperses and Time Passes, 90. 13.╇ There is only 1 way to get all heads—all coins land head up. There are 10 ways to get just one head—each coin may be the solitary head. With just two or more heads, things get more complicated, but one can refer to the tenth row of Pascal’s triangle to get the answers. There are 45 ways to get just three heads, 120 ways to get just four heads, and 252 ways to get just five heads. 14.╇ Von Baeyer, Warmth Disperses and Time Passes, 89–90. After explaining that in quantum physics, position and momentum become “a real pair of op posites” whose overall indeterminacy is governed by Planck’s quantum of action, Wolfgang Pauli makes the connection between statistics and quantum reality: “As this indeterminacy is an unavoidable element of every initial state of a system that is at all possible according to the new laws of nature, the development of the sys tem can never be determined as was the case in classical mechanics. The theory predicts only the statistics of the results of an experiment, when it is repeated under a given condition.” He then explains that individual events are immune to statistical elucidation: “Like an ultimate fact without any cause, the individual outcome of a measurement is, however, in general not comprehended by laws. . . . The probabilities occurring in the new laws have then to be considered to be primary, which means not deducible from deterministic laws.” (Pauli, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 32; emphasis in the original.) Since the indeterminacy associated with Planck’s quantum is a fundamental feature of reality, there will al ways be events that cannot be precisely predicted. These are individual quantum events that, when considered en masse, coincide with statistical law. Something similar, I am arguing, occurs in the macroworld as we consider everyday events.
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15.╇ Schrödinger, What Is Life? 80. 16.╇ Quoted in David, Games, Gods, and Gambling, 137. 17.╇ Hardy, Harvie, and Koestler, The Challenge of Chance, 129–30 (emphasis in original). 18.╇ Von Baeyer, Warmth Disperses and Time Passes, 90. 5.╇ Double-Slit Analogues The epigraph is from Crease, “The Most Beautiful Experiment.” 1.╇ Galilei, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, 237–38. 2.╇ Tubbs, What Is a Number? 206. 3.╇ Ibid., 210. 4.╇ Dyson, Disturbing the Universe, 248–49. 5.╇ Eddington, Relativity Theory of Protons and Electrons, 329. 6.╇ The difference between the two runs parallel to C. S. Lewis’s observa tion of the world of difference between seeing a beam of light in a dark and dusty toolshed and seeing by that beam. To see the beam of light—or the wave-interfer ence pattern—is to stand outside its transformative magic. “I was standing today in the dark toolshed,” writes Lewis. “The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it. “Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previ ous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.” Lewis, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” 212. 7.╇ Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 187. 8.╇ Stapp, “Are Superluminal Connections Necessary?” 202. 9.╇ Galison, How Experiments End, 278. 10.╇ Sappho, The Songs of Sappho, 57. 11.╇ Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” in Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 164. 12.╇ Myers, The Near and the Far, 15–16. 13.╇ Ibid., 180–81. 14.╇ While this statement is widely attributed to Sophocles, I could not track down the original source. 6.╇ Everyday Superposition The epigraph is from Harding, On Having No Head. 1.╇ Polkinghorne, The Quantum World, 19–20. 2.╇ Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, 157–58. 3.╇ Lyon Playfair, in Basalla, Coleman, and Kargon, eds., Victorian Science, 82. 4.╇ Dyson, Disturbing the Universe, 248–49.
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Notes to pages 79–91 5.╇ Hodgson, The Mind Matters, 92. 6.╇ James, “Human Immortality,” in Writings, 1878–1899, 1125. 7.╇ The Witness of Music
The epigraph is from Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” quoted in Robert Jour dain, Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy, 322. 1.╇ Zajonc, Catching the Light, 299. 2.╇ Bohm, Quantum Theory, 169. 3.╇ Whitehead, Dialogues, 19. ˇ The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics, 371. 4.╇╃Capek, 5.╇ Ibid., 371–72. 6.╇ Clark, Japan, 7. 7.╇ Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 213, 216. 8.╇ Ibid., 218–19. 9.╇ Ibid., 175–76. 10.╇ Ibid., 227, 235. 11.╇ Ibid., 227 (emphasis added). 12.╇ Cited in Sacks, Musicophilia, 202. 13.╇ Ibid., 225. 14.╇ Ibid., 228. 15.╇ Ibid., 226. 16.╇ Many have proposed that reality is a kind of musical composition. Ear lier I referred to the music of the spheres tradition, which was once a reflexive response to the evident order and beauty—the harmony—of the starry heavens. Marcel Proust proposed that music might be “the unique example of what might have been—if the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas had not intervened—the means of communication between souls.” Proust, In Search of Lost Time, 5:292. See also Otto, Die Musen and der göttliche Ursprung des Singen und Sagens. 17.╇ Saffran and Griepentrog, “Absolute Pitch in Infant Auditory Learning,” 75. 18.╇ Ibid., 82. 19.╇ Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1:261 (emphasis in original). Music, says Suzanne Langer, is form without content: “Music . . . is pre eminently non-representative even in its classical production, its highest attain ments. It exhibits pure form not as an embellishment, but as its very essence; we can take it in its flower—for instance, German music from Bach to Beethoven— and have practically nothing but tonal structures before us: no scene, no object, no fact. This is a great aid to our chosen preoccupation with form. There is no obvious, literal content in our way.” Philosophy in a New Key, 178. 20.╇ Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 266–67. 21.╇ In The Singing Neanderthals, Stephen Mithen proposes that human lan guage originated with the singing of wordless meanings, which were tied to abso lute pitch. Over time the singing yielded to word-borne communication, the “loss of perfect pitch” for most people, and “the diminution of musical abilities.” 22.╇ Thomas, “Fern Hill.” 23.╇ Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 235.
Notes to pages 93–115
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8.╇ Everyday Relationality The epigraph is from Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 2.0121. 1.╇ Mermin, “What Is Quantum Mechanics Trying to Tell Us?” 754 (empha sis in original). 2.╇ I borrow this example from Kosso, Appearance and Reality, 155. 3.╇ Parmenides of Elea, fragments 14 and 15, in Freeman, Ancilla to the PreSocratic Philosophers, 45. 4.╇ For ways this discovery may have altered Parmenides and the course of Western thought, see Popper, The World of Parmenides, 68–104. 5.╇ Much of what follows is taken from my “Goethe on Light and Color.” 6.╇ Goethe, Goethe: Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft, part 1, vol. 4, 3. 7.╇ Goethe, Theory of Colours, 73. 8.╇ Ibid., 23–24. 9.╇ Ibid., 24. 10.╇ Ibid. 11.╇ Ibid., 25. 12.╇ Ibid., 28. 13.╇ Ibid. 14.╇ Ibid., 20–28. 15.╇ Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, 9. 16.╇ Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” 891. 17.╇ Cited in Hon and Goldstein, “Symmetry and Asymmetry in Electrody namics from Rowland to Einstein,” 651. 18.╇ Kosso, Appearance and Reality, 96 (emphasis in original). 19.╇ Bohm, The Essential David Bohm, 160. 20.╇ Faraday, Experimental Researches in Electricity, 2:291. Cited in Alan HirschÂ�feld, The Electric Life of Michael Faraday, 163. 21.╇ Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, 71. 22.╇ Clark, Japan, 7. 9.╇ Observer-Created Reality The epigraph is from Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” in Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 165. 1.╇ Mermin, “Is the Moon There When Nobody Looks?” 2.╇ Quoted in Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond, 41. 3.╇ Analytical Greek Lexicon, 194. 4.╇ Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity, 97. 5.╇ Goethe, Goethe: Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft, part 1, vol. 4, 18. 6.╇ Darwin, The Origin of Species, 210. 7.╇ Parker, In the Blink of an Eye, 46. 8.╇ See, for example, Miller, Finding Darwin’s God. 9.╇ Bohm, Quantum Theory, 414. 10.╇ Ibid., 168–72. 11.╇ Ibid., 415. 12.╇ Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, 158. 13.╇ Darwin, The Origin of Species, 65.
160
Notes to pages 116–133 14.╇ Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 17. 15.╇ McFadden, Quantum Evolution, 314. 16.╇ See Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind and Shadows of the Mind. 17.╇ Wheeler, “Law without Law,” 189. 10.╇ Wide-Open Reality
The epigraph is from Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 86. 1.╇ Plato, The Republic, 203. 2.╇ Ibid., 378. 3.╇ Pascal, The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal, 98. I have modified the wording slightly. The text reads: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” 4.╇ Niels Bohr, “Light and Life,” 458. 5.╇ Pope, Moral Essays, in Four Epistles, epistle 1, lines 29–30. 6.╇ Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” in Wordsworth: Poetical Works, 377. 7.╇ Brown, “Fire.” 8.╇ Lloyd, “A Quantum Less Quirky.” 9.╇ James, The Principles of Psychology, 462. 11.╇ Nonlocality The epigraph is from Bortoft, “Counterfeit and Authentic Wholes,” 279. 1.╇ Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” 2.╇ Bohr, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” 3.╇ As others have noted, Bohr’s language is obscure. Stating that the mea surement of one particle will cause no instantaneous “mechanical disturbance” of another distant particle, he nevertheless insists that “at this stage [the measure ment of the first particle] there is essentially the question of an influence on the very conditions which define the possible types of predictions regarding the future behavior of the system.” Ibid., 700, emphasis in original. Arthur Fine characterizes this wording as a retreat into positivism and a shift from “actual physical distur bance” to “semantic disturbance.” Fine, The Shaky Game, 34–35. 4.╇ Nadeau and Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe, vii. 5.╇ Eliot, “The Dry Salvages.” 6.╇ Nadeau and Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe, 69. 7.╇ Ibid., 197. 8.╇ Greenstein and Zajonc, The Quantum Challenge, 184. 9.╇ For caveats against this attitude, see Loudon, The Quantum Theory of Light, 1; Greenstein and Zajonc, The Quantum Challenge, 36–37. 10.╇ Plato, The Republic, book 6, 246–53. 11.╇ Jonathan Powers writes: “When we see an object we see patches of colour, of light and shade. We do not see a luminescent stream flooding into our eyes. The ‘light’ we postulate to account for the way we see ‘external objects’ is not given in experience; it is inferred from it.” Philosophy and the New Physics, 4. P. W. Bridg man’s comment is also apropos: “The most elementary examination of what light
Notes to pages 134–150
161
means in terms of direct experience shows that we never experience light itself, but our experience deals only with things lighted. This fundamental fact is never modified by the most complicated or refined physical experiments that have ever been devised.” The Logic of Modern Physics, 151. Other such statements from a broad range of thinkers could be offered, but I hope these will suffice to make the general point. 12.╇ Schumacher, Human Posture, 113–14. 13.╇ Here I am thinking of Einstein’s equations, which incorporate both the speed of the object of interest and the speed of light. When the former speed equals the latter, the length of the object collapses to zero and its clock (its pas sage through time) stops. With time no longer ticking away, the idea of speed or motion becomes problematic, for such presupposes the passage of time. 14.╇ Wheeler, A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime, 43. 15.╇ Baierlein, Newton to Einstein: The Trail of Light, 96. 16.╇ Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 166 (emphasis in original). 17.╇ James, Psychology, 14 (emphasis in original). 18.╇ Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 243. What he has in mind is that our body parts are not arrayed in space but enveloped, interrelated, and felt throughout; hence they constitute a very different kind of space from that ideal ized by science wherein things may be viewed dispassionately. See Phenomenology of Perception, 98. 12.╇ Quantum Play, Quantum Sorrow 1.╇ Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 17. Most of what follows is taken from my “Quantum Uncertainty, Quantum Play, Quantum Sorrow.” 2.╇ Quoted in Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond, 41. 3.╇ Gardner, “Mathematical Games.” 4.╇ Schopenhauer, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, 208, 263. 5.╇ Young, The Reflexive Universe, 30. 6.╇ Ibid. 7.╇ Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 56 (emphasis in original). 8.╇ Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 163–64. 9.╇ Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 9. 10.╇ Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 163. 11.╇ Goethe, “Epirrhema,” in Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, 1:18–19. Quoted in Heitler, “Goethean Science,” 59. 12.╇ Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 213. 13.╇ Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man, 78. 14.╇ Shakespeare, King Lear, act 4, scene 6. In his Symposium (219a) Plato writes, “The mind’s sight becomes sharp only when the body’s eyes go past their prime.” 15.╇ Schopenhauer, “On Ethics,” 269, 267. 16.╇ Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 20. 17.╇ Shimony, “Implications of Bell’s Theorem,” quoted in John A. Schu macher, Human Posture, 142 (emphasis added).
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Index
Italicized page numbers indicate illustrations. Aristotle, 14 atomism, 21–25, 66, 131 atomistic light, 7, 133–135 Augustine, 3–4, 15, 133, 135 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 86 Beltrami, Edward, 155n6 Bernoulli, Jacob, 61, 155n6 Bohm, David, 84, 102, 114–115 Bohr, Niels, 19, 39, 42–43, 85, 108–109, 112, 114, 120–124, 129–130, 160n11:3; on language, xii, 109, 144; on life, 18, 121; ontological uncertainty, 14; on probability, 57 Bortoft, Henri, 129 Bridgman, P. W., 160n11 Brown, Judy Sorum, 121 Buber, Martin, 149 Cambrian Explosion, 113 causality, 56, 58, 61, 66, 70–71, 84, 130, 135, 137, 145, 155n4:4 childhood, 7, 89, 91, 125–126 Chopin, Frédéric, 83 Churchill, Winston, 11 collective unconscious, 42 color, 6, 95–100, 112–113 complementarity, 43, 85–86, 95, 98, 99, 102, 120, 132, 137
171
consciousness, 5, 26, 28–29, 31–33, 44–45, 78, 80–81, 104, 108, 114– 115, 154n4 Copenhagen interpretation, xii, 129–130 Dainton, Barry, 26 Darwin, Charles, 112, 115 De Broglie, Louis, 23–25, 66, 131 De Moivre, Abraham, 155n6 Descartes, René, 104, 109 determinism, 2, 17 Dirac, Paul, 77–78 double-slit experiment, 5, 7, 49, 51, 53–56, 58, 60, 62, 65, 87, 93, 100, 116–117; like geometry, 66–69; like peek-a-boo, 122–125; like seeing, 69–71; like sunset, 71–74. See also two-slit experiment dreams, 42, 44–45, 90 Dyson, Freeman, 79 Eddington, Arthur Stanley, 21, 69 Eigen, Manfred, 155n7 Einstein, Albert, 7, 22–23, 42, 54, 100–101, 122, 129, 132, 135–139, 161n11:13; on measurement, 108; posits light speed constancy, 22, 135; on probability, 57–58; on uncertainty, 37, 77–78
172
Index
Eliot, T. S., 130 entanglement, 2, 4–6, 83–84, 105, 130, 132–134, 137, 140 Epicurus, 1 evolution, 6, 17, 29, 111–113, 115–116, 126 Faraday, Michael, 102–103 Feynman, Richard, 51 Fine, Arthur, 160n11:3 Frost, Robert, 114 Galilei, Galileo, 19, 67 Galison, Peter, 72 Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 155n6 geometry, 66–68 Gloucester, Earl of, 149 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 95– 100, 112, 148 Gould, Stephen Jay, 17 Greenstein, George, 2, 4, 132 Griepentrog, Gregory, 89 Hamlet, 115 Harding, Douglas E., 77 Harvie, Robert, 61 Heisenberg, Werner, 13–14, 18, 114, 144 Heraclitus, 70 Herbert, Nick, 19 Hindemith, Paul, 90 Hodgson, David, 79 Hosinski, Thomas, 31 Huizinga, Johan, 149 indeterminacy, 45–46, 145, 156n14. See also uncertainty
Kosso, Peter, 101 Kundera, Milan, 150 Langer, Suzanne, 158n19 Laplace, Pierre Simon, Marquis de, 12, 105 law of large numbers, 59, 61, 156n8 Lewis, C. S., 157n6 Lloyd, Seth, 125 locality principle, 58 Lockwood, Michael, 18 Loudon, Rodney, 160n11:9 magnets, magnetism, 100–105 Mahler, Gustav, 90 Malin, Shimon, 49 McFadden, Johnjoe, 116 measurement, 13–16, 18, 41–42, 46–47, 65, 78, 110, 130, 156n14, 160n11:3 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 7, 31, 45–46, 71, 139–140, 147, 161n18; handtouching-hand, 148; on science, 27–29; visually integrated into nature, 137 Mermin, David, 94 Mill, James, 32 mind, 5, 80 Mithen, Stephen, 158n21 music, 5–6, 83, 85–91, 119, 130, 145– 147, 153n1:6, 158nn16,19,21 Myers, L. H., 73 Nadeau, Robert, 130–132 Newton, Isaac, 19, 96 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 147, 153n1:6 nonlocality, xi, 7, 129–134, 137–140 Nussbaum, Martha, 90
James, William, 17, 28, 30–31, 33, 80–81, 139; infant experience, 126; the knowing of things together, 26, 154n4; superposed minds, 80 Jeans, James, 79, 115 Jencks, Charles, 37 Jung, Carl, 42–45
objectivity, 109–111, 147. See also spectator attitude observer-created reality, 6, 107–108 Oedipus, 110 order from disorder, 5, 61, 155n6
Kafatos, Menas, 130–132 Kant, Immanuel, 107 King Lear, 149 Koestler, Arthur, 59
Parker, Andrew, 113 Parmenides, 95 Pascal, Blaise, 60, 120, 156n13 Pastoral Symphony, 86
Index Pauli, Wolfgang, 42, 44, 156n14 peek-a-boo, 121–122, 124–126 Planck, Max, 54, 156n14 Plato, 119, 133–136, 148, 161n12:14 play, 7, 143–148, 150 Podolsky, Boris, 129 Pope, Alexander, 121 Popper, Karl, 159n8:4 Powers, Jonathan, 160n11 pre-conceptual experience, 2, 28–30, 86 probability, 38–40, 59–61, 78–79, 116, 155n6, 156n8 Proust, Marcel, 158n16 randomness, 17, 60, 122, 144–146 relationality, 6, 66, 93, 95, 100, 102– 103, 105 Rosen, Nathan, 129 Sacks, Oliver, 89 Saffran, Jenny, 89 Saint Paul, 11 Salih, Tayeb, 116 Sappho, 72 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 90, 145, 147, 149 Schrödinger, Erwin, 5, 57, 61, 77–78 Schumacher, John, 134 Season of Migration to the North, 116 Shimony, Abner, 132–138 Sophocles, 74 sorrow, 7, 83, 90, 143–144, 146–147, 149 special theory of relativity, 100 spectator attitude, xi, 6, 12, 16, 18, 108, 110–112, 147, 149. See also objectivity Stapp, Henry R., 30, 71–72 Stevens, Wallace, 51, 107 Stoics, 21 sunset, 71–74 superposition, 5, 41–42, 44, 77–81, 94, 102, 111, 114–116, 125 synchronicity, 42 thermodynamics, 19, 56, 60 Thomas, Dylan, 90 Thoreau, Henry David, 119
173
Tubbs, Robert, 67–68 two-slit experiment, 51, 65. See doubleslit experiment uncertainty, xi, 4, 11–19, 69, 77–78, 81, 114, 122, 145–146, 150; epistemic versus ontological, 14, 37; as spark of life, 18, 121. See also indeterminacy uncertainty principle, 13, 43, 121 unconsciousness, 44 universal ether, 22–23 visual experience, 6, 133–134, 137, 139–140; double-slit seeing, 69–71; figure-background duality, 45–47 Von Baeyer, Hans Christian, 60–61 Von Neumann, John, 42 wave function collapse, 42 wave interference, 5, 38, 39, 53, 54, 55, 58, 61, 65–66, 68–72, 87, 123, 124–125, 157n6; like peek-a-boo, 122–126; like seeing, 69–71; like sunset, 71–74 wave-particle duality, xi, 4, 21–23, 25– 27, 31–32, 37, 45–46, 66, 71–73, 87, 131, 133; difference between waves and particles, 49–50; implicit in dreams and waking reality, 42–45; implicit in pre-conceptual experience, 30; implicit in visual experience, 46; like music, 87; like seeing, 70–71; like sunset, 71–74 Wearing, Clive, 88–89 Weaver, Warren, 156n8 Wheeler, John, 116, 137 Whitehead, Alfred North, 17, 28, 31–33, 85, 143 Wigner, Eugene, 42 Wilde, Oscar, 83 Winkler, Ruth, 155n7 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 93 Wordsworth, William, 72, 121 Young, Arthur M., 145–146 Zajonc, Arthur, 2, 4, 83, 132 Zeno of Elea, 15–16, 26 Zuckerkandl, Victor, 86–88, 90
David A. Gr a ndy is Professor of Philosophy at Brigham Young University. He is author of The Speed of Light (Indiana University Press, 2009), (with Dan Burton) of Magic, Mystery, and Science (Indiana University Press, 2004) and Leo Szilard: Science as a Mode of Being.
Everyday Quantum Realit y was designed by Jamison Cockerham at Indiana University Press, set in type by Cathy Bailey, and printed by Integrated Book Technology. The text type is Electra, designed by William A. Dwiggins in 1935, and the display type is Futura, designed by Paul Renner in 1927, both issued by Adobe Systems.
