Wigner's Friend
On theorizing reality in the time of disasters and violence
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.
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WIGNER’S FRIEND*
I guess it started with the multiverse. I was not losing sleep over whether we live in one, imagining a Karmela from some parallel universe, but it did temporarily become my job to think about it. A scientific paper had come out arguing that the multiverse, if it exists, could be even larger than physicists previously thought and one of my editors judged that this would make for a good story. For about a week, trying to understand how you can make the leap from a few equations to many, many worlds, and talking to experts about it, became part of my daily routine
Then, more papers came. One about time being a quantum illusion. One about a particle's properties becoming disembodied and independent of it, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat. One about how some correlations and influences can extend over vast distances even when those distances would render any communication nearly impossible. I wrote a feature about how the notion of reality as scientists have long conceived of it is in so much trouble that we may need a huge mathematical overhaul of physics’ foundations just to salvage it. Then, papers arguing about whether cause really must precede effect in every single physical situation piled up on my desk. After that, I wrote about an experiment that seemed to feature negative time and another one where energy was extracted from seemingly empty space, then teleported elsewhere.
For most of the summer, being a physics reporter on the news beat forced me to sit with some of the strangest scientific ideas, many of which sound like science fiction, and take them extremely seriously. It was a summer of mathematically-induced existential crisis, or at least it was shaping up to be such.
This does underscore the power of science as a method of meaning-making and the utility of having been trained as a scientist - even for the most outrageous ideas there are frameworks, methods and references that can help ground them in something more like what we experience as reality. Reality itself is a fraught term that lends itself to competing definitions. When I was reporting that feature, several researchers, some physicists and some philosophers, cautioned me to ask everyone what exactly they mean by “realism,” let alone “reality.” It is hard to say whether spending large portions of their lives thinking through questions like how to define reality, makes researchers immune to the immensity of those questions, but people outside of that narrow expertise are certainly not.
Readers are drawn to stories about research results that seem counterintuitive to them, or simply shock them. Many of the papers I have read and reported on this summer also sparked animated, and often fun, debates in the newsroom where I work. There is something inherently joyous in being able to say “I always knew time didn’t exist” or “I thought reality wasn’t real once when I was seven and now I am vindicated.” Though the type of academic research I am referring to is very rigorous and always relies on lots of hard-to-parse mathematics, it does give readers permission to engage a kind of imagination that they may have once been told is excessive - or even that it needs to be replaced with evidence-based science. No matter how much math you use, the work of scientists will always include worldbuilding and storytelling and that work is not fully disconnected from what other storytellers do. The curiosity and creativity that comes alive in people when they realize how much of the story of our universe we have not told yet is often nothing short of beautiful.
I don’t want to make it sound like it is easy to write about the multiverse from a standpoint of rigorous science rather than science fiction, and I can attest first hand that making sense of experiments that report findings that our language captures only with absolute clunkiness, like the phrase “negative time,” is intellectually taxing. As a journalist who is still making a name for themselves, I have objectively had a good summer because I managed to write so much in this vein.
But this summer has also been an incredibly tiring one, and probably would have been such even if I wasn’t also trying to complete the manuscript for my first book. I have felt both invigorated and inspired by the work I am reporting on, and drained by having to think about it. Thinking about it now as we are moving into the fall and academic physicists around the world are only ramping up their research efforts, brings me to a question that I have often asked myself while I was also an academic physicist - what does it do to a person to always be thinking about how the world works at its most essential, most fundamental level?
A surprising answer came to me while I was reporting that first multiverse story. “I think we're sort of agnostic on the ontology of this,” one of the researchers said to me about their work. “Yeah, I think maybe you can say that we're agnostic about the ontological conclusions.”
I was stunned. We had just spent half an hour discussing all the mathematics that make the idea of a multiverse more plausible, and now the researcher was telling me that despite having poured so much time into this work, they would not take a strong stance on how its conclusions relate to our lived reality. How could a person study something as grand as the possibility that we live in one of a myriad of worlds and be indifferent to whether it's true?
Infamously, physicist Hugh Everett who originated the so-called “many worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics - the original theory of the multiverse - died rather young due to, at least in some part, giving into his vices. His contemporaries have quoted him justifying some of those risky behaviors by assuming that versions of him in some other worlds would make better choices, stay healthier, and live longer. Physicist Max Tegmark, another champion of the theory, told New Scientist in 2014: “I feel a strong kinship with parallel Maxes, even though I never get to meet them. They share my values, my feelings, my memories – they’re closer to me than brothers.” When I first read this, it struck me as radical, but being ontologically agnostic may actually be the more unusual response.
But within a few months, I started to feel the same indifference arise in myself. While my editors and colleagues reacted strongly to every new story about something counterintuitive some particle or atom was doing, and reader numbers stayed strong, I was rarely rattled. I can explain away some of my calm in the face of ideas like time being a quantum illusion by invoking my academic training. Having been a physicist both helps me understand the mathematical arguments, but it also makes me keenly aware of caveats that are always there in every bombastic-sounding study. But part of it also lies in how soothing it can be to pretend that nothing, including reality is real, and everything is up for a safe, academic debate.
I realized this when a physicist asked me, during a particularly engaging interview about realism in quantum mechanics, whether I imagine the electron - the smallest particles to carry electric charge - to have a color. ”Um, I don't, because I don't imagine the electron at all, because I have a PhD in theoretical physics and have been taught to not imagine things,” I said without thinking, and instantly found myself feeling embarrassed.
When did I lose the imagination that I so loved seeing in my colleagues and readers? And, more importantly, if I had stopped imagining, then were there even stakes to any of this? Academic investigations of reality are in danger of serving as a sort of highly respectable escapism, especially if those who preoccupy themselves with this line of thinking never leave the proverbial ivory tower.
A few weeks later, I was having dinner with a college classmate who I had not seen in almost a decade, but we almost immediately fell into a heated debate about the nature and history of science, as if our days of college-appropriate idealism, and also college-appropriate disillusionment, never ended. Since college we had both been exposed to older, renowned physicists who perfectly fit the stereotype of a genius so consumed by his work (and it really almost always is “his”) that he cannot properly tie his shoes or brush his hair. Part of this archetype is often also that such physicists make offensive remarks or hold problematic views because they have not kept up with what it means to be a kind person while they were busy doing cosmologically important mathematics.
How should the impact of such a person on their field be evaluated in 2024? Looking backwards at figures like Erwin Schrodinger or Richard Feynman, their beautiful papers and lectures told so much of the story about the world that physicists tell today, but they also left a legacy of sexism and harm. They got to shape and reshape the frontiers of scientific imagination while completely disregarding the tangible reality of people they harmed.
And today, looking beyond a few bad actors, the gap between studying reality and having to live it can be utterly devastating. “As a physicist based in Gaza, I have been taught to ask questions that challenge our understanding of the world,” writes Qasem Waleed El-Farra at the Islamic University of Gaza. “Being a physicist in Gaza has made me realize that this field explains so much more than the mysteries of nature. It also raises questions about my life as a besieged individual living under occupation.”
In June CE&N ran a story about Rami Morjan, a chemistry professor at the same university, where writer Laurel Oldach described:
Israel bombed the campus in 2008, 2014, and 2021. After the 2014 bombing destroyed the science building, Gardiner says, Morjan helped raise money to rebuild. “They’d really only in the last couple of years got back to where they had been,” Gardiner says.
Still, some types of research were out of reach. Power was generally available only 8–12 h a day; materials and equipment were in short supply. Blockades meant that people in Gaza could not legally import chemicals or—according to a nongovernmental organization’s unofficial translation from Hebrew—“equipment and tools of physical and chemical analysis.” So scientists had to adapt protocols for the available materials and equipment.
Where John Gardiner is a British professor who advised Morjan during his doctoral training. These accounts are tragic for too many reasons to name, but I found them especially hard to read because I recognized an instinct in Morjan and El-Farra that I see in researchers who I interview every day, and in myself - the instinct to always turn to science, to never abandon its quest for meaning and sense-making, even in the worst possible version of reality. In the introduction to my book, I write:
I still see physics everywhere. It offers itself to me when I try to make sense of all the paths my life did and did not take, it unexpectedly reassures me when I try to reconcile and cobble together all the identities that I feel describe me, and it is there when I am waging war against my body or distrusting my memories, providing me with something to anchor my thinking in. Sometimes it comforts me, and sometimes it sets my mind on fire when I think about my experience of life as not disconnected from what seem to be the deep truths of the physical universe. Often, it makes me feel like I am ready to makes sense of whatever might be about to happen to me, good or bad.
It broke my heart to read about these scientists who are being put into an unbearable situation and immediately feel kinship with how we all reach for our training in moments of crisis.
El-Farra engages with this directly. Underscoring the absurdity of having the tools to understand physical reality on a mechanical level yet have no reprieve of what it is like to actually be in it, he writes:
“I realize that physics in Gaza is different.
Physics taught me how to accurately calculate the velocity of a rocket as it hits the ground. But it didn’t teach me how to calculate the fallout if that rocket targeted my house.
Physics taught me that when the density of an object is less than that of water, it will float on the surface, like aid boxes dropped from planes. It didn’t teach me that people might drown trying to reach that aid.”
State-side, I thought about students protesting their universities’ financial ties to the genocide in Palestine, as well as protestors looking to stop police training campuses, which are inevitably part of the same militarization and death-making project. The title of my recent cover feature was “reclaiming reality” - isn’t that exactly what these activists were trying to do? Were they not acknowledging what living reality is like and looking to take charge of it and communally reshape it?
In Practicing New Worlds, Andrea J. Ritchie engages the idea of wave-particle duality, which is a staple of quantum theory. Here, the same quantum object, like an electron, can exhibit wave-like behavior in one experiment and particle-like behavior in another. Being a particle and being a wave are mutually exclusive physical identities by definition because a particle is localized while a wave is extended. This then begs the question of what something like an electron actually is and especially what is it when its behavior is not constrained by a pre-built experimental apparatus. Ritchie cites the Complex Movements collective’s use of the word wavicle for such objects and summarizes lessons that its properties impart as follows:
“wavicles… reminds us to take hold of a piece of what we are wrestling with while recognizing that it is impossible to measure all of its properties and to remember that the state, like everything else, is part of a larger, imperceptible, complex whole that we are shaping through our interactions… Wave-particle duality also helps us let go of the need for certainty about what abolitionist futures will look like and see ourselves as part of weaving them into being.”
Researchers have written myriad papers and books about what it means for our reality that something like a wavicle can exist at all (one popular theory is that it doesn’t and we have just failed to construct experiments sufficiently good to reveal to us its “true” and more definitive nature). Often, I think that organizers and activists leapfrogged them by understanding that we can not just intellectualize but also experience some of the wavicle’s meaning if we stop pretending that the lessons of science exist without a societal context.
Beyond the horrors of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, other realities are also being denied, like the fact that many are already living in the world affected by climate catastrophe, the one that media like to report on as if it was still a problem that can be theorized about, or solved in the future if we just think about technology hard enough now. The physics of addressing climate change makes a very different impression than the physics of rising waves, of destruction in the path of hurricanes, of failing power grids, of infrastructure materially failing in the face of heat. I sat in an editorial meeting recently where it was a point of debate whether readers would find a longform piece on the power grid boring, as if that grid is not an entity whose behavior directly impacts so many lives.
This is not to lay blame solely on the media, nor do I want to imply that scientists should drop all research other than that which engages with the most immediate, most practical threats. But both scientists, and science-centered media, can lose sight of a lived reality in favor of a more fanciful and abstract one. Ultimately, this ends with commentators in popular magazines claiming that science is apolitical and plays no role in issues such as election, even when we are constantly told that this will be the most important one of our lives (again). Scientists working in war zones, in exile, in flooded places and places with no access to electricity will never get to make such a claim. Even within the United States it is increasingly impossible for scientists of color or openly queer scientists to practice science - to study the nature of physical reality - while never once engaging with their own reality, one which is both political and politicized. As is always the case, claiming that something is apolitical is in itself a political statement, and a reflection of privilege.
One of the researchers I spoke to about whether realism can be salvaged within modern physics told me about a framework called “algorithmic idealism” where everything starts with an individual experimenter, or observer, and does not necessarily end with them finding a shared reality with their peers.
“In a way, it says that there is not really a world out there, and the usual way that we think of it, but the only fragments if you want that, like, when you think of a little mosaic, maybe the world is composed of little pieces. But these pieces do not quite fit together. One such piece could be an observer, for example, you,” the researchers explained, citing several famous physics experiments as plausible evidence in favor of the idea that “the pieces are more fundamental than the whole in some sense.”
And it is true that many experiments, even those only conceived as “gedanken,” or thought experiments, imagine two people trying to communicate their reality to each other and either failing to find a common ground, or the one that they do find defies intuition. Often, they’re called Alice and Bob and they are trying to use a quantum object to exchange information. The scenarios they are put into often position them very far from each other, often they can pick up the phone but not say all the words that they want to, and almost always they have to rely on some unusual quantum effect to bring their worlds together because other options fail.
Alice and Bob have become staples of physics writing and research exactly because their troubles allow physicists to explore what exactly is plausible in our physical world (Can you communicate across distances as large as the whole universe? Well, consider Alice on one end and Bob at another, and each has a single particle of light with a particular set of quantum properties…) and so has, inadvertently, the implication that it is extremely difficult to fully connect your reality to that of another.
But those of us who are not in just a gedanken experiment do encounter this issue within existing hierarchies, and our socioeconomic system. There are people who have power, and they do have something to say about what reality is, and what it should be. Who gets to decide what reality is, what a realistic view of the world is, what realistic horizons and goals for policy and organizing are, will consequently be on the electoral ballot in November.
As a person who cannot vote because I wasn’t born in the United States I have spent four elections to date watching people argue on how to reshape my reality from the sidelines. Everything about my day-to-day life has been up for grabs, from my path to citizenship, my access to healthcare, my civil rights as a queer person and who was allowed to fund my research when I was an academic. I have been incredibly lucky and have enjoyed immense privilege along the way so the effect of this has not unraveled my life, but I keep thinking of scholars and thinkers who maybe could be on the edge of discovering the next big thing in the physics of reality but cannot because their lived reality includes denied visas, harassment or illness. And I am not just saying that because I want more physics discoveries, but because the joy of thinking about the most abstract bones of our worlds is being consistently denied to large swaths of people. Politicians deny their lived reality, or they make it more unbearable and then deny that, and they make it impossible for them to participate in shaping one intellectually.
I did not watch the presidential debate, but I did receive a flurry of messages when Kamala Harris mentioned quantum computing, a slice of academic and industrial research that I report on regularly. On social media, scientists and startup CEO excitedly shared memes about it, recognizing that their work had never been mentioned on such a large public stage before. But it's worth noting that Harris did not mention it out of her love for fundamentals of quantum mechanics or even because she had heard hype about quantum computing “solving” climate change and curing cancer. She mentioned it as part of the discussion about economic competition with China, in the same breath as AI, which is a technology that is currently so energy-hungry and environmentally costly that it's giving a second wind to fossil fuels. Harris’s reality is not one of the quantum realm and it is also not one of hurricanes, floods and wildfires, and she was advertising that, selling the public a reality in which market competition and being a lethal superpower is all that matters.
After the Democratic National Convention, Charlotte Shane wrote about the importance of naming that reality and treating it as actually really here, on our doorstep, and not just something to mull about, like the multiverse:
“When it comes to voting, I’m not trying to talk anyone into anything nor out of it. I would only issue the invitation to “act as if the truth were true” because the act becomes a little easier when there are more people doing it. And because I don’t know what is left to us if we can’t claim that much, or what power we might hope to yield if we cede this most modest, fundamental one. We have to debride reality, to carve away the necrotic tissue that encroaches on and obscures the truth. It’s not optional. It’s urgent. It’s necessary. It’s the starting point from which everything else becomes possible.”
I thought of a researcher telling me they were trying to get to the bottom of what physical reality is by studying models with the barest of bones, ones adorned with fewest assumptions, where the math is supposed to resist imprecise or overly contrived interpretations. In physics, this sometimes gets comical, with a few atoms standing in for much bigger chunks of the world, or everything getting approximated as a tiny oscillator. Off the pages of research notebooks, we seem resistant to do this at all, resisting what Shane so poignantly names as debriding. Reality is nowhere more fraught than in places where it matters the most.
As I am writing this I have, incidentally, wrapped up another bout of reporting on the multiverse and my email inbox is couching several emails about quantum causality. Studying and explaining some of physics’ most difficult and also most exciting theories will be part of my job as long as I remain a science journalist. I do think that they are important, and progress on fundamentals of what our world is made of on the most granular level should be seen as worthwhile and exciting. Science media should keep publishing these stories and advancing the conversations about what lies at the very edges of discovery. After all, this is exactly the kind of media that inspired me to become a scientist when I was young. But I am also increasingly feeling the weight of what it means to be able to engage with these ideas in the time of genocide, environmental distasters and leaders across the globe flirting with totalitarianism of all flavors.
If we are to have a future, and if we are to have a revolution, we need intellectuals and physicists just like we need artists and writers, because the future starts with all facets of creativity and imagination, and shaping it will require all of the analytical and meaning-making tools at our disposal. I want physicists to continue to look at a few lines of equations and see infinitely many universes, or maybe a world just like ours but without causality, or one where an object does turn into existential fuzz when you stop looking at it. And I want to keep writing about it. But until the intricacies and riches of all of those hypothetical ways in which the material world may have arranged itself into something like what our senses reveal to us stop feeling so disconnected from, or so inaccessible to, lived realities of both horror and power that the past year has put on stark display, it will not be the latest from Physical Review A that is pushing me into an existential crisis.
Best,
Karmela
*Wigner’s friend is a thought experiment conceived by physicist Eugene Wigner in the 1960s to illustrate the paradoxical nature of the act of measurement in quantum physics. In this scenario, a friend of Wigner’s is observing a quantum system, like an electron in a box, inside of a lab while Wigner is standing outside of the lab and observing both his friend and the electron. Working with standard laws of quantum mechanics to analyze what each person should see here leads to the conclusion that the two can never agree on what exactly is happening to the particle, i.e. their realities are mismatched. Several physicists that I spoke to this past summer told me that resolving the paradox of Wigner’s friend would be a necessary condition for any new quantum theory to be take seriously by the whole physics community.
ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING
Since I have mentioned lots of my recent journalism above, let me use this space to advertise that on October 5th I will be participating in a reading titled EAT OR BE EATEN as part of the Water Street Projects FEAST here in New York. Many thanks to Alicia Kennedy, Mold magazine and all the other organizers for inviting me!
READING
Sofia Samatar’s Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life, which is a short collection of excerpts from the author’s letters to a writer friend as well as from other writers’ writing about writing, all packaged into short bursts of reflection and commentary. I inhaled this book, feeling both inspired by Samatar’s honesty about the difficulties of pursuing writing as a calling and humbled by how many of the authors she cites I had not engaged with in the past. “We were searching for a writing method that was less like writing and more like living,” she writes. And then: “It seemed true to writing that it should be a form of repetition, closer to a heartbeat than a craft.” Reading both made me tear up. Samatar’s interview on the LA Review of Books podcast is also really interesting.
I started Ferris Jabr’s Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life which explores how it’s not so much that Earth hosts or supports life, but that the two are constantly changing each other, like one giant collective where everything is, in some sense, alive. Jabr is great at that science writing thing where you describe traveling and seeing oceans or caves and populate them with scientists written as if they were ready to immediately be the main hero of a movie. There is something very old school, and a bit cumbersome, about this style of writing (how many descriptions of a scientist’s hair do we really need), it can also be beautiful, and the idea at the center of the book is compelling in an almost spiritual way so I am, so far, interested in reading more.
LISTENING
I’ve been lucky to consume a lot of music live in the last few weeks, including Waxhatachee, Bikini Kill and Khruangbin. These were three very different shows, but also a great reminder that music sometimes really does benefit from the shared energy of a crowd so much.
Since various levels of fall melancholy are on the horizon, I have also been listening to lots of MJ Lenderman’s latest album called Manning Fireworks, a sort of alt-country with a wink and a nod, and the more upbeat but still moody indie pop of Royel Otis on PRATTS & PAIN.
On the completely opposite side of the musical spectrum, Freedom, Sweet Freedom by the hardcore band Regional Justice Center is a great example of the genre in how it sounds and also continues the band’s engagement with the realities of incarceration in their community, including a formerly incarcerated family member of one of the musicians being featured on the album.
WATCHING
Many episodes of the animated X-Men series from the 90s because I loved it as a kid and I recently loved X-Men ‘97 as an adult. I never really read Marvel comics and it is quite cliche for a queer person to have grown up loving a story about misfits and chosen family, but the mix of 90s animation, soap-opera-worthy love triangles, campy aliens and nonsensical time travel, and a deep sense of everyone being a part of something larger really speaks to me.
My partner and I have been slowly making our way through the first season of Homicide: Life on the Street, a show that aired in 1993 and one that TV critics relentlessly love to reference. I expected it to be more like Law and Order than anything else, a sort of warm up for the Wire as it is also based on the writing of David Simon - and I was wrong. This is a show that makes interesting creative choices and experiments with form a lot more than any procedural I have watched recently and it really helps that it is not shy about underlining the flaws of policing at every step. I’m excited to watch more.
EATING
Breaded eggplant sandwiches with roasted red peppers and a basil tofu “ricotta.”
Weekly bagels from Knickerbocker Bagel, always untoasted, with tofu veggie spread. One very successful trip to RAS Plant Based for gorgeous platters of Ethiopian food.
A riff on this balsamic and soy tofu which turned out really great. I cooked it in the marinade, then briefly roasted it and it was great both warm with some potatoes and cold the next day with some pickles and ajvar.