Reprobate Quantum Geniuses

Why does everyone have something to say about quantum physics?

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REPROBATE QUANTUM GENIUSES

Everyone has something to say about quantum physics, including the newly minted Nobel laureate in literature.

After the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai was awarded the prestigious prize, a colleague messaged me a piece he had written for the New York Times philosophically inflected Big Ideas series where he, they pointed out, refers to the rules of quantum physics as “unprecedented vile laws.” I scoffed just like my colleague knew that I would scoff. “Who is he to opine on a complex subject that he did not train in,” yelled the gatekeeper in my head. Then, I calmed down.

Krasznahorkai’s piece captures an imagined park bench conversation between a nameless narrator, who is implied to be unhoused, and another person who is sleeping in the park and holding some whiskey. Ventriloquizing the unhoused as prophets and philosophers of a bleak urban life does not exude kindness towards them, but this is where Krasznahorkai is going. His narrator monologues on the nature of reality. He sketches out its history to include a stage of defining it based purely on experience, then a stage of questioning, then a more stable phase marked by religion. That stability, he posits, vanished with the arrival of quantum physics.

In contrast to classical physics of Einstein and Newton, quantum physics is probabilistic instead of deterministic. If you want to predict what a quantum object will do, there is no amount of data or mathematical savvy that can help you do better than give odds for one of its possible behaviours or another. In a quantum world, certainty and causality lose some of their usual sharp meaning. Accordingly, Krasznahorkai writes:

“...man came across new experiences in nuclear physics that crossed the boundary of so-called common sense and reality; the laws of causality and so-called normality, granted to us through millenniums of experience, no longer applied.”

The line about vile laws follows, coupled with an invocation of a specific interpretation of quantum physics that posits that there are many universes parallel to ours. This allows Krasznahorkai’s narrator to question whether a single thing called “reality” exists at all. He blames “reprobate quantum geniuses” and “apostles of quantum science” for raising the possibility that it might not. Needless to say, the multiverse interpretation is in not the consensus one nor has it been buttressed by experiments.

The monologue becomes frenzied. It pivots to fake news, a sharp turn from Einstein to the Fox Corporation. The narrator wonders whether denying reality altogether is all we can do. In the end, what he really wonders, however, is whether the other man will share his whiskey.

Did Krasznahorkai really need to invoke physics to make a point about life being too much? Was there no other way to point out that we all see the subjective reality that we want to, or need to, see? The fragmentation of reality that we are experiencing right now is, I would argue, much more to blame on psychology than physics.

I admit it: I am primed to read this piece unkindly. Or, really, to read it with exasperation. In writing that does not explicitly center science, and in fiction, the word “quantum” is often invoked as a synonym to “magic” or “inexplicably weird.” It becomes a multifunctional plug for plot holes or a vessel for existential dread. As a journalist who reports on quantum science and technology, and a recovering quantum physicist, I bristle at the word when I come across it outside of my field because it tends to be used in ways that are more lazy than accurate - or interesting.

Yet, being able to serve this role indicates the uniqueness of quantum physics’ position in history of science, and underscores how successfully it has broken into popular consciousness. In August, I asked a historian whether he knew of any other theory that has so much utility and has resisted falsification in experiments so stubbornly while so many debates keep raging about what it actually means. He paused for a second, seemingly stumped, then flatly said “No.” If quantum physics didn’t work in a utilitarian sense, your phone or internet connection would not exist right now. If quantum physics did work in a philosophical sense, novelists could not use it to speculate about multiverses and dissolution of normality.

The world governed by the “vile” laws of quantum physics is very much not the world that we can claim with our senses. The denizens of the quantum world are tiny and they are cold, they are electrons and protons and quarks, and they are atoms living in the coldest places allowed by nature. Why do we feel like that world should be intuitive to us?

Tantalizingly, we are also made of electrons and atoms, as is everything that we materially experience. The question of whether some quantumness remains within us and the world that is within our reach, or if it all somehow emerges from the quantum realm unscathed, is not completely without merit. It doesn’t help that physicists disagree on where exactly the quantum world stops and our non-quantum world begins. This is sort of how you end up with the multiverse too. The gaps in our ability to describe quantum theory with words and images instead of just equations can, in clever hands, be stretched to such a scale that you start theorizing about objects much, much bigger than the experiential edges of our reality.

It is a peculiar situation. It gives scientists lifetimes worth of inspiration; I guess I should not blame artists for being struck by it either. As long as they can use it judiciously, and not as a conveniently blunt instrument.

Best,

Karmela