Our Universe Works … Yet Doesn’t Make Sense; How Could That Be?
Prominent science writer John Horgan finds himself stumped (and somewhat vexed?) by quantum mechanics — the behavior of the fundamental particles of the universe:
Quantum principles underpin our modern scientific worldview and much of our technology, including the laptop on which I’m writing 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,” CROSS-CHECK, MAY 22, 2024
He Has a Point
How can so much uncertainty lie placidly at the basis of our universe but disrupt nothing in particular? In fact, as he says, we build better computers using its principles. Why doesn’t fundamental uncertainty cause us to build worse ones or nothing at all?
Horgan, author of My Quantum Experiment (2023), takes this disjunction personally:
I’m blindly thrashing about for insights, epiphanies, revelations. Every now and then I think I’ve grasped some slippery truth, but my satisfaction is always fleeting. Sooner or later, I end up bouncing off 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 who tackled quantum mechanics are as much in the dark as the prominent science writer, if that’s any help. For example,
“For those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.” —Niels Bohr (1885–1962), in 1952, quoted by Werner Heisenberg (1971), Physics and Beyond. (New York: Harper and Row), p. 206.
“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics” — Richard Feynman (1918–1988), YouTube Video clip 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 apprehension of reality.” — Peter Atkins in Foreword to Beyond Measure (2004), by Jim Baggott.
“Quantum mechanics was, and continues to be, revolutionary, primarily because it demands the introduction of radically new concepts to better describe the world.” — Nobelist Alain Aspect, “Introduction: John Bell and the second quantum revolution” in J. S. Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics (2nd ed, 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 imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the ‘old one.’ I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.” — Letter to Max Born (4 December 1926); The Born-Einstein Letters (translated by Irene Born) (Walker and Company, New York, 1971).
Note: Einstein apparently believed in the idea of God espoused by philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and that is what he seems to mean by the “old one.”
So How Can the Universe Be Like This?
The most reasonable theory of how the universe can be both uncertain at its base yet reliable in everyday life is the least popular one: As atheist mathematician and astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) reluctantly suggested, “A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”
If so, we can understand some of the universe created by a greater intelligence but perhaps not all of it, or at least not at present.
That points in the direction of deism or theism — an impersonal or personal God. It was what caused lifetime atheist philosopher Antony Flew (1923–2010) to conclude toward the end of his life that There Is a God. (HarperOne, 2007). And that’s hard to discuss casually today. The problem isn’t that the scientists who think that there is a God are proceeding without evidence. Rather, because theirs is an unpopular perspective, they might be canceled even if they have plenty of evidence. Even if evidence, in the form of further discoveries of the fine-tuning of the universe, is piling up… One way of describing a situation like that is intellectual stagnation.
Note: In his essay, Horgan compares himself to a “blind piranha” that he once saw. It could find and eat minnows that were thrown to it but it really had no idea of its surroundings (an aquarium in a bar).
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