Quantum Flapdoodle
The Fool’s-Gold of Knowledge
Science, according to satirist Terry Pratchett, “used to be so simple, once upon a time. Because the universe was full of ignorance all around and the scientist panned through it like a prospector crouched over a mountain stream, looking for the gold of knowledge among the gravel of unreason, the sand of uncertainty and the little whiskery eight-legged swimming things of superstition.
“Occasionally he would straighten up and say things like ‘Hurrah, I’ve discovered Boyle’s Third Law.’ And everyone knew where they stood.”
This is the view from Discworld, Pratchett’s invention*, a parallel reality marketed as fantasy. In fact, his stories explore the very real but contrary mental landscape of contemporary people. We live daily within the horizons of a flat earth, even as we “know” it’s round. We place naive trust in magical thinking, even as we “know” to act with logic and rationality. We want science delivered in discrete golden nuggets of cause-and-effect, even as we “know” that life is a complex system with countless variables.
Perception tells one story about the material world: the sky is up, earth is solid, and what I believe is real. Yet measurements and tests and data points often tell a counter-intuitive story: space is curved; mineral atoms contain more emptiness than matter. As to the belief business, science doesn’t cooperate with the human bias for absolute answers. New measurements, new tests and sets of data points keep shifting and expanding what we learn.
Does anyone know where we stand these days? The modern human mind has some very ancient wiring. Call it the unconscious. It struggles with the ongoing clash between traditional truth and measured truth. Our suffering has been interpreted as disenchantment, alienation, ennui, neurosis, existential angst, cognitive dissonance. The confusion can result in fuzzy notions about science. We reasonably educated non-scientists want to be up-to-date thinkers. We really do, but just as we are getting the hang of Enlightenment Rationality and Newtonian Order, along comes the Quantum to disrupt assumptions. Pratchett describes a common sort of bafflement felt by the layperson:
“But the trouble was that ignorance became more interesting, especially big fascinating ignorance about huge and important things like matter and creation, and people stopped patiently building their little houses of rational sticks in the chaos of the universe and started getting interested in the chaos itself — partly because it was a lot easier to be an expert on chaos, but mostly because it made really good patterns that you could put on a t-shirt.
“And instead of getting on with proper science, scientists suddenly went around saying how impossible it was to know anything, and that there wasn’t really anything you could call reality to know anything about, and how all this was tremendously exciting, and incidentally did you know there were possibly all these little universes all over the place but no one can see them because they are all curved in on themselves? Incidentally, don’t you think this is a rather good t-shirt?”
— Witches Abroad: A Novel of Discworld
Muddled ideas are harmless until they are not, until they are used to mislead and beguile. Many gospelers in the spiritual-quest/human-potential/self-help/life-coach business profit from metaphysical blends of wishful thinking and bad science. A “flurry of flapdoodle*” is how Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann branded misinformation that cuts-and-pastes from quantum mechanics. Promoters snip out a bit of knowledge about the sub-atomic world and paste it into a simplistic big-world view. Gell-Mann wrote, “Because quantum mechanics predicts only probabilities, it has gained a reputation in some circles of permitting just about anything.”
If science is gold, then flapdoodle is pyrite, fool’s gold.
Popular flapdoodle suggests that our thoughts determine material reality. The physical world manifests at the direction of human consciousness. Focus one’s mind the prescribed way and tumors shrink, bank accounts grow, opportunities emerge. Fate takes notice and acts kindly. This is a quantum twist on a long established theorem of America’s self-help industry — that people make their own destiny, and they can make it what they want by following a formula. In a less subtle era, Napoleon Hill’s 1937 best seller summed up the philosophy with a brilliant title: Think and Grow Rich*.
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Pyrite-quartz
That idea — human consciousness invents reality — can be argued on many levels. Flapdoodle versions start with the uncanny behavior of the quantum energy packet, an elusive lump of energy that resists being pinned to any one location. The only time it deigns to take a fixed position is within a mathematical state called wave function collapse, which in layman’s terms means that by measuring the object we find where it is. Some physicists even call it a “participatory”* model of reality. But words are by necessity metaphors, poetic language, not math language, and metaphors are con artists. If we are gullible enough to take them literally, they will take us to the cleaners.
What a sweet delusion — macro-world mind over micro-world matter. The big and little worlds don’t translate back and forth that neatly. Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman warned us that the new science paradigm would not be easy to assimilate:
“Because atomic behavior is so unlike ordinary experience, it is very difficult to get used to, and it appears peculiar and mysterious to everyone—both to the novice and to the experienced physicist. Even the experts do not understand it the way they would like to, and it is perfectly reasonable that they should not, because all of direct, human experience and of human intuition applies to large objects. We know how large objects will act, but things on a small scale just do not act that way. So we have to learn about them in a sort of abstract or imaginative fashion and not by connection with our direct experience.”
Feynman places before us a mystery as grand as anything from ancient mystery religions. Here is something inexplicable, something with hidden significance that our senses, our “direct experience” cannot penetrate. Quantum mechanics, he wrote, is “a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way…. We cannot make the mystery go away by ‘explaining’ how it works. We will just tell you how it works.”
Paul Dirac, also a 20th century Nobel laureate, offered a taste of inexplicability* in an essay aimed at the non-specialist. He wrote about how we perceive the world — and classical physics measures the world — in three flat dimensions. Einstein’s special theory of relativity adds time as a fourth dimension, so “What appears to our consciousness is really a three-dimensional section of the four-dimensional picture.” Then Einstein’s general theory of relativity requires that it all be curved. “With the four-dimensional space curved, any section that we make in it also has to be curved, because in general we cannot give a meaning to a flat section in a curved space.” Now add the influence of multiple observations. “This leads us to a picture in which we have to take curved three-dimensional sections in the curved four-dimensional space and discuss observations in these sections.”
More recently, and more succinctly, theoretical physicist Christopher Fuchs* writes “reality is more than any third-person perspective can capture.” The abstract language of math can explore it, but for the rest, we are left with words, the imaginative language of metaphor.
“A metaphor is always a framework for thinking, using knowledge of this to think about that,” says cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson*. “We all think with metaphors of various sorts, and we use metaphors to deal with complexity…. [P]eople use one pattern in the world as a metaphor for another one all the time.” A framework or pattern, however, will never map precisely, feature for feature, onto that for which it is supposed to be a guide. There will always be gaps. In the places where “it doesn’t fit, it will cause you to make errors in how you deal with your problems.”
For now, at least, the picture is unsee-able, ineffable. Charlatans are happy to push pyritic metaphors that add to problems, errors, and “ignorance all around.” Meanwhile physicists pan furiously for the gold that will let them straighten up and say, “Hurrah! I’ve discovered where we stand!”