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NY Times, Feb. 17 2015
Disorder Rules the Universe
‘The Quantum Moment’ Recounts the End of Determinism
By AMIR ALEXANDER
The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg Taught Us
to Love Uncertainty.
By Robert P. Crease and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber.
W.W. Norton. 352 pages. $29.95.
“On or about September 1927,” wrote the philosopher Ray Monk, “the
physical world changed.” Until then, according to Robert P. Crease and
Alfred Scharff Goldhaber’s rich and entertaining new book, “The Quantum
Moment,” we lived in a homogeneous, continuous, Newtonian world in which
all objects moved seamlessly from the past to the future, governed by
universal mathematical laws.
But in that fateful year, everything changed: Objects now follow
different rules depending on their size, and we can never be sure where
they are or what they are doing.
In fact, we can’t even say what they are, because that depends on how we
observe them. Our reality became one of unpredictable “gaps,
inconsistencies, warps and bubbles,” as John Updike put it, and we are
still struggling to find our way in the quantum universe.
Dr. Crease is a philosopher and Dr. Goldhaber a physicist at Stony Brook
University, and their book is an introduction to the brave new world we
inhabit. The harmony of the Newtonian universe, they argue, began to
fray in 1900, when Max Planck discovered that to correctly describe
“black box” radiation, he had to make a radical and unwarranted
assumption: that light radiation was not continuous, but came in
discrete and irreducible packets of a fixed size, or quantum.
Classical physicists believed the discontinuous quantum was a mere
computational trick, but rather than fade away as expected, the
mysterious energy packets started popping up in more and more places. In
1905, Einstein demonstrated that the quantum explained the photoelectric
effect and the strange phenomenon known as Brownian motion. Some years
later, a young Niels Bohr came up with a model of the atom in which
electrons moved between specified “orbits” when they absorbed or emitted
energy quanta. The unwelcome interloper, it seemed, was here to stay.
For Newtonian physics, much worse was to come. From 1925 to 1927,
quantum mechanics moved from challenging the contents of classical
physics to undermining its deepest foundations. It was during those
intense years that Werner Heisenberg proposed his uncertainty principle,
which posited that the location and momentum of particles could not both
be known with certainty at the same time. Almost simultaneously Erwin
Schrödinger proposed his psi function, which describes the probability
that a particle will be found in a given location in terms of a wave,
which in turn led Bohr to formulate his complementarity principle: An
object can be a wave or a particle depending on how it is measured. The
location and momentum of an object, and even whether it is a wave or a
particle, was no longer a free-standing fact of nature. It depended on
the act of observation.
Dr. Crease and Dr. Goldhaber make these mind-boggling theories plausible
to the lay reader, but their focus is on the cultural implications of
the quantum revolution. What can one make of a world in which particles
move seemingly as they please, where a particle can also be a wave, and
measurement can affect its location, momentum and even what it is? And
how does that change how we see the world?
Clearly the new science has given rise to a new way of experiencing the
world. Updike, the authors point out, likened reconstructions of John F.
Kennedy’s assassination to the indeterminacy of subatomic particles; the
artist Antony Gormley created series of sculptures exploring how form
takes shape through randomness; a character in Teju Cole’s novel “Open
City” perceives the illusion of life’s continuity.
And some of those nearest to the storm made more sweeping claims.
Already in 1928, the famed British astronomer Arthur Eddington argued
that the indeterminacy of the quantum universe opened the way for the
reintroduction of the spiritual into the world, initiating a line of
thinking that associates the paradoxes of the quantum world with the
mysteries of religion. Some years later, the American physicist Arthur
H. Compton argued that the quantum world pointed to the existence of
God; in the 1970s, the Fundamental Fysiks Group related quantum
mechanics to New Age Eastern mysticism.
For Dr. Crease and Dr. Goldhaber, however, the significance of the
moment lies elsewhere. Quantum mechanics changed the world not by
reintroducing spiritualism into science but by extinguishing the dream
of perfect determinism and mathematical predictability that structured
the Newtonian universe.
Yet that dream is far older than Newton: Already in the sixth century
B.C., Pythagoras and his disciples claimed that everything in the world
could be described by whole numbers and their ratios, and more than two
millenniums later, Descartes made a powerful case for a perfectly
rational and mathematically knowable universe. Each time, however, the
rigorous scheme fell victim to the forces of disorder: The Pythagoreans
had their “quantum moment” when they discovered irrational numbers,
which proved the hopelessness of their quest; Descartes’s followers were
felled by Newton’s discovery of universal gravity.
The quantum revolution may well have changed our world, as Dr. Crease
and Dr. Goldhaber argue. But it may not have been the unique turning
point that they make it to be. It was, quite possibly, just the latest
encounter in a long struggle pitting the human advocates of mathematics
and order against an unruly world that seems to keep its deepest
mysteries to itself.
Amir Alexander is the author of “Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous
Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World.”
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