Non-classicality

On the value of hanging onto weirdness

Thanks for reading my newsletter! The breakdown: first a personal essay, some of my recent writing, then some thoughts on the media that I am consuming and finally some vegan food and recipe recommendations. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own. 

If you are here because you like my writing about science or my Instagrams about cooking, you may not be interested in every essay in this space, but please do stick around until I loop back to whatever it is that we have in common.

Find me on Twitter and Instagram. I’d also love it if you shared this letter with a friend.

NON-CLASSICALITY*

Stories with the word “quantum” in the headline do well. People click on those headlines, read the articles, like them on social media, and share them with their friends. The word is catnip for science enthusiasts, techno optimists, some investors, and many practitioners of the woo. Unlike other bits of jargon from contemporary physics, like relativity or discussions of fields, “quantum” is recognizable in popular culture settings, and it feels legible to people that may not know what it means but understand it to signify weirdness, something unusual, maybe even esoteric.

Before I worked in science journalism, I hated this. I probably also blamed the media for the whole thing with a type of vitriol that I now sometimes face from scientists that I interview. This was a reactionary instinct, and a pretty petty one - I spent my whole physics career studying quantum systems because I read “Quantum Mechanics for Dummies” when I was 16 and found the science so different, and therefore so cool, that I could not let go of it. The other part of my origin story as a physicist is seeing a talk about how to image a quantum mechanical wavefunction, something I thought was a purely mathematical abstraction, in an actual experiment with ultracold atoms. This moment when I learned that the esoteric quantum world could be accessed experimentally kicked off almost a decade of my studying ultracold atoms, trying to understand the quantum world because its differentness never stopped drawing me in. 

During my first year working in science journalism full time, I sat in a meeting where my manager was introducing our newsroom to their manager. When they got to me, they just said it plainly - our readers want quantum physics stories so we hired someone who has a PhD in that. My track record shows this too. Here are some headlines editors wrote for stories I reported recently: “Quantum computer uses a time crystal as a control dial”, “A single atom could drive a piston in a quantum engine”, “Odd quantum property may let us chill things closer to absolute zero”, “Quantum memory device could stop unhackable networks from failing” and “Single atoms captured morphing into quantum waves in startling image.” And this is just a short selection, not counting many others that made it to print, and many more that I pitched but the time wasn’t right to follow them through. 

I still think popular culture distorts and misuses “quantum” more than it represents it in a way that matches its physical definition and how it manifests in replicable, rigorous science, but its power to engage people with topics they may otherwise never care about is undeniable. That power stems from the supposed weirdness of the quantum world. Though physicists today may, like I once did, feel like it is incorrect to focus just on that characteristic of quantum theory, it is a fact that at the inception of this theory in the 1920s many of the great physicists of the time were also nothing short of weirded out by what they were learning. Working on my upcoming book has given me a great excuse to re-engage with some classic papers from that era and some historical accounts of how progenitors of quantum theory like Niels Bohr, Max Born, Erwin Schrodinger, and Albert Einstein talked about it. 

None of them were as calm or as accepting as you may expect from a textbook physics genius. Schrodinger and Einstein in particular wrote letters to each other making fun of and berating their colleagues who had been more open to some philosophically challenging implications of quantum theory. It’s somewhat ironic then for modern physicists to object to quantum theory being called weird when the people who formulated it based on real empirical, experimental evidence could not quite find it in them to consider it normal too. 

Some of the conflict between colloquial uses of the word and what it means in scientific circles certainly comes from the temptation to make it all about us, humans, rather than just particles and atoms. In science fiction, and in some spiritual circles, this is a common mistake - ascribing quantum properties and effects to objects as large and as warm as people are. There are two ways to think about this from the empirical, physicists’ perspective. 

First is to acknowledge that the whole world is quantum but measurable effects that reveal it as such only exist at small scales, for objects smaller than a few million atoms. Here, people are quantum creatures, but our quantumness does not matter because we are too big to ever really do or experience anything measurably, observably quantum. The second possibility is that there is some theory of everything different from quantum mechanics, but that predicts everything that quantum mechanics does if you try to use it at scales we consider quantum, for everything that is incredibly small or incredibly cold. Here, we may simply not be quantum but some other thing and quantum effects not only do not matter for us but may not happen at our scale at all. 

In any scenario, scientists agree: a particle may be also be a quantum wave, and it may possibly be in two places at once, and it can be quantum teleported, and it could be inextricably connected to another particle across large distances through quantum entanglement, but this will never ever happen to a person. It will never even happen to a tardigrade despite some recent claims to the contrary.

Though learning this sometimes turns people off from really wanting to understand quantumness, the thought that even if we can’t experience its effect, they may be hardcoded into the bones of our world still grabs people. 

“‘Chances are the whole world is quantum’” is very upsetting to me and my conception of reality,” a colleague recently wrote to me in an email exchange about a possible news story. I wrote back: ”Ah, it's maybe because you've never had to calculate the wavelength of a baseball or the chance that Ant-Man tunnels through a wall, when you see how small those numbers are, you realize that the world probably is quantum and it will just genuinely never matter for warm giants like us. It's a bit like 'do we live in a simulation' for me. Like, so what if we do, I still have to get up every morning and be a person, haha.” 

Immediately, I wondered whether I had been rude to my coworker and unnecessarily quenched their curiosity by invoking my credentials as someone more learned in the topic. As I have written about before, I truly believe that at the bottom of many scientists’ desire to do science lies exactly a curiosity about what our reality actually is and how any of it could be revealed to us as weird when we exist within it so un-weirdly from our own perspective. Something being very upsetting to your conception of reality is actually a pretty good reason to engage with science and try to unpack it as rigorously and in as much detail as possible. 

At the same time, since quantum mechanics has been around since the 1920s and has given us so much, from transistors that make our phones work to the recipe for conducting MRI scans to a foundation for why we think we can catalog all particles in our universe with the help of giant colliders, many professional scientists have just become ok with its weirdness, effectively rendering it less and less weird. 

In a recent issue of New Scientists, science writer Michael Brooks touched on this within a story about quantum entanglement. He wrote:

“For Einstein, this weirdness was an indication that something was missing from quantum theory. But these days, entanglement is just seen as a routine resource. Indeed, it no longer provokes any kind of head-scratching in the physicists who work with it on a daily basis.

“We cannot explain it in classical terms, but it’s not really an issue somehow,” says Mirjam Weilenmann, also at the University of Geneva. Ana Sainz, who works with entanglement at the University of Gdansk in Poland, feels similarly. “The fact that we don’t see it in our macroscopic world every day makes it look weird, but I think it’s just a fact of the universe,” she says.”

After a decade spent training as a physicist and another almost five years teaching physics or writing about it, I fall into the same school of thought as Sainz. I do not necessarily think that it is impossible that we will learn more about quantumness or some new aspects of it in the coming years, but I do think that what seems like an inherent weirdness of quantum theory is not all that inherent and we will eventually get over it. To call something weird, we first have to have an idea of what is normal, and since that essentially comes down to a judgment call, we are always free to shift the idea of normalcy - and with it the idea of weirdness - as we learn more or otherwise change our perspective. There is ultimately nothing more scientific than updating your views as new data becomes available, anyway.

I have been thinking about the question of whether quantum mechanics is weird, and how weird exactly, and who gets to decide that, because it is a specific instance where I feel like my training has equipped me with tools to unravel the issue with some confidence. I know the definitions, I know some of the history, I’ve done some calculations, and I have interviewed many, many physicists who have to contend with all things quantum every day. 

Less objectively, I also struggle with the idea of quantumness being so incredibly weird because I found it fairly intuitive when I first started learning about it. Of course, it could be that I am an outlier and a weirdo, but experience has taught me that it is very rare to be a truly singular weirdo (none of us are so important as to be truly unprecedentedly weird). The work of physicist and writer Chanda Prescod-Weinstein helped me get my bearings here. She writes: 

“I would argue that what is intuitive is constructed by our experience and not inherent. This is brought to light by a comment made by British drag queen Amrou Al-Kadhi. When asked to explain what it means to be non-binary, and whether that’s natural, Amrou pointed to the quantum theory of particles. Just as fundamental particles can be two things at once, Amrou says, so can a gender non-binary person. In other words, a fundamental tenet of quantum mechanics is very intuitive for Amrou.” 

Being non-binary myself, I am probably biased to agree with what is being said here, but that first sentence where Prescod-Weinstein argues that “what is intuitive is constructed by our experience” really does pack a punch. Even if you take all the querness out of it, it matches very well with shifting perceptions of quantum physics. Physicists in the 1920s did not only train within the framework of classical physics, but all the experiments they encountered and all the parts of their lives where they learned to see physics exposed classical behavior. Classical physics is the physics of balls rolling down hills, cars skidding on icy roads and air friction making falling coins reach terminal velocity. We experience those things even before they are explained to us, so once they are recast for us in terms of classical physics we are amenable to calling them intuitive. So, what is intuitive and normal becomes equated with what we experience, and what we experience often. Everything else, be it behavior of physical objects or people gets relegated to weirdness.

Another way to say this is that when things become common and frequent, we get used to them, and are more likely to call them normal. And when something is common, we lose the incentive to ask about the details of how we sought it out, how we looked at it, and under which conditions it happened. I can answer these questions for you about many quantum phenomena. We do not commonly experience quantum effects, so we learn how to look for them and how to engineer the conditions under which they become apparent. 

Do you want to see a particle become a wave? You will need a small glass and metal chamber devoid of air, about six lasers, some magnets, a sample of sodium or potassium, a really good CCD camera and a whole lot of time. On the other hand, I may not have to give you such a recipe, or any recipe at all, if you just wanted to see a moving object slow down because of friction or something fall towards the ground because of gravity. When this fact of not giving a recipe becomes conflated with thinking there does not have to be a recipe at all, outside of the world of atoms and rolling balls, opportunities for harm arise.

That Prescod-Weinstein quote helps here too, because she is recounting a queer person being asked whether their queerness is natural. There is a long history of naturalists and biologists turning a blind eye to signs of queerness in the animal world, basically all the way up to 1999 when Canadian researcher Bruce Bagemihl published his book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, which collects studies of more than 450 species of animals that have been documented showing homosexual and bisexual behaviors. This book was such a challenge to the status quo and so powerful that it played a role in the United States Supreme Court case that struck sodomy laws as unconstitutional in 2003. 

As journalist Lulu Miller explains in this great episode of the You’re Wrong About podcast, the idea that same sex attraction is unnatural originates with Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, but later scientists also found a way to tie it into Darwin’s theory of evolution, adding a more scientific sheen to it. This then incentivized them to simply not look or purposefully turn a blind eye or find excuses to dismiss any signs of queerness in animals that they stumbled upon for the next 700 years. They assumed that heterosexuality was common, normal and happened under such normal conditions, within a recipe for empirical observation that was so universal that it did not need to be spelled out. Of course, the world is as queer as it is not, it is just that it's hard to see that if the idea of queerness itself upsets your conception of reality.

This applies to many other types of difference among people and behavior that have been encoded as both normal and weird by people who are in power and shape our laws and our culture. It is probably not a surprise that science has often been leveraged to help the transition from deeming something as common because of a refusal to look elsewhere, then codifying it as normal, then punishing everyone who was immediately rendered not normal or weird. 

Race science, biomedical models of criminality, even the way mental illnesses are still treated as illnesses and disabilities rather than just a difference in lived experience come to mind. Ironically, though science has the capacity to overhaul our understanding of reality, like it did with quantum theory, it can also be a potent tool for those who do not want any type of overhaul at all. Among most recent examples, I am thinking here of the Cass report and its framing of trans youth as something new and overwhelming without acknowledging any of the long history of young people seeking transition or the even more mundane reality that more young people have started to seek gender affirming care in the United Kingdom in recent years simply because a change in diagnostic categories made more of them eligible to do so.

You can certainly meet scientists who are ready to accept that an atom is a wave if you look at it the right way, but claim that their colleagues who experience life differently are somehow in the wrong for wanting that experience to be deemed normal as well. The lag between accepting something seemingly weird as a fact of the universe for inanimate objects and for people is sometimes devastating. And it underscores how important it is that we ask the same rigorous and unflinching questions about claims of something being counterintuitive, odd or esoteric whether that something is a particle or a person.

I’ve always thought that there is a bit of escapism behind how taken people who do not work in science can be with the word quantum, reinforced by incidents like a family member once asking me whether my training in quantum physics made me think that reincarnation could be at least a little real. Quantum theory butts heads with objective realism, or the idea that objects exist in some fundamentally self-standing true way even when they are not observed, with absolute certainty in our observations, and with the notion that if we can just gather enough information about something then we can predict exactly what it will do next. In other words, quantum theory raises the possibility that the world is fuzzier than we think, and that we can know less about it than we may want - and that the great men of the age of enlightenment told us.

If you are someone who wants control and believes that there is always such a thing as getting something exactly right, this may upset you. This is in part why it upset the mostly white men who discovered quantum theory but were trained, by other mostly white men, to think perfect rationality exists and they can leverage it to achieve absolute knowledge. On the other hand, if you are looking to escape being boxed in into being just one thing and defining yourself with nothing but precision and certainty, quantum theory may reassure you that that need is not unnatural. The fuzziness may offer you an intellectual escape of sorts. If you’re in the latter camp, you probably would not call it weird in any sort of judgmental and derogatory way.

In a world that is normalizing or ignoring genocide, trying to make it impossible for queer people to keep existing in public and maybe even at all, where obscene wealth gaps go unremarked upon and blaming someone who is different than the presumed ideal citizen for every economic and other ill is becoming the lingua franca of American politicians from all sides, the word “normal” is quickly becoming something monstrous. Some use it as a weapon and a reason to dole out punishment to everyone deemed not normal. Some, even more worryingly, have taken to saying things like “this is not normal” or “in a normal world this would not happen” or “I wish we could go back to normal”, then doing absolutely nothing about it. Whether it’s a cajole or a way to sound concerned but stay complacent, the word is fraught, possibly as useless as it has ever been.

Naively, what I wish for is for all those people that want to click on stories with “quantum” in the headline because they are intrigued, galvanized or even disconcerted by what we have long been framing as the weirdness of the physical world is to seek a little more weirdness in themselves. 

The more I think about it the more I am convinced that this is a bad time for seeking normalcy and the exact right time to upset the sense of reality that has brought us to this point. The fact that the keepers of status quo have such violence in store as we saw when incredibly militarized police forces came down on student protests across the United States, earlier this month, only makes this more salient. I would lie if I said that I wasn’t scared about what may happen next, but I am also more certain than ever that we have to hold on to our weirdness and use it to reshape and re-do the framework for how the world works that we have been taught more than ever.

Best,

Karmela

*All quantum objects and states are by default non-classical, as classical and quantum physics are formulated as opposites, but contemporary physicists often use the idea of non-classicality as a way to quantify just how quantum something is. Different measures of non-classicality have been proposed and are used, especially in studies of how quantum signals can transmit information or be used inside of new kinds of computers, and they all try to put a number on how different a quantum behavior is, or how deviant from something we’d see in the classical world that we experience.

Do you like Ultracold? Help me grow this newsletter by recommending it to a friend, sharing this letter on social media or becoming a subscriber.

ABOUT ME LATELY

WRITING

A few weeks ago I got to virtually attend the International Conference on Reproducibility in Condensed Matter Physics and write about it for New Scientist. Many scientific disciplines have already had their own reproducibility crises, but despite its high impact on technology, the condensed matter physics community has been slow to engage in the same kind of self-reflection. Now that it is finally happening, in part thanks to a few very public and egregious instances of scientific misconduct within the field, it feels really important to shine as much light as possible onto this discussion. I am grateful to have had a chance to be a small part of that.

On a lighter note, I also recently wrote about record breaking X-rays fired by a giant laser underneath California (writing these words will never not feel like I am engaging with supervillains) and what they may allows us to “see” in the future, and I wrote about how black holes were once believed to be the best scramblers of information in the universe, but that may not actually be the case.

READING

I really enjoyed 17776, a piece of multimedia speculative fiction about the future of football by Jon Bois which skillfully brings together the tender and the absurd that already exists in American sports but is here amplified through characters such as space probes and players that have not had a rest from the game for centuries.

A colleague lent me a copy of Melissa Faliveno’s Tomboyland and I spent a good chunk of a recent Saturday absolutely glued to its pages. This is a collection of essays about the Midwest, about gender and queerness, about moving to New York to become a writer, and a whole lot of other issues that feel so incredibly relevant to me that I almost got mad at my colleague for knowing me so well. There is something really special about being seen by good writing, a sort of reassurance that things that are happening to you are never challenges that the universe maliciously concocted to singularly torture just yourself, and a sort of spark of encouragement to keep pushing your own story forward. I can’t wait to finish this book.

Margeux Feldman of the @softcore_trauma Instagram writing about crying during sex, trauma, trust and being in your body on their newsletter Carescapes. I’ve been really taken with how raw and honest yet well thought through and careful their series Wounding/Wanting, which deals intersections between hurt, desire and healing, has been. It has also been really interesting to see similar pieces of writing appear across different entries in the series as Feldman irons out what exactly it is that needs to be said, and in what form, to make the narrative work and the healing work stick. 

Robert Macfarlane writing about people whose way of life may be going extinct together with the changes in their environment in Granta magazine. He invokes the evolutionary idea of “ghost species,” each of which is a “species that has been out-evolved by its environment, such that, while it continues to exist, it has little prospect of avoiding extinction,” to frame his visit to a village in East Anglia where it is farmers and agrarians that are becoming ghosts of a sor. He writes: ”Historically, the idea of ghost species has been confined to the non-human kingdoms. But sitting in Eric’s kitchen that January day, it seemed clear that there were also human ghosts: types of place-faithful people who had been out-evolved by their environments – and whose future disappearance was almost assured.” This is a beautiful and melancholy piece that does not pass judgment or assign blame, just captures a moment that ought to keep living on whether it be a little ghastly or not.

This “unsonnett” by Dante Di Stefano about nature, death and the environment. As much as this is a poem preoccupied with how much of our world may actually be left for future generations, I found many of its forward-looking lines, like below, to be packed with love for nature in a way that is not despairing at all. Di Stefano writes:

My children & my children’s children

will inherit the edges of cumulonimbus

clouds, the unexpected sunflower

blooming from a second-story rain

gutter, the gentleness of the marbling

sunlight on the fur of a rabbit stilled in

a suburban backyard. | | I am in love

with the Earth. | | There are still

blackberries enough to light the brain

with the star charts of a sweetness—

LISTENING

I learned a lot from the NPR podcast Landslide which traces the turn of the Republican party towards the kind of right wing conservatism that we know it for today through the transition from Gerald Ford to Ronald Reagan. Host and journalist Ben Bradford is a skillful storyteller and the production of the show makes it easy to follow a fairly convoluted story, one that really clarified and changed my perception of what American politics were like in the 1970s and how their echoes still really matter today. Ides like the archetype of the outsider candidate ready to clean up Washington or the importance of direct access to voters and parties having their own partisan media that Bradford keeps returning to in the series might as well be about today as much as about the Reagan era.

One of my partner’s softball teammates recommended that I listen to the new Knocked Loose record after I disclosed my past as a fan of heavy, loud and fast music and they were absolutely correct to do so. This is such a tight, coherent, punchy record and a real showcase of how good hardcore can be. My favorite song is Suffocate which has a great feature by the once absurd YouTuber Poppy. The same person also really hit it out the park by pointing me to Frail Body’s 

Artificial Bouquet, which reminds me of early Deafheaven and a more doomier Thou, a combination that I loved.

WATCHING

My partner and I finally finished watching FX’s Shogun, a prestige TV show based on a series of novels that had already been adapted to a hit TV show in the 1980s. Having never read the novels or watched that earlier adaptation, we went into Shogun pretty cold and ended up taking a long time to piece together its ten very meticulously made episodes. This show did not blow my mind, but I found it worthwhile and interesting to watch, especially for its commitment to getting medieval Japan right and providing us with the point of view of characters other than the one white protagonist. A lot about this show was beautiful, but a lot could have also been more impactful had Shogun not completed its run with an exposition-packed episode that felt rushed and sudden. This is often my complaint about so-called prestige TV where it seems to be common practice to make the second-to-last episode extremely action packed and the last episode full of tell-instead-of-show type moments which, I guess, ensure that the viewers really got why the drama and violence of what happened before was necessary. I would have been perfectly happy to have a few more hours of Shogun and a lot less of the main characters spelling out their plans in words rather than actions. Having said that, if the rumors are true and the show returns for a second season, I will still have enough curiosity about the world the show’s creators built so far to want to keep watching it.

EATING

I was grateful that a friend whose birthday cake I made last year asked me to give it another go this year, so this coconut and passionfruit number was extra sweet and special for me. 

I also tried my hand at Jordan Smith’s giant scone with hibiscus poached strawberries, from his great recipe newsletter Save Me A Slice. It feels like I am bookmarking every single of Jordan’s recipes, but this one also had the added benefit of leaving me with half a bag of dried hibiscus, which I soon learned can be used to make really nice vegan tacos (though I doctored mine some by adding some chipotle chiles in adobo sauce and tomato sauce into the rehydrated hibiscus flowers as I braised them with garlic, cumin and onions).