Prominent science writer John Horgan is baffled (and somewhat irritated?) by quantum mechanics – the behavior of the universe’s fundamental particles:
Quantum principles underlie our modern scientific worldview and much of our technology, including the laptop on which I write these words. And yet, a century after its invention, physicists and philosophers cannot agree on what quantum mechanics means.
John Horgan, “Quantum Mechanics, Plato’s Cave, and the Blind Piranha,” Crosscheck, May 22, 2024
He has a point. How can so much uncertainty lie quietly at the foundation of our universe, but not disrupt anything in particular? In fact, as he says, we build better computers based on its principles. Why doesn’t fundamental uncertainty make us build worse systems or nothing at all?
Horgan, author of My Quantum Experiment (2023), takes this disjunction personally:
I blindly seek insights, epiphanies and revelations. Every now and then I think I’ve grasped a slippery truth, but my satisfaction is always fleeting. Sooner or later I’ll hit an invisible barrier. I don’t really know what’s going on. I’m in the dark.
Horgan, “Quantum Mechanics, Plato’s Cave and the Blind Piranha”
Horgan is certainly not alone
The greatest scientists to study quantum mechanics are just as in the dark as the prominent science writer, if that helps at all. For example,
● “For those who are not shocked when they first encounter quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.” – Niels Bohr (1885–1962), in 1952, quoted in Heisenberg, Werner (1971). Physics and beyond. New York: Harper and Row. p. 206.
● “I think I can safely say that no one understands quantum mechanics” – Richard Feynman (1918–1988), YouTube video excerpt from his 1964 Messenger lecture series at Cornell University
● “No other theory of the physical world has caused such consternation as quantum theory, for no other theory has so completely overthrown the previously cherished concepts of classical physics and our everyday understanding of reality.” Peter Atkins in the foreword Beyond benchmark (2004) by Jim Baggott
● “Quantum mechanics was and remains revolutionary, especially because it requires the introduction of radically new concepts to better describe the world.” – Nobel Prize winner Alain Aspect “Introduction: John Bell and the Second Quantum Revolution” in JS Bell, Ineffable and ineffable in quantum mechanics (2nd edition, 2004) by John Stuart Bell (1928-1990)
● Albert Einstein (1879–1955) never accepted quantum mechanics and spent much of his career opposing it: “Quantum mechanics is certainly impressive. But an inner voice tells me it’s not the real deal yet. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the ‘old’. In any case, I am convinced that He is not throwing dice.” – Letter to Max Born (December 4, 1926); The Born-Einstein Letters (translated by Irene Born) (Walker and Company, New York, 1971) ISBN 0-8027-0326-7.
Remark: Einstein apparently believed in the idea of God espoused by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and that is what he seems to mean by the “ancient.”
So how can the universe be like this?
The most reasonable theory of how the universe can be both fundamentally uncertain and yet reliable in everyday life is the least popular: as the atheist mathematician and astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) reluctantly suggested: “A common-sense based interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has delved into physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth mentioning in nature.”
If so, we can understand part of the universe created by a greater intelligence, but perhaps not the entire universe, or at least not right now.
That points towards deism or theism – an impersonal or personal God. It was the reason that the atheist philosopher Antony Flew (1923–2010) concluded towards the end of his life that There is a God. (Harper One 2007). And that’s difficult to discuss casually these days. The problem is not that the scientists who think there is a God are operating without evidence. On the contrary, because they have an unpopular perspective, they can be canceled even if they have sufficient evidence. Even as the evidence, in the form of further discoveries of the sophistication of the universe, piles up… One way to describe such a situation is intellectual stagnation.
Remark: In his essay, Horgan compares himself to a “blind piranha” he once saw. He could find and eat minnows thrown to it, but he really had no idea of his surroundings (an aquarium in a bar).
You may also like to read: Refining the universe makes a top neuroscientist ‘very hopeful’. Christof Koch of the Allen Institute talks about the assumptions underlying his theory of consciousness – assumptions that led many other neuroscientists to cancel him. When one of the world’s most prominent research neuroscientists deviates from the classic materialist script – and gets away with it – things change.