CHAPTER TEN

Entropy

As I trudge along the Hudson this morning, a few lonely snowflakes fall, and a haiku comes to mind:

Every snowflake is

special. But so what? They melt

too fast to matter.

Glum lately, not sure why. My blues are over-determined. They could stem from diminished daylight or unfavorable comparisons of this holiday season to past ones. The Covid plague and climate change are factors. Trump’s refusal to concede the election doesn’t help. Either does the condition of Robert, with whom my son Mac and I once planned to go to Namibia.

When I email Robert to ask how he’s doing, he replies in his usual jocular fashion, but his update is grim. Botched surgery on his cancerous liver has left him with a huge, bulging hernia, distended even further by buildup of a “protein-rich serous fluid” called ascites. His wife Ruth says he looks pregnant, and she has “broadly hinted” that she might buy him a baby carriage for Christmas. Doctors can’t repair the hernia until his tumors are brought under control. He’s been taking a “monoclonal antibody named (o dread god!) Panitumumab.” Its side effects include convulsions and facial bloating; he’s glad to be wearing a mask.

Going to Namibia in May 2021 “looks a bit iffy,” Robert says. “I can't jounce over hundreds of miles of Namib Desert 4x4 tracks, torque over Orange River rapids, or scramble up the Konigstein massif, belly flush to granite, with my existing abdominal embarrassment.” Mac and I should go to Namibia without him. “Looking on the bright side,” Robert adds, “I'll probably qualify for vaccination next month. Healthy specimens like you and Mac will probably have to wait longer.” Robert attaches a photo of his grotesquely swollen belly. I can’t get the image out of my head. I respond to him:

I have confidence you'll pull through this and become your old insanely indomitable self. There's no way Mac and I are going to Namibia without you. We'll wait for you to get better, and for the world to get better, and we'll go on our great adventure together.

My quantum project compounds my funk. Over the past seven months, I’ve read books and articles, talked to experts, audited a physics course. I’ve filled notebooks with scrawls. But to what end? I didn’t expect illumination, just a little clarity. If I could crack open quantum mechanics, the black box at the core of physics, things might become less obscure. Instead, the experiment has left me more befuddled than ever. It’s as though the black box of quantum mechanics has expanded to encompass everything, including my own self. I’m as clueless as the guy in the Chinese room. Should I continue devoting my wild and precious life to this experiment?

When my science-writing students agonize over an assignment, I tell them to ask themselves:

So what? Why does your topic matter? Why should your reader care about it? Keep that question—So what?--in mind as you write, even if you don’t explicitly answer it.

My growing frustration with quantum mechanics is making me ask, So what? Why does quantum mechanics matter? Why should non-physicists, including me, give a shit about it? Maybe we shouldn’t give a shit. I doubt whether quantum mechanics has appreciably boosted humanity’s wisdom. Are the wise folk who predated quantum mechanics, like Shakespeare and Jane Austen, not that wise? Is their wisdom premature or incomplete? And what, really, has quantum mechanics contributed to our knowledge of the world and of ourselves? Its contributions are primarily negative. It raises questions about the nature of matter and time and space, the knowability of reality, even the existence of “reality.”

And yet, instead of humbling physicists, quantum mechanics and its extensions, such as quantum chromodynamics (the theory of quarks, of which protons and neutrons consist), have fostered hubris and visions of a “theory of everything.” The obscurity of quantum theory, its inaccessibility, gives physicists license to disparage traditional belief systems, as well as philosophy and other humanities. Not to mention common sense.

Meanwhile, quantum mechanics has degenerated into a cheesy pop-culture meme. On a whim, I google “Christmas” and “quantum” and turn up all sorts of quantum crap. Superposition helps Santa deliver presents to homes around the world at the same time. Okay, that makes sense, I guess. I have a harder time getting how spooky action enabled Mary, a virgin, to become pregnant with Jesus. Did the Holy Ghost inseminate her nonlocally? I usually love x-mas kitsch, but the quantum version depresses me.

Desperate for Christmas spirit, I check out the Netflix movie Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey. Emily, who loathes Christmas schlock, watches with me out of pity. The film turns out to have a quantum theme. A failed toy inventor, Dr. Jangle, turns his business around with the help of his plucky granddaughter. Together, they build an adorable flying robot with a glowing quantum contraption for a heart. Uttering wave function and superposition like incantations, Dr. Jangle and his granddaughter harness quantum magic to make the world a better, kinder, more marvelous place.

One problem with the film, I grumble to Emily, is that the military funds robot research. If a flying quantum robot gets built, it will be an instrument of death, not joy.

And you call me Scrooge, Emily replies.

Progress and the Second Law

I ask mega-optimist Steven Pinker to give my school a much-needed pep talk in the spring. To my delight, he agrees. He’ll riff on his book Enlightenment Now, which charts humanity’s remarkable progress. We’ve become wealthier, healthier, freer, more peaceful, kinder, even smarter, notwithstanding recent setbacks. Pinker thinks we should be more grateful for these accomplishments, which he traces to the Enlightenment, when white, male, European thinkers showed the rest of the world how to solve problems through reason. He’s annoyed with so-called progressives who deny progress and harp on our problems.

A few of my pals at Stevens are progress-denying progressives. They groan when I tell them Pinker will speak to us this spring; they think he’s full of shit. Jim, an historian of science, grants that we’ve progressed since the industrial revolution, but that’s a split second of time compared to the vast sweep of history and pre-history. Climate change makes our present course unsustainable; something must give.

Michael, a philosopher, is even more scornful of Pinker’s everything-is-getting-better thesis. Roman scholars, Michael says, could have written books touting Rome’s achievements right before the empire collapsed. I chide Jim and Michael for judging Pinker without reading his book. Michael says he would read Pinker’s book only if I put a gun to his head, and probably not even then. After I announce Pinker’s lecture on Twitter, one of my so-called friends posts a photo of Pinker, smiling, beside billionaire sex trafficker and science fanboy Jeffrey Epstein. Ouch.

My gloomy colleagues don’t cite physics in support of their pessimism, but they might have. Physicists are fond of conservation laws, which dictate that certain features of nature remain constant no matter how much things seem to change. Energy, for example, can take many forms—kinetic, potential, electrical, thermal, gravitational, nuclear--and it can morph from one form into another. Matter can morph into energy, and vice versa, according to E = mc². But if you add up all the energy at any given instant, that sum remains constant, supposedly.

Let’s not forget Leonard Susskind’s favorite law, conservation of information, the minus first law, which can be rephrased as conservation of ignorance. How is progress, change for the better, possible if everything stays essentially the same? Conservation laws say 1 = 1, whereas progress implies that over time 1 can become something more than 1. Let’s say G is the total goodness of the world, which evolves on a timeline marked t1, t2, t3 and so on. If progress is real, then G at t1 < G at t2 < G at t3… G is not conserved if Pinker is right. But if all the conservation laws are true, our progress must be illusory, or transient. We’re stuck in a bound state: 1 = 1.

Then there is the principle of least action, a.k.a. the law of laziness, which suggests that the universe is rolling downhill, taking the path of least resistance. Bolstering the law of laziness is the grimmest law of all, the second law of thermodynamics, which decrees that entropy, whatever that is, inevitably increases. Trying to explain the second law to my students, and to myself, I tell them that there are infinitely many more ways for us to be dead, or non-existent, than alive.

Our ultimate fate, according to the second law, is heat death. “Heat death” is a misleading term, because our expanding universe is actually headed toward a big chill, a state devoid of heat or energy of any kind. The big chill is a state of absolute coldness and darkness, in which nothing can happen. The second law contradicts all the conservation laws, and all our hopes for progress. It implies that over the long run, 1 = 0. Two decades ago, cosmologists discovered that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, which means we’re tumbling toward the big chill at a faster and faster rate.

Physicists disturbed by the prospect of heat death have imagined ways for us to beat it. Freeman Dyson speculates that eons from now our descendants might shed their flesh-and-blood bodies and become clouds of sentient gas; through clever conservation of energy, these gassy entities can keep heat death at bay for a long, long time. I once asked Dyson how the superintelligent gas clouds will pass the time, beyond simply trying to survive. After mulling over my question, Dyson replied that the gas clouds will probably work on math problems.

Another creative physicist, Roger Penrose, conjectures that our increasingly vacuous cosmos will eventually produce a rupture in spacetime akin to the big bang. In this way, our universe can spawn new universes ad infinitum. Better yet, each new universe can pass on its accumulated information to the next in the form of cosmic microwave radiation, the big bang’s afterglow. The microwave radiation pervading our universe might bear messages from previous universes. And we might pass our knowledge on to inhabitants of the universe spawned by ours. This scenario resembles the one that Andrei Linde, the gloomy Russian physicist, laid on me decades ago.

As you entertain these hypotheses, keep in mind that the universe won’t reach heat death, according to one estimate, for a googol years. That’s 10 to the 100th power, a long time. Given recent events, I’m worried that we won’t make it to the end of this decade. On January 6, Trump leads a “Stop the Steal” rally of numbskulls who reject Biden’s victory. Egged on by Trump, people at the rally storm the Capitol and stop Congress’s ceremonial counting of Electoral votes, which would have sealed Biden’s win. Four people die in the ruckus. On that same day, Covid-19 kills almost 4,000 Americans, a new record.

Our democracy will emerge stronger from these tests. That’s what I tell my students, my colleagues, my children and other captive audiences. I cite the same statistics as Pinker, which show that we’ve gotten healthier and wealthier and more literate and yada yada. But I’m shaken. I fear for my country, for the world. It’s hard to see a stable solution for this N-body problem.

The Future of STEM Education

PEP553 has been over for more than a month, but I’m still Zooming with my study buddies Dean and Luis every week or two. This morning Luis joins Dean and me while driving to a drug store to get a drive-through Covid test. After the pharmacist hands you the test kit through your car window, you test yourself and hand the kit back through the window. The pharmacist texts you the result. Luis, demurely, turns his screen off while swabbing his nostrils, much to the amusement of Dean and me.

Luis just started his optics class. He is already doing experiments, measuring the output of a laser passing through a complicated apparatus in a darkened lab. Luis has been toiling over a lab report on his experiments. He must plot his readings and find a curve to connect them. He’ll send the report to me and Dean when he’s done. This, I remind myself, is where physics begins, with plots of experimental results, which physicists try to reproduce with math gadgets dangling from their tool belts.

Dean has big news. He’s going to Vietnam, where his girlfriend Cece used to live, and where she has family. He’s been learning the language and has found a teaching job in the country. He’s fascinated by socialism, and soon he’ll see it first-hand. Dean plans to fly to Vietnam in May, Covid permitting. Cases in Vietnam, which has a population of almost 100 million, have ticked up lately from two or three a day to 20 or 30 (compared to thousands of deaths a day in America). Whenever cases go up in Vietnam, the government shuts the country down. Dean is dropping his plan to create an online reality show where young STEMers troubleshoot technical topics, but he hopes to test his educational ideas in Vietnam.

I recall Dean’s ideas about reforming STEM education the next time I see Emily. She is hooked on “Mad Money,” a popular show hosted by manic investor/entertainer Jim Cramer. When I’m at Emily’s place on weekday nights, she makes me watch “Mad Money” with her. I groused at first, but then I got hooked on Cramer’s madness. Tonight he raves about Chegg, a company whose stock has surged during the pandemic. Once a textbook seller, Chegg has switched to peddling online courses.

Online learning is “inevitable,” Cramer says. Traditional education is costly and ineffective, and too many students never graduate. People need to learn throughout their careers, especially STEM-related skills, and Chegg can help. Cramer thinks the company will thrive post-pandemic, challenging traditional academic institutions. Chegg is $105 now; Cramer thinks it could hit $200. I nod along, thinking how brilliant and prescient Cramer is, and how his prophesy dovetails with what Dean and Luis have been telling me about the need for changes in STEM education. 

Chegg’s stock nosedives after Cramer’s prophesy. 

Joe’s Moment 

January 20, 2021. I’m about to eat a ham-and-cheese sandwich while watching an episode of Community, a sitcom about sitcoms; this has been my escapist lunch routine of late. But when I face the TV, I remember the inauguration and think, I have to watch this historic event. I turn on CNN just in time to see Joe Biden express his desire to bring us all together. “My soul is in it,” he says. “My whole soul is in it.” He looks like he means it, and I can’t help myself, I’m moved. This humble, mumbling, battle-scarred old pol, now our leader, says we’re all united, connected, bound to each other. E Pluribus Unum.

There it is again, our yearning for our primal state, oneness, when we were in the womb, before the cataclysm of the big bang, the advent of spacetime, of forces and particles, of galaxies, stars, planets, life, sex, sentience, civilization, money, castes, war and all that rips us apart. We remain bound to each other by the spiritual analog of the strong nuclear force, which strengthens with distance. The more we scatter from each other, the greater our urge to reunite. This is the meaning of the inauguration, of the victory of Joe the Binder over Trump the Scatterer.

Joe’s job is daunting. We’re all wearing masks, social distancing, even when we’re not. When Emily and I lie in bed, we are masked and distant, each of us sealed in a solipsistic cell. But we’re bound too. We share DNA, dreams, nightmares. We’re God’s offspring, alter egos. Emily is my sister, my twin, myself, as is everyone else. We are embedded in a cosmic harmonic oscillator driven by attraction and repulsion, and now, after years of scattering, we’re coming together again. 1 = 1.

This mystical malarkey is my prayer for Inauguration Day. Good luck, Joe.

John Bell’s Negative Capability

One of my ambitions when I embarked on my quantum experiment was to understand Bell’s theorem. John Bell, an Irish physicist, virtually created the field of quantum foundations with this mathematical argument, which he published in 1964. Bell’s theorem shows…

Well, that’s the question. What, exactly, does Bell’s theorem show? Here is my layman’s understanding. Say you have two electrons, A and B, whose spins are entangled, meaning that they are described by a single wave function. The wave function, sloshing back and forth in its box, gives you a range of possible outcomes, expressed as if/then statements. If you measure A’s spin with your instrument in this position, then you have this probability that A’s spin will be up and B’s down.

The key, crazy fact is that your measurement of A instantaneously collapses the wave function and determines the spin of B, or vice versa, no matter how far apart A and B are. Einstein rejected this “spooky action at a distance” because it seems to violate special relativity, which bans the propagation of effects faster than light. Einstein also insisted that particles must have fixed properties even when we don’t look at them. 

Bell’s theorem shows that quantum mechanics violates Einstein’s conditions. That is, a theory that prohibits spooky action, and that assumes particles’ properties are fixed before you look at them, generates predictions that diverge statistically from the predictions of quantum mechanics. The predictions are unequal, which is why Bell’s theorem is sometimes called Bell’s inequality. Since Bell published his theorem, experiments on entangled particles have repeatedly confirmed quantum mechanics and contradicted Einstein’s conditions. Spooky action is real.

Bell’s papers on quantum mechanics are collected in Speakable and unspeakable in quantum mechanics, published in 1987. Although I can’t understand the technical details, I take pleasure in Bell’s voice, which is as distinctive in its own way as Feynman’s. Bell writes more gracefully and with more poetic flair, and he expresses himself more tentatively. Whereas Feynman warns that you will go “down the drain” if you try to understand quantum mechanics, Bell passionately pursues understanding, although he never reaches firm conclusions.

Bell seems less intent on solving the paradoxes of quantum mechanics than on drawing attention to them. In a 1984 essay, he compares his fellow physicists to “sleepwalkers,” who continue to extend quantum theory while ignoring its “fundamental obscurity.” Given the “immensely impressive” progress achieved by sleepwalking physicists, Bell asks, “is it wise to shout, ‘wake up’? I am not sure that it is. So I speak now in a very low voice.”

Ironically, Bell’s voice has only gotten louder since he died in 1990, when he was 62. Quantum theorists cite him like scripture, even though his utterances, in papers and interviews, seem fluid, unsettled, riddled with self-doubt. He even disses his own inequality theorem, suggesting in his essay “On the impossible pilot wave” that “what is proved by impossibility proofs is lack of imagination.” Bell’s theorem is an impossibility proof. Bell is blessed, and cursed, with negative capability. 

The End of Science Revisited

Jacob Barandes, a physicist at Harvard, runs the Philosophy of Science Group, which includes professors and students at Harvard and other schools. He has invited me to talk via Zoom about The End of Science, which was published 25 years ago. Do I still think science is ending? Have my views changed? Good question, one that’s been nagging me lately. I start jotting down thoughts for the meeting.

When a new edition of The End of Science was published in 2015, I wrote a cocky, chest-thumping preface. I stood by my claim that science has become a victim of its own success. Scientists have created a “map” of reality, and a history of the cosmos and life on Earth, that is unlikely to undergo “radical revisions,” because it is largely accurate. Scientists “will learn much more about nature,” and they will invent lots of cool gadgets, but these advances “will merely extend and fill in our current maps.” Yes, there are big remaining mysteries, like where the universe came from, how life began, how matter makes a mind, but these mysteries might be unsolvable.

In some ways, my predictions have held up well, especially in physics, where the quest for a unified theory looks increasingly futile. In 2002 I bet physicist and bestselling author Michio Kaku $1,000 that by 2020 no one will win a Nobel Prize for string theory or any other unified theory. I just won the bet; Peter Woit, a physicist/mathematician at Columbia, announced on his blog, “Nobel Prizes announced, John Horgan wins.” Woit says my argument that “theoretical high-energy physics” has hit a wall “has become stronger and stronger as time goes on.” Sabine Hossenfelder recently said on her blog that “the reason [Horgan] encounters so much hostility is because no one likes people who make bad [that is, pessimistic] predictions and end up being right.”

Physicist Michael Nielsen, a quantum-computing expert, and software entrepreneur Patrick Collison, co-founder of the billion-dollar company Stripe, credit me with having foreseen our current scientific stagnation. They argue in The Atlantic that we are “investing vastly more merely to sustain (or even see a decline in) the rate of scientific progress.” They cite a recent survey in which physicists rank discoveries awarded Nobel Prizes; physicists say their field peaked in the 1920s and 1930s, the heyday of quantum mechanics. Physics has declined since then except for an uptick in the 1960s, when experiments confirmed predictions of quantum chromodynamics and electroweak theory, which extend quantum mechanics.

So in some ways, yes, I still feel good about my bad prediction. But my quantum experiment has thrown me for a loop. It has forced me to question a premise of The End of Science, that science has given us an accurate map of reality. Yes, quantum mechanics accounts for countless experiments, and its applications have transformed our world, but it calls all our knowledge into question. Experts cannot agree on what the theory tells us about the nature of matter, energy, space, time, mind.

In The End of Science, I said particle physics “rests on the firm foundation of quantum mechanics.” Firm foundation? Ha! The more I ponder quantum mechanics, the more physics resembles a house of cards. Floating on a raft. On a restless sea. Physics seems wobbly, ripe for revolution, for a paradigm shift that sends science veering off in unexpected directions. John Bell, who helped expose the weirdness of quantum mechanics, hoped it would yield to a theory that makes more sense.

Another possibility is that we become more doubtful of all mathematical models of reality. Forget imaginary numbers, which are crucial to quantum calculations; real numbers aren’t as real as we’d like to believe. Real numbers, which correspond to points on a line running from negative infinity to positive infinity, are mathematical beasts of burden. They help us model and track things in nature, like rockets, rainbow trout and electrons. But most scientific measurements are approximations, which come with error bars. Real numbers, in contrast, are impossibly precise. Between any two integers there is an infinite number of real numbers, each of which must be specified with an infinite number of digits.

Maybe we shouldn’t think of mathematical theories like quantum mechanics and general relativity as true. Maybe we should view the theories as calculating devices that predict experimental outcomes but have an obscure relation to nature. I’ve become more sympathetic toward a philosophical outlook called pluralism. Just because a theory works does not mean it is “the truth”; there might be many other theories out there just as effective, or more effective.

One of my favorite philosophers, Paul Feyerabend, was a pluralist. For him, pluralism was a moral and political issue. He loathed attempts of scientists and philosophers to reduce the world to a single, ultimate explanation, a theory of everything so true that we must accept it. He equated this endeavor with political totalitarianism. Feyerabend defended peoples’ right to believe in myths and theologies, even if they lack empirical support. He wrote:

Human life is guided by many ideas. Truth is one of them. Freedom and mental independence are others. If Truth, as conceived by some ideologists, conflicts with freedom, then we have a choice. We may abandon freedom. But we may also abandon Truth.

Once, when I stuck up for scientific truth, Feyerabend said to me, “What’s so great about truth?” I found this line silly at the time, but now, as my quantum project proceeds, Feyerabend’s critique of truth makes more and more sense. If we give up the idea of final truth, we have more freedom to imagine what we are, can be and should be.

I dump all these ruminations on the Harvard philosophy of physics group. Thirty-two people show up for the Zoom conversation. They are young and old, female and male, from Harvard and other schools. During the Q&A, several people argue that technological breakthroughs could propel science out of its doldrums. A movement called “transhumanism” envisions us transcending our cognitive limits by means of genetic engineering--like Kahn, the Star Trek villain. Or we might soup up our brains with implanted, wi-fi-linked brain chips and become a giant hive mind--like The Borg, another Star Trek villain.

The singularity comes up, that supposedly inevitable moment when machines become superintelligent and leave us in their dust, like the mean robots in The Matrix or the nice smartphone with the voice of Scarlet Johansen in Her. Someone mentions quantum computers, which might turn out to be much more powerful than conventional computers. Quantum AIs might solve problems too hard for flesh-and-blood scientists, such as unifying physics or explaining how matter makes minds.

I point out that transhuman science was in the air when I wrote The End of Science in the 1990s. Physicists Frank Tipler and John Barrow imagined a distant future in which our ancestors turn the universe into a cosmic computer with godlike powers. I ran with this idea in a chapter titled “Scientific Theology, or the End of Machine Science.” I proposed that this hi-tech deity in the far, far future would try to answer the question, Why is there something rather than nothing?, but it would fail, because there is no answer. God, if there is a God, does not know where She/He/They/It came from; God is even more baffled by existence than we are.

I admit that I reached this conclusion during a psychedelic trip back in 1981, when I became the godlike computer at the end of time. Some people in the audience smile and chuckle; others look puzzled, unsure whether I’m being ironic. I’m not sure myself. After almost two hours, I’m in a state of manic exhaustion tinged with derealization. Before signing off, I reiterate my main point: My quantum experiment has me questioning not just my end-of-science thesis but everything, including my faith in social progress. The world seems more baffling and frightening than ever.

Pond Hockey

Pond-hockey dispels my blues, at least temporarily. I’ve played hockey since I was a boy. In the mid-1990s, I started playing on ponds in the Hudson Highlands, where I lived with my wife and kids. After I got divorced and moved to New Jersey, I kept driving north on winter weekends to play with my old buddies. A month ago our ringleader, Richard, said via email that playing during the pandemic would be too risky. Then he changed his mind and said we can play if we wear masks and don’t clump together. Socially distanced hockey? Sure, why not.

Today ten of us hike deep into a state park in Putnam County, lugging our duffle bags and sticks down a winding dirt road to a pond that Richard tested in advance; the ice should hold us. Richard and his brother Tom bring two boards that serve as goals. I huff and puff for two hours with my buddies, propelling my old carcass around the ice, pulling my soggy mask aside now and then to suck in unfiltered air. A biophysicist could track my energy expenditures and correlate them with my movements around the ice. The principle of least action might provide constraints on the model.

But can a biophysics model reveal why I drive 1.5 hours, one way, to play in these games? Could it describe the exhilaration I feel when Tim drops me the puck and I deke Richard and slide the puck against the goal-board, which emits a satisfying clonk? Can a model describe the distress I feel when Nate flies past me and my teammates on his young, strong legs and clonks the puck against our goal? Pond hockey is a blatant violation of the law of laziness, but it makes me feel good. In “Unreasonable Effectiveness,” Wigner warns us not to forget what our models omit. I am an object with mass and volume, a machine with computational/cognitive/motor components, moving through spacetime. But that is not what really matters.

I’m driving home on the Palisades Parkway, watching the sun set in the pale winter sky, my muscles pleasantly achy, and suddenly the old feeling wells up in me, the swooning, as visceral as an orgasm. My eyes tear up, I grin foolishly. No biophysical model, not even supplemented by real-time brain scans, can capture the swooning. It is transient, ephemeral, but it feels like a revelation. The swooning never lasts. It collapses by the time I arrive back in Hoboken into humdrum gloom.

I keep dwelling on the swooning. I wonder: How can a feeling be a revelation? Truth is objective, third person; feelings are subjective, first-person. Other southbound drivers on the Palisades Parkway probably noticed the winter sunset without making a big deal out of it. They just thought, “Nice sunset.” Sunsets are pretty. So what? I, the pretentious writer, wallow in the feeling, puffing it up into something grandiose. Asking whose reaction is “true” is a category error, right? Physicists grant that feelings can serve as a guide to truth. They speak of the exaltation they feel when they discover a beautiful equation, which hints that they are in the presence of truth. Curiosity, puzzlement and confusion also motivate scientists.

But can feelings, rather than merely propelling us toward truth, embody truth? Artists translate their feelings into words, sounds and images, which in turn evoke feelings in the rest of us. Art helps us escape our solipsistic isolation; it reveals what it feels like to be another person, like an adulterous Irish songstress in Dublin in the early 20th century. But feelings do not equal their expressions, and some feelings, notably the ones we call mystical, transcend description. They are ineffable, as William James puts it. And yet mystical experiences are also noetic, James says, meaning that they seem to convey knowledge. But what knowledge? That’s the question.

If I had to pick a word to describe the swooning, I might go with “love,” but that’s as inadequate as “God” or “bliss.” And it’s love without an object, unless the object is everything. Another strong feeling that comes over me, much more often than the swooning, is derealization, a sense of alienation from the world and even from my own self. Derealization, you might say, is the antithesis of swooning, but it feels like a revelation too. How can that be?

My favorite Wittgenstein utterance comes near the end of his prose-poem Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.” [1] The mystical revelation doesn’t tell you: The world began with a quantum fluctuation in the void, which led to a rapid expansion of spacetime called inflation… No. The mystical revelation just reveals, period. It says, Behold! This revelation can feel good, like the swooning, or it can feel creepy, like derealization. Or you might have both feelings at once, in superposition. Either way, it’s a revelation: Behold!

As I jot down these notes, I feel as though I’m onto something, something related to my quantum experiment. Maybe it’s this: Contemplating a wave function, Ψ, stirs us, like a sunset; it evokes feelings in us. When we try to interpret the wave function, we are trying to express those feelings. You see evidence of the infinite creativity of nature, and possibly of a loving god. I see proof of nature’s meaninglessness and indifference. Asking which interpretation is correct is like asking which reaction to a sunset is correct.

No, that can’t be right. Interpretations of quantum mechanics, unlike reactions to a sunset, can be right or wrong. Or at least smart or dumb. I have to think through my feelings about feelings, or maybe just let them go. They are a distraction, a way of putting off a decision on my quantum experiment, my attempt to understand Ψ. Should I continue? If so, how?

Okay, something unexpected has happened. I know how my quantum project should proceed. Will proceed. I will read Q Is for Quantum. The author is Terry Rudolph, a physicist. He wrote his book to convey the mathematical essence of quantum mechanics to pre-college kids, like his nine-year-old nephew. Rudolph’s slim little paperback is much harder than Quantum Physics for Babies, the book my buddy Robert gave me eight months ago, but it’s much simpler than Susskind or Griffiths. If a nine-year-old kid can get it, I can. My new goal is to read and reread Q Is for Quantum until I get it. Starting… now. [2]

Notes

1. In Tractatus, Wittgenstein elaborates on “Not how the world is the mystical, but that it is” as follows: “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.” Even when the world has been thoroughly explained by science, Wittgenstein seems to be saying, it hasn’t really been explained at all. The answer to the riddle of life is that there is no answer. For more on Wittgenstein’s mysticism, see my column “Was Wittgenstein a Mystic?”

2. In the following chapter, I describe how Terry Rudolph reached out to me to recommend his book Q Is for Quantum. I was primed to read the book by two other physicists who had previously recommended it to me: Jacob Barandes of Harvard and David Kagan of the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Both Barandes and Kagan, coincidentally, participated in the online discussion of The End of Science described in this chapter.

Table of Contents

ABOUT MY QUANTUM EXPERIMENT

INTRODUCTION
Old Man Gets More Befuddled

CHAPTER ONE
The Strange Theory of
You and Me

CHAPTER TWO
Laziness

CHAPTER THREE
The Minus First Law

CHAPTER FOUR
I Understand That
I Can’t Understand

CHAPTER FIVE
Competence Without Comprehension

CHAPTER SIX
Reality Check

CHAPTER SEVEN
The Investment Principle

CHAPTER EIGHT
Order Matters

CHAPTER NINE
The Two-Body Problem

CHAPTER TEN
Entropy

CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Mist

CHAPTER TWELVE
Thin Ice

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Irony

EPILOGUE
Thanksgiving

THANKS

DISCUSSION