From The Tao of Physics to What the Bleep Do We Know?, quantum mechanics has been a favorite target for wildly misguided cultural appropriations. That’s hardly surprising; quantum mechanics is hard, and not many physicists understand it at a deep level. The only interesting argument is whether “not many” in that sentence should be replaced by “no.”
Yesterday I stumbled across two invocations of quantum mechanics in very different contexts. First, via 3quarksdaily, historian John Lukacs muses on the centrality of our nature as human beings to our ability to apprehend and understand the world.
All of this happened during and after three-quarters of a century when physicists, inventing and dependent on more and more powerful machines, have found more and more smaller and smaller particles of matter, affixing them with all kinds of names. Until now, well into the 21st century, it is (or should be) more and more likely that not only A Basic Theory of Everything but also the smallest Basic Unit of Matter will and can never be found. Why? Because these particles are produced by scientists, human beings themselves.
Every piece of matter—just as every number—is endlessly, infinitely divisible because of the human mind. Some scientists will admit this. Others won’t.
It goes on like that at great length; it was hard to choose a representative excerpt. Basically, Lukacs is making a mistake resembling that which I accused Paul Davies of some time back — demanding that properties of as-yet-known physical theories conform to some cherished metaphysical presuppositions. In reality, the fact that scientists built the apparatuses that produce elementary particles doesn’t tell us anything at all about whether a Theory of Everything is an attainable goal. It may or may not be, but our status as conscious human beings doesn’t have anything to say about it.
And then, via Cynical-C, we find Roger Ebert reviewing Watchmen:
So let’s ask what we understand about quantum mechanics. We’ll start with me. I understand nothing.
Oh, I’ve read a lot about it. Here is what I think I know: At a basic level, the universe is composed of infinitesimal bits, I think they’re called strings, which seem to transcend our ideas about space and time. One of these bits can be in two places at once, or, if two bits are at a distance, can somehow communicate with one another. Now I have just looked it all up in Wikipedia, and find that not only don’t I understand quantum mechanics, I don’t understand the article either. So never mind. Let’s just say my notions are close to the general popular delusions about the subject, and those are what Dr. Manhattan understands.
Let’s see: despite the name “quantum,” it’s not really right to think of quantum mechanics as based on individual “bits.” But it’s true that fields resolve themselves into particles under careful observation, so that’s an excusable confusion. “Strings” have nothing to do with it, a consequence of mixing up different topics in the pop-science domain. “Somehow communicate with each other” refers to entanglement — widely-separated entangled particles don’t really communicate, but that’s certainly our fault as scientists and communicators, since we keep saying that they do.
There are two major differences between Lukacs’s discourse on quantum mechanics and Ebert’s. First, Lukacs is much more subtle, intricately weaving concepts from modern physics into a thesis concerning the role of history in human affairs. (Still completely wrong, of course.) But second and more importantly, Ebert admits he has no idea what he’s talking about, and goes to look things up on Wikipedia; Lukacs, in contrast, flaunts his misunderstanding, waving it around as proof of his erudition. Score one for the non-academics.
(And there’s no justification for scientists sneering at historians in general on this score; if I had a nickel for every time a physicist flung around concepts like “falsifiability” or “postmodernism” without knowing what was going on, I could rescue the American banking system all by myself.)
What I really found interesting was that Ebert, after giving up on Wikipedia — and rightfully so, their physics articles are uniformly useless for someone approaching the ideas as an outsider — turned next to YouTube for edification! He includes a few clips that try to say something helpful about quantum mechanics. I wonder if that’s the wave of the future. It gave me the idea of making a set of very short videos, each of which would succinctly explain one scientific idea. Making a two-minute video would take less time than writing a decent blog post. (Right?)
Phil Plait did a pretty impressive job with his “Q&BA” series. That might be a model worth emulating.
Blake, thanks for that link. The excerpt from Brian Boyd’s essay (in your comment) bolsters my faith that there remain many intelligent and careful thinkers in the humanities, notwithstanding the corrosive effects of certain mind-numbing fads (which seem to have largely run their course in recent years).
“if I had a nickel for every time a physicist flung around concepts like “falsifiability” or “postmodernism” without knowing what was going on, I could rescue the American banking system all by myself.”
You may understand quantum mechanics, but I am suddenly very skeptical of your ability to do basic division. 🙂
I’ve recently given up trying to understand quantum mechanics properly through wikipedia and youtube and have turned to this instead – http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=stanforduniversity&view=playlists
Stanford university lectures by Leonard Susskind
I’m halfway through the quantum mechanics course, and so far so good…
Blake, that’s a great blog name: Fractured Ceramics.
Dear Readers; Such videos basically already exist. Indeed, for about a year now the
Journal of Number Theory has been publishing on youtube “video abstracts” for some of the
papers that are accepted for publication. (We leave it to the author(s) at the moment whether they create such a video.) The idea is that these are going to be archived with the
paper so that readers in 50 years can see and hear the speaker. If these are done enough you will
be able to follow the speaker through his/her career this way.
We also are putting these on youtube (besides the server of the publisher) and you can
f ind them at
http://www.youtube.com/JournalNumberTheory
The video by Alain Connes found there is a brilliant example of the power of these videos.
David Goss
That was quick: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxFfUsDgnaU
“And there’s no justification for scientists sneering at historians in general on this score; if I had a nickel for every time a physicist flung around concepts like “falsifiability” or “postmodernism” without knowing what was going on, I could rescue the American banking system all by myself.”
I’d like to see some cites here. I’ve seen you chide scientists before about their “naive” philosophical ideas. Heck, I believe your post defending Derrida at the time of his death may be the first blog post I ever read. So, how do you think physicists misunderstand falsifiability? And how in any way does this compare to the near total misunderstanding of things like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle or Godel’s incompleteness theorem among the humanities set? Do you think you understand “falsifiability” and “postmodernism” in a way that most other physicists don’t, or do you merely assume the typical characterization of them is wrong? Do you think working scientists would actually benefit from knowing these things or do you just wish we’d all stop knocking Bruno Latour so you don’t feel obligated to apologize for your fellow physicists to Berube?
jb– I don’t claim to be an expert in these things myself, nor do I know how to compare the relative amount of misunderstanding between two fields. Nor do I think that you necessarily become a better scientist by studying the history and philosophy of science.
But I do think that the default assumption of experts in field X when approaching field Y should be one of respect — imagining that the true experts in that other field are likely to be smart people who have thought hard about very difficult problems. Prolonged exposure may force one to modify the default assumption, but it’s the proper place to start. If something seems ridiculous on first blush, your initial assumption should be that you don’t understand it, not that the people in field Y are all idiots. Likewise, when you want to appropriate some handy concept for you own purposed, it’s a good idea to keep in mind that there are probably a lot of subtleties and caveats involved, and you should probably be careful.
Very few scientists would disagree with these recommendations, if they were given to humanities professors talking about science; I think they are equally sensible when scientists want to talk about the humanities.
I agree that a default attitude of respect is appropriate, although when say a historian of science is discussing science I don’t think that it is necessarily obvious that they are the expert and that actual scientists are evaluating their work from a position of ignorance, but in fact quite the opposite. The question though is how much scientifically ignorant pap like that which you quoted from John Lukas above must one endure before harboring suspicions that maybe this kind ignorance may in fact be endemic to certain areas of research? Certainly people like Sokal and Bricmount (or Levitt and Gross before them) have made at least a case for this.
My main objection to your post though, was your implication that scientists are just as ignorant of things outside of their expertise (or it would have to be inside their expertise to really be fully equivalent since Lukas is making ignorant claims about science as part of work in HIS discipline). I would bet you object to this kind of everybody’s equally guilty, pox on both houses, etc. kind of discourse when discussing Republican smear tactics for instance. Why do you indulge in it here?
Hey Sean,
A few months ago, I had a similar idea about teaching through visuals. I’m in the process of creating short clips to explain Fourier Analysis and Convolution; still getting the hang of After Effects.
Early betas are up right now, your readers might be interested:
Fourier Analysis: http://bafoontecha.com/2008/12/11/a-visual-guide-to-fourier-transforms/
Convolution: http://bafoontecha.com/2009/01/25/on-convolution-and-other-things-you-think-you-dont-know/
hm…seems to me you’d have to hear a physicist say “falsafiability,” or “postmodern” about twice a second for 12 hours a day every day of your life (guessing age) to make that nickel argument. That’s assuming 700bil was really enough. Which is a bad assumption.
As a New York Times book critic once said about Buddhism, it does not take a great deal of intelligence to empty one’s mind.
Reading reviews on Watchmen has finally convinced me that most film critics are clueless and only interested in promoting themselves. Ebert is a bit better than most in this category, though, but most of them know about as much science as did a recent former US President.
The problem with saying that physicists don’t really understand quantum mechanics is that people start saying “Well, since nobody really understands quantum mechanics, maybe at the bottom level there are really purple unicorns ….” We may not really, really, truly understand quantum mechanics, but we understand enough to know that we don’t need purple unicorns.
So purple unicorns are not a realistic example, but I’ve had this essentially this conversation with people about faster-than-light communication, and about reasons for quantum computers being fundamentally impossible.
Journalists love to say that scientists don’t understand things. As scientists, I don’t think we should make the claim that we completely understand quantum mechanics (especially when we don’t completely understand how it fits together with general relativity), but I don’t know what we should say instead, though. Any suggestions?
I don’t see a problem with claiming an understanding of quantum mechanics. Perhaps this understanding is not “complete” and “true”, but to be honest I don’t understand what that would even mean.
To journalists, one can say, like for any other topic, that there are those who do not understand quantum mechanics because they’ve not studied it sufficiently, but that there are also those who’ve studied it and do understand it. However, part of the latter group, perhaps for historical reasons or perhaps out of personal modesty, don’t admit to it. Notably, Feynman, whose famous quote about nobody understanding quantum mechanics often gets brought up in these discussions, belonged to that subcategory, among other names like Einstein, Bell, Bohm, etc. The much bigger problem is posed by those who claim an understanding without any study. And, unfortunately, there’s no shortage of them.
As a short sound bite nugget, I would offer in the most facetious of tones:
Though, perhaps, it comes off as a bit too crass for general consumption. 🙂
Peter, I absolutely agree. My default approach is to tell the truth: there are things that we don’t understand about quantum mechanics. Also, there are things that we do understand. “We don’t know everything” is not a license to ignore the things we certainly do know.
However, I agree that it would be nice to have a better way of conveying this state of tentative knowledge more concisely and accurately. Open to ideas on that score. I suspect there may not be a simple solution, just because the concept is very subtle.
Maybe analogies are helpful: “We don’t know, with mathematical certainty, what would be the perfect play to call in any particular situation during a football game. But we’re pretty sure that punting on first down is a bad idea.”
Hi Sean,
I like your analogy!
Thanks,
Peter
I didn’t see any metaphysical presuppositions driving Lukac’s argument (maybe in the last few paragraphs, where he strays off and makes a big point he never really tried to justify). As I understood it, Lukacs is using his rudimentary understanding of quantum mechanics to make an epistemological, or even logical, point about a Theory of Everthing. Not metaphysical, and much more relevant to an actual discourse on science. In short, he’s talking about the inability to prove a Theory of Everything, not the inability of the world to be a certain way. than However, I am also guilty of trying to make sense of Lukac’s argument, even where it does not quite make sense, so I might be misinterpreting him.
Lukacs clearly starts with some picture of Heisenberg Uncertainty–we can’t know the mass and velocity of a particle precisely as they are because the knowledge requires observation, and observation alters the way things are. Fair enough. Somewhere he makes a big jump from that to saying we don’t even know if all of these subatomic particles exist because our evidence of them is also based on observation using human machines (not sure if actually means we don’t know that the subatomic particles exist, but that seems close). Et. cetera et. cetera…. any theory of everything at best purports to tell us the way the world probably works. The inability to have a theory of everything is therefore an epistemological constraint of the Uncertainty principle–which I guess we will assume to be true without any doubt. Depending on the level of certainty/probability you require from a quantum theory of everything, he might even have a point there.
He adds to that a point that scientific knowledge is human knowledge and therefore constrained by our own capacity to understand and interpret the world. It doesn’t mean that the world does not operate according to unified laws, it just means that we as humans will never understand those laws. Now, at first look that is dependent on metaphysical assumptions. After all, there is no basic principle that implies that the laws of physics must be hard to understand. Per Sean’s commentary, we haven’t discovered those laws yet, so lets not rule out the idea that they could be simple.
But some of his discussion suggests that he making a more analytical, and less metaphysical claim about the relationship between the theory of everything and human intellectual capacity. He basically assumes a theory requires a finite system of particles (or fields). I assume that Lukacs doesn’t really understand the finer points of what he is talking about regarding splitting atoms into smaller and smaller pieces. But also, we can’t keep positing and infinite set of new entities to fit into our theory of everything, or else no finite being will ever understand said theory.
Lukacs point here is actually kind of interesting, though by no means something I am ready to accept without question: human language and mathematics inherently involves terms which are infinitely divisible, a theory of everything inherently requires particles which are not infinitely divisible, therefore it is impossible for a human to understand a theory of everything that is written in human language/math.
That just sounds wrong–of course I am capable of understanding discrete items; in fact, I primarily observe the universe as a system of discrete macroscopic object. But at least that is an analytical/linquistic argument against the theory of everything, not metaphysical. Again there is a huge difference. Metaphysical arguments are just anti-science in a sense (not completely: a cosmologist is happy to know that our universe can’t be one which violates the grandfather paradox, or other logical impossibilities; we do want our laws to describe a world that can actually exist). The analytic argument, if it could be made to sound little less weird, I’d be interested in thinking about twice.
No kidding. The general maths articles are as bad – it’s like someone has gone through and removed anything that might be useful to a newbie on the basis that introductory material is “not encyclopedic” enough. The pages just go round and around.