CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Irony

It was the pre-pandemic era when my buddy Robert convinced me and my son Mac to trek with him through Namibia. We planned to go in May 2020, but the pandemic thwarted us. Now Robert wants to go to Namibia after my semester ends in May, in just two months. Namibia’s COVID numbers are pretty low, and doctors have cleared Robert for the trip, in spite of his hernia.

I’m ambivalent about trekking in a faraway land, during a pandemic, with my ailing, 69-year-old friend. I’m not in great shape either. A doctor, after examining my swollen right elbow, diagnoses bursitis. He drains fluid from the elbow and gives me a cortisone shot, but the elbow still bugs me. “Robert, you magnificent maniac,” I reply. Instead of Africa, I say, maybe we should trek somewhere here in the U.S., like the Rockies.

My son, after seeing our exchange, calls me. Mac just started a tree-care company, and May is his peak season, but he thinks we should go to Namibia. He has fond memories of Robert, his wife Ruth and son Blaed. Our families were inseparable when we were neighbors in the Hudson Highlands, more than a dozen years ago. Robert led us on lots of hikes back then. Going to Namibia with Robert is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, Mac says, we’ll regret not going.

I’m proud of my son and ashamed of myself. I tell Robert that Mac has changed my mind, we would love to go to Namibia. I start fantasizing about the trip. A radical change of scenery might jar loose a quantum epiphany, one that can give my experiment a satisfying finale. Emily says going to Namibia is “wackadoo,” but this trip, I tell her, is what Robert, Mac and I must do with our wild and precious lives.

*Fish River Canyon, Namibia. This is where my friend Robert Hutchinson wanted to go with me and my son Mac.*

A Brief History of Quantum Mechanics

My quantum experiment has lasted almost a year. Trying to assemble my fragmentary knowledge into a coherent story, I come up with the following: You and your friends have data from a variety of experiments: light reflecting off glass, light shining through two slits in a screen, electrons veering through a magnetic field. You plot the data on a coordinate system, as my study buddy Luis does in his optics class. You draw a curve between the data points, and then you look for equations that generate a similar curve. Ideally, the equations will predict new data points.

You can think of the math as a gadget, a contraption with a bunch of moving parts, that takes inputs and produces outputs, just as a factory takes raw materials, like steel or chemicals, and turns them into safety pins or antidepressants. You keep assembling different pieces of math—the equivalent of gears, sprockets, drive shafts, switches, pulleys—hoping to find a combination that replicates your data. You don’t worry too much about the logic of the math or its correspondence to “reality”; you rely on intuition, guesswork. You construct an equation consisting of a Hamiltonian, partial derivatives, complex numbers and a constant, ħ, which equals 1.054571817... times 10 to the minus 34 joule seconds (whatever those are). You’re not sure why this contraption works, but it does work, really well.

Meanwhile your friend has constructed an entirely different machine consisting of complex numbers embedded in matrices. This works too; it matches your data points and predicts the outcome of new experiments. And over here, another friend has built a much simpler contraption consisting of black and white balls falling in and out of boxes; the boxes change the color of the balls according to specific rules. No matrices, derivatives or complex numbers needed.

You and your friends eventually realize that your seemingly different machines operate according to the same underlying principles; that is why they all produce the same results. There is really just one machine. Now you and your friends try to figure out why this machine works. You spend decade after decade on this problem, in vain. Some people say they know why the machine works, or they say they’ve found a different machine, which works better than your machine. But none of these claims withstands scrutiny. You’re stuck with a contraption that works, but no one can say why it works. Sourpusses say, Who cares? Just be glad it works. But you can’t stop staring at the machine, poking it, shaking it, trying to figure out how it does what it does.

That is my brief history of quantum mechanics.

Quantum Quiz

Friends who know about my quantum project wonder what I’ve learned. Any big insights? They usually ask with a smirk, as if they’re expecting me to bullshit them. I’ve been asking myself the same question, and I don’t want to bullshit myself. So I give myself an assessment quiz to learn what I’ve learned:

What the hell is a wave function?

Oof. Tough question, maybe the question. Here goes. A wave function is a mathematical widget that lets you calculate the probability that light, quarks, electrons, hydrogen atoms, qubits, cats, Wigner’s friends, the universe, the multiverse or whatever will behave in certain ways. The probabilities embedded in the wave function rise and fall like waves over time, hence the name. Experts debate whether a wave function is just a handy tool or a real thing, existing out there, in nature. I’m going with tool, because the alternative is too weird; it defies common sense.

What’s the difference between superposition and entanglement?

I vowed at the beginning of this project that I’d answer this question. Here goes: A wave function describes many possible behaviors of an electron or whatever at a given instant. These possible behaviors are said to coexist with each other, in superposition, until you look at the electron. At that point, the superposition vanishes, and you see only one of the possible behaviors. Entanglement is a special form of superposition involving two or more things, such as photons, electrons, cats, friends or universes, which are described by a single wave function. If entangled things are distant from each other, the entanglement is said to be nonlocal, or “spooky,” as Einstein put it.

Does an electron, cat or friend exist when we don’t look at it?

Yeah, it definitely exists. The question is, does it have fixed properties, like spin, position, direction, shape, color, furriness and so on? Two theorems, from John Bell and a trio of physicists whose first names begin with the letters PBR, supposedly prove that when we’re not looking at something, its properties are not fixed; they exist in a haze of superpositions. This result is so freaky that even Terry Rudolph, the R of the PBR theorem, has a hard time accepting it. When forced to choose between a mathematical theorem and common sense, I choose common sense.

Will quantum computers ever live up to their hype?

Probably not, because the hype is so extreme. Quantum computers exploit superposition and entanglement to do things that conventional computers can’t. Quantum computers could evolve into a useful new technology if the technical bugs are resolved--a big if. They might also lead to insights into quantum mechanics, leading to better quantum computers, leading to more insights… You get the idea. But quantum computers can’t save us; they aren’t magic wands that can solve global warming and other wicked problems. And as with all technologies, bad guys might use quantum computers for bad ends.

Does quantum mechanics corroborate ancient mystical doctrines, like that Tao of Physics guy said?

Quantum mechanics, if you squint at it in a certain way, does seem, sort of, to corroborate doctrines of Hinduism and Buddhism. It suggests that mind, not matter, is the fundamental stuff of existence. “Reality” is an illusion, and everything is connected to everything, and it probably all comes from one thing, a field of loving cosmic consciousness that you might call God. But quantum mysticism, like the Catholicism of my childhood, bumps into the old problem of evil. If a powerful, loving deity created us, why is existence so painful and unfair? Not for me—I’m a lucky bastard--but for many people.

Is physics finished?

I argued as much in The End of Science, and I hate admitting I’m wrong. But my quantum experiment has unsettled me. Physics seems unstable, ripe for a shake-up, which quantum computers might catalyze. That said, I’m more convinced than ever that physics will never produce a complete description of reality, a so-called theory of everything, contrary to what Hawking and others hoped. That hope was always delusional. As physicist Philip Anderson once told me, “When one understands everything, one has gone crazy.” “Reality,” whatever that is, will always transcend our descriptions, it will always remain weird. Oh, and I still think string and multiverse theories are dead ends; they can’t be tested, which means they’re not really scientific.

Can quantum mechanics help us understand ourselves?

The mind-body problem asks: How does matter generate mind? This question can be rephrased as: What are we, anyway? Smart people like Roger Penrose see quantum mechanics as the key to solving the mind-body problem; our minds are the outcome of quantum oscillations in our brains. It’s possible, again, that quantum computing might yield insights into consciousness and even mental disorders. My guess is that the more we try to solve the riddle of ourselves, the more mystified we will become. But I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Does quantum mechanics give us free will?

Some experts say quantum indeterminacy allows for human choices. Others, like my frenemy Sabine Hossenfelder, claim that quantum physics is as deterministic as classical physics and rules out free will. I don’t find any arguments linking physics to free will persuasive. I believe in free will because I know my choices are real, not illusory, and their causes are psychological, ethical, spiritual, not just physical. I alter my trajectory through the world with my choices, such as my choice to study quantum mechanics at the beginning of the pandemic. I admit that I’m biased. Although life with free will is stressful--filled with anxiety and guilt and regret and all the rest--life without free will is meaningless. I hate the concept of fate. Fuck fate.

I’m grading the test, as well as giving and taking it, and I give myself a perfect score. Others might grade me differently. And my answers might change as I keep reading, thinking and writing about quantum puzzles. If I take this quiz in a year, I might reply that superdeterminism is correct and free will is “logically incoherent nonsense,” as Sabine puts it. I doubt it, though.

And it’s hard to imagine that I’ll change my mind about the unknowability of things. The older I get, the more convinced I am that to see the world clearly is to see it as weird, as infinitely improbable and inexplicable, beyond belief, beyond language. Nothing is weirder than we are. Every single human, every player in this game, represents a unique, once-in-eternity N-body problem, unsolvable even by a quantum computer that fulfills enthusiasts’ dreams.

When we say something is weird, we usually mean it is unfamiliar. The assumption is that this thing won’t be weird once we learn more about it. A philosopher would say weirdness is an epistemic rather than ontic concept; it’s about what we know, or think we know, and not about what actually exists. When I say we are weird, I mean that we are intrinsically, objectively weird. Like quantum uncertainty, the weirdness exists out there.

I can give a spiritual spin to weirdness if the occasion demands it--for example, when I’m talking to my students. If the world is infinitely improbable, that’s sort of like saying it’s miraculous; a miracle is something that shouldn’t happen but does. There is no reason for us to be here, and yet here we are. So cherish every moment, good and bad, happy and painful, beautiful and ugly, before it’s gone. That’s what I tell my students, and myself.

My Ironic Interpretation

Last summer Sabine Hossenfelder predicted that someday there will be a quantum interpretation named after me. I’m tempted to invent an interpretation just to fulfill her ironic prophesy. Ironic in the sense that she meant it, but not really.

Wait, that’s it! In The End of Science, I coined the phrase ironic science to describe theories that should not be taken literally, because they are more akin to philosophy or literature than to genuine science. Real science can be tested and hence verified or falsified, but not ironic science. Quantum mechanics is a hybrid of genuine and ironic science. In its mathematical form, quantum mechanics is the most powerful and precise theory ever discovered; it has withstood countless tests. It is ironic in the sense that its meaning is maddeningly ambiguous.

The ironic interpretation says there can be no definitive interpretation, no final statement of what quantum mechanics means. This is, sort of, the position of Bohr and Feynman and physics professors who tell students to shut up and calculate. Einstein and his intellectual heirs, like John Bell and Tim Maudlin, reject that stance, insisting that physics must be more than a set of formulas, or recipes, for cranking out predictions and applications. They want truth.

The ironic interpretation encompasses both of these seemingly contradictory positions. You keep trying to understand quantum mechanics while acknowledging that final understanding will always elude you. Language, words, numbers--all our means of representing the world fall short of the mystery. This perspective resembles negative theology, which attempts to describe God while stipulating, as an axiom, that God cannot be described. You understand that you can’t understand. But you stand.

A corollary of the ironic interpretation is pluralism, the idea that there are many ways to see and solve the world. Engineers are pluralists without making a fuss over it. Faced with a problem like building a new bridge, electric car or smart phone, engineers don’t ask, What is the definitive, ultimate, true solution to this problem? That sort of thinking is dumb. The engineer’s job is to find a solution that works.

A solution can work in lots of ways. It can help us make sense of data and predict the outcome of experiments. It can give us power over nature, so we can cure cancer or build deadlier bombs. On a more personal level, an answer can console us, give us meaning, help us make sense of our lives. It can amaze us, tearing the scales from our eyes so we see the world anew. Note that these latter outcomes involve feelings.

Jorge Luis Borges epitomizes the ironic, pluralistic perspective. Borges packages ideas in metaphysical fables that make my flesh crawl. I never get habituated to him, even after repeated readings. He reliably estranges me from the world and from myself. In “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Borges imagines a world whose sages have concluded that reality is inexplicable. That assumption, far from discouraging speculation, inspires it. Tlon’s thinkers propose countless models, or “systems,” that are “beautifully constructed or sensational in effect.” Borges continues:

The metaphysicians of Tlon are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement. They consider metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature. They know that a system is nothing more than a subordination of all the aspects of the universe to some one of them.

Yes, every philosophy is a synecdoche. Borges, that sly dog, notes that in Tlon the most fantastic synecdoche of all is “the doctrine of materialism,” which holds that matter has an objective existence apart from human perception. Materialism is so counter to the mindset of most Tlonians that they can’t grasp it, no matter how cleverly it is propounded. They love materialism precisely because it so absurd. The joke is that here on Earth, materialism is common sense; it is science’s default stance—although quantum mechanics makes it harder to be a materialist.

The ironic interpretation assumes that our debates about quantum mechanics, about what is real, will never be resolved. Neither will our debates over God, the mind-body problem, free will, morality, the meaning of life and related stuff we endlessly bicker about. We should be glad we can’t solve all these inter-linked problems, because we can keep inventing new solutions, solutions that amaze us, that make us see the world anew, forever.

Do you really want to find the solution to the mystery? To know? Read “The Zahir,” in which Borges tells the story of a man who gets a coin as change in a bar. The coin turns out to be a Zahir, an emblem of everything, of the entire cosmos. It is the ultimate synecdoche. The man becomes so obsessed with the coin that he cannot think about anything else. Absolute knowledge is equated with insanity, and oblivion. When one understands everything, one has gone crazy.

*Jorge Luis Borges, whose stories explore the perils of knowledge, died and was buried in Geneva. I found this* *photo of his grave on Wikipedia. The figures are Norse soldiers heading into battle. Borges was a fan of Norse mythology.*

You and Me

Although I see quantum mechanics as an emblem of irony, the indeterminacy of meaning, I find some interpretations more compelling than others. Ethical considerations often trump aesthetic ones. The Tlonians would probably love the many-worlds hypothesis, because it’s so fantastical. And there have been times in my life, I confess, when I have felt shadow selves veering away from me into sunnier or darker timelines. I nonetheless loathe the many-worlds hypothesis, because it devalues our world by making it one of many.

Superdeterminism is fantastical too. What I am doing right now, plinking on a laptop on a couch in Ho-Ho-Hoboken, New Jersey, was foreordained at the beginning of time? Whoa! But superdeterminism makes us victims of fate; it reduces the world to pure, inhuman physics, with no room for free will or anything else that gives meaning to our lives. At this dark time in our history, the last thing we need is an ideology that reinforces our despair and fatalism. Sorry, Sabine, but I don’t believe in fate. Fuck fate.

Again, for ethical reasons, I like Karen Barad’s agential realism, which reminds us that scientific truth is never pure; it is invariably entangled with power and inequality and war and other messy social realities. If I had to pick a favorite interpretation, I might go with the relational interpretation, which I find consoling and metaphorically resonant. The relational interpretation says that at the heart of reality there isn’t one thing, like a supersymmetric string, a Zahir, a god; there are at least two things doing something to each other. John Wheeler was an early explorer of this notion. Noting the role of measurement in quantum outcomes, Wheeler suggests that we live in a “participatory universe,” in which we bring the world into existence, and vice versa.

Carlo Rovelli, riffing on Wheeler’s ideas, coined the phrase “relational interpretation.” “20th-Century physics is not about how individual entities are by themselves,” Rovelli writes. “It is about how entities manifest themselves to one another. It is about relations.” The relational interpretation rejects “naïve realism,” Rovelli says, the notion that science discovers a world existing independently of our observation of it.

*Escher’s drawing of hands drawing each other,* *from Wikipedia*.

Neither Wheeler nor Rovelli cites mind-body theorist Douglas Hofstadter, but they might have. Hofstadter is obsessed with things that refer to, talk about or otherwise interact with themselves. One example is Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, a proof about the limits of proofs. Hofstadter proposes that consciousness, the self, life and existence as a whole stem from “strange loops,” things that bring themselves into existence. My favorite depiction of a strange loop is Escher’s drawing of two hands drawing each other.

An especially gifted explicator of the relational interpretation is science writer Amanda Gefter. I encountered her last fall when she talked via Zoom to scholars concerned with the mind-body problem. Gefter is young and pale, with an unearthly air about her. During her talk she seems tentative at first, smiling ingratiatingly at the old white men in her audience. But she speaks in an exceptionally clear way about misty matters.

Afterwards, I talk to Gefter one-on-one via Zoom. She got interested in physics, she says, because of her curiosity about “nothing” and its relation to reality. (What a thing to be obsessed with: nothing!) Meeting John Wheeler encouraged Gefter to follow her curiosity where it took her. She’s fascinated by Wheeler’s suggestion that we--our minds, ideas, questions--bring the world into existence. She wants to move past old dualities, like the one between mind and matter. She is dissatisfied both with strict materialism, which decrees that matter rules; and with idealism, which says mind is fundamental. “The central lesson of quantum mechanics,” Gefter says, is that “subject and object can never be decoupled.”

Maybe, Gefter speculates, we don’t live in either a first-person world or a third-person world. Maybe we live in a second-person world, and the fundamental entity of existence is not “I” or “It” but “You.” This is the metaphysics espoused by philosopher Martin Buber in his classic work I and Thou. Every “You,” Gefter says, implies an “I” interacting with the You. This view “is definitely not materialism,” Gefter says, “but it’s not idealism either.”

*Amanda Gefter and me chatting online in December 2020.*

I ask Gefter if she finds the second-person metaphysics consoling, and she replies, in a roundabout way, yes. She’s always been a loner, a solitary person, in part because she has a rare syndrome that makes her want to sleep during the day and stay awake at night. Her you-centered metaphysics makes her feel less estranged. She also recently fell in love and got married; that helps.

I have doubts about the relational interpretation, as I do about all metaphysical systems that privilege our minds. They smack of narcissism, anthropomorphism, wishful thinking. I have derided mind-centric theories as throwbacks to geocentrism, the medieval belief that the universe revolves around us. The relational interpretation reminds me a bit too much of the sentimental slogan God is love.

But that’s also why I like the relational interpretation, and especially Gefter’s you-centered version of it. I find her worldview beautiful and soothing, a welcome alternative to mindless materialism. The relational interpretation also seems intuitively sensible. Just as words must be defined by other words, so we are defined, even brought into existence, by each other. And the relational interpretation honors my axiomatic conviction that our metaphysics must pay attention to suffering. Suffering matters.

Quantum Mechanics Is Quantum Mechanics

Does the ironic interpretation apply to itself, and does that mean it is self-refuting? Well, yes, I suppose, in the same way that all skeptical philosophies, including postmodernism and negative theology, are self-refuting. But I prefer to think of the ironic interpretation as paradoxical rather than contradictory.

My interpretation resembles Scott Aaronson’s “Zen anti-interpretation,” which he just spelled out on his blog. It holds that “all interpretations of QM are just crutches that are better or worse at helping you along to the Zen realization that QM is what it is and doesn’t need an interpretation.” Aaronson is not saying that physicists should shut up and calculate, although this pragmatic attitude makes sense when you are a novice starting out on the quantum path. Nor is he saying that all interpretations are “equally good or bad.” He thinks many worlds comes closest to offering a “straightforward picture of the equations.”

But after many years of struggling to understand quantum mechanics, Aaronson says, you begin to realize that all interpretations fall short. You become once again like a novice, who “just sees the thing for what it is.” First there is a wave function, then there is no wave function, then there is. Aaronson, appropriately, presents his anti-interpretation ironically. He’s jotting down these “half-baked ideas” while lying in bed, “knocked out by my second dose of the Moderna vaccine.”

Tim Maudlin isn’t impressed by Aaronson’s Zen anti-interpretation. “Oy,” Maudlin replies after I email him a link to Aaronson’s column. “I’ll just put it down to some reaction to the vaccine. That’s a post that he can’t possibly defend when he’s clear-headed. Dreadful.” And yet Maudlin’s hero John Bell flirts with the ironic interpretation in his essay “Six possible worlds of quantum mechanics.” After reviewing leading interpretations, including the many-worlds and pilot-wave models, Bells likens them to historical novels, made-up stories consistent with known facts. Bell suggests that “the theoretical physicist differs from the novelist in thinking that maybe the story might be true.” Ouch.

Tim Maudlin’s other hero, David Bohm, propounder of the pilot wave and tormented seeker, would have liked the ironic interpretation. When I interviewed him in 1992, Bohm predicted that science and art would merge someday. The division of art and science “didn't exist in the past,” he said, “and there’s no reason why it should go on in the future.” Just as art consists not simply of works of art but of an “attitude, the artistic spirit,” so does science consist not in the accumulation of knowledge but in the creation of fresh modes of perception. “The ability to perceive or think differently,” Bohm said, “is more important than the knowledge gained.” Bohm’s prophesy makes much more sense to me now than it did three decades ago.

Many seekers will reject the ironic interpretation, seekers like Maudlin and, I’m guessing, his buddy David Z Albert. Albert earned a doctorate in physics, but his shut-up-and-calculate training left him with too many unanswered questions, so he became a philosopher specializing in quantum mechanics. Albert and I go way back. He served as my guide when I wrote about quantum mechanics for Scientific American in the early 1990s. He is one of the experts I asked to advise me when I started my quantum experiment. Reading Quick Calculus was his idea.

*David Z Albert’s book. The painting is Joan Miro’s “Landscape (The Hare).”*

I’ve been studying Albert’s book Quantum Mechanics and Experience, an influential examination of quantum paradoxes. Albert’s passion for understanding takes him to some strange places. He dramatizes the measurement problem with a “science fiction story” involving a person named John. John has a device installed in his brain that can measure the spin of electrons, and he has little doors on either side of his head through which electrons can pass. The device is hooked up to John’s brain in such a way that it informs him of an electron’s spin.

The John experiment reminds me of the Wigner’s friend experiment. In Wigner’s scenario, your friend is inside a locked room, looking at the results of an experiment involving a radioactive particle. You are outside the room, with only probabilistic knowledge, embodied in a wave function, of what your friend sees. In David Albert’s version, you are your own friend; you are both outside and inside the room in your own head. The bifurcation of reality happens within you.

I’m probably mangling Albert’s thought experiment, but that’s how I explain it to myself. Albert narrates his “science fiction story” in a deadpan tone that makes it even creepier, almost Borgesian. The story sets up Albert’s defense of an interpretation called “many minds,” which proposes that the different possibilities embodied in the wave function are realized not in different universes but in a single individual’s mind. The Tlonians, I’m guessing, would have loved this conjecture.

Is Albert proposing all this ironically? He opens Quantum Mechanics and Experience with a poem by Zbigniew Herbert:

a bird is a bird

slavery means slavery

a knife is a knife

death remains death.

I’m puzzled why Albert chose this epigraph. It seems like an elaboration on the meta-tautology It is what it is. The poet warns that the search for meaning can be a kind of evasion, an escape from the darkness of the world. We should resist the compulsion to retreat into metaphors, especially when we’re talking about suffering, injustice and death.

I read the Herbert poem as a rebuke of quantum interpretation. We can blather on and on about the measurement problem and other puzzles, but in the end quantum mechanics is quantum mechanics, and death remains death. That’s my guess about Albert’s intention. But when I ask Albert why he begins his book with the Herbert poem, he emails me back:

It's nice of you to notice that! I guess I meant it as a sort of pledge to talk simply and literally and truthfully and without art--something that (as you know) is not often done, or not done often enough, in discussions of the foundations of quantum mechanics.

The emphasis is mine. Albert cannot possibly fulfill his implicit pledge. As soon as you try to interpret quantum mechanics, to say what it means, you are in the realm of art--especially if you make your point with a “science fiction story”! Quantum mechanics is what it is, but it isn’t. Like life itself, quantum mechanics seethes with possible meanings. David Z Albert and Tim Maudlin have devoted their wild and precious lives to discovering this meaning, even though there is no final, definitive meaning. They are negative theologians, poets, whether or not they know it.

I once attended a conference on negative theology at the University of Chicago—yes, it was as odd as it sounds—and a philosopher said if you can’t speak the name of God, you can’t whistle it either; that is, you can’t evoke God with music or art. But music and art can get us closer to God, to absolute truth, by evoking certain feelings in us. When I’m overwhelmed by the glad/sad feeling that I call the swooning, that may be as close as I get to God.

Superposition is akin to artistic irony. Art, the lie that tells the truth, is intrinsically ironic, and like quantum mechanics it offers multiple, superposed meanings that coexist even if they contradict each other. Take The Waste Land, which is life-negating and life-affirming. No, that’s too hackneyed an example. Take any John Ashbery poem, like “Wakefulness”:

Little by little the idea of the true way returned to me.

I was touched by your care,

reduced to fawning excuses.

Everything was spotless in the little house of our desire,

the clock ticked on and on, happy about

being apprenticed to reality…

The poem is casual, conversational, intimate, and at the same time puzzling, strange, because it’s about the strangeness. We live our lives, we love, talk and listen as though we know what’s going on, but we don’t. Ashbery, like all great poets, is a mystic, overwhelmed by the weirdness of life and yet grateful—so grateful!—for the beauty of things and the comfort of companionship.

Ashbery’s poems resist interpretation, but they evoke powerful feelings in us; they give us the sense that we’re in the presence of a deep intelligence, which sees things that we might see if we paid closer attention. Quantum mechanics has a similar quality, but it is much colder and harder than any poetry. The equations don’t give a shit if we get them, because that is not their primary function. If we want to gush over them, fetishize them, invent meanings for them, fine, but they’re not asking us to do that.

Ashbery’s poetry is ingratiating in comparison to physics. I can puzzle over an Ashbery poem and convince myself that I’m getting it on some level, or feeling it, even if I can’t articulate that feeling. In contrast, a paper on quantum chromodynamics, the theory of quarks, is opaque to me, adamantine, a cliff of sheer obsidian lacking handholds or footholds. I once asked Murray Gell-Mann, inventor/discoverer of quarks, if he thought we’d always be stuck with quantum strangeness. He gave me this response, which I reproduce with poetic line breaks:

I don’t think there’s anything strange

about it!

It’s just quantum mechanics

acting like quantum mechanics!

That’s all it does!

To Gell-Mann, quantum mechanics made perfect sense. And yet Gell-Mann was a mischievous fellow. He toyed with a many-worlds variant called many histories. He lifted the word quark from a line in Finnegans Wake: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” (Quarks come in threes.) He called a scheme for categorizing particles “The Eightfold Way” after Buddha’s steps to enlightenment. Gell-Mann encouraged interpretation even as he scorned it. How ironic. His attitude reminds me of Marianne Moore’s poem about poetry, which says:

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond

all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one

discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.

Moore’s advice applies to interpretations of quantum mechanics, or to any philosophical propositions, for that matter. Scott Aaronson concludes his riff on the Zen anti-interpretation by saying “there’s more to life than achieving greater and greater clarity about the foundations of QM.” But read the interpretations of Maudlin, Albert, Bohm, Wheeler and others with perfect contempt, and you might find something useful.

Was my ironic quantum conclusion foregone? Pre-determined? Fated? Maybe. My know-nothing-ism comes in part from a youthful psychedelic vision, during which I realized that not even God, if there is a God, knows why She/He/They/It exists. Since then, I’ve become more and more convinced that science, although it tells us a lot about a lot of things, cannot solve the biggest mysteries: Why this universe? Why life? Why us? As we learn more about the world, the mysteries deepen, the world gets weirder and weirder.

At the same time, my quantum experiment—not to mention the growing chaos and darkness around me--has sharpened my yearning for the revelation that makes everything clear. This project has forced me to reconsider my views, to doubt my own doubt. My worldview feels wobblier, more uncertain than ever. I’m on thin ice. If you ask me what I think about quantum mechanics, I’ll do my best to express my current position, but that will be merely the starting point for another phase of wobbling.

The problem of quantum mechanics is related to the mind-body problem, which Schopenhauer called the world knot. Or rather, they are the same problem, the same knot, seen from different perspectives. Both problems ask, What are we, what can we be, what should we be? We choose answers that work, that give us comfort, that help us make sense of life. And we keep changing our minds about those answers in response to new experiences, including encounters with other seekers. But we must give up the idea of a final answer. That is a category error, as much so as the idea of a final bridge or final poem. So says the ironic interpretation of quantum mechanics.

The ironic interpretation isn’t the last word on anything. It is a never-ending conversation.

Robert emails me. He’s changed his mind about Namibia, he’s too sick to go. He fears the knot of guts bulging from his abdomen will burst in Africa, forcing Mac and me to lug his “ruptured corpse” out of the wilderness; we must go to Namibia without him. I reply that we’re not going anywhere without him.

New plan: In early June, after my semester ends, I’ll visit Robert and Ruth at their home in Hanover, Illinois, a hamlet on the Mississippi River. Their son Blaed is in Hanover too. He moved there from Los Angeles, where he designs video games, at the beginning of the pandemic to help care for his dad. My son and daughter want to come with me. It’ll be great being together again after all these years, just like old times.