CHAPTER TWELVE

Thin Ice

Lots of snow last night. Richard, our ringleader, enlists a crew for clearing a pond on his family’s property in Cold Spring, New York, with snow blowers and shovels. My pals are still shoveling when I arrive from Hoboken. When we finally play, the ice is treacherous. My skates keep plunging into air pockets beneath the slick surface. I fall repeatedly, banging my elbows and hips. When I get home, I’m aching all over, not in a good way. I peel off my sweat-soaked gear and take a long, hot shower. My right elbow, I notice, is swollen and bleeding.

The metaphor is almost too obvious, applying to my failed marriage, my writing career and now my quantum experiment. I’m skating along, full of myself, thinking everything is cool, when, Ooof! I tumble. That happened with Susskind last summer and PEP553 last fall. I’m gliding happily and, Ooof! I fall on my face. Q Is for Quantum boosted my confidence, but my gains feel flimsy. I want to consolidate my knowledge, to arrive at a grand conclusion, perhaps related to the what-is-real conundrum.

With that goal in mind, I resume reading a book I found too difficult months ago: Philosophy of Physics: Quantum Mechanics by Tim Maudlin. Maudlin is a highly regarded philosopher of physics. We crossed tracks a while back after I posted a snarky profile of Karl Popper, a giant of 20th-century philosophy, on ScientificAmerican.com. Maudlin commented on Facebook that he couldn’t decide who came across worse: Popper, his bossy housekeeper or this Horgan guy. Maudlin’s reaction was funny and fair. A mutual friend brought us together for lunch, and since then we’ve stayed in touch, mostly via Facebook.

After I finish Maudlin’s book, he agrees to talk to me about it via Zoom. Part of me hopes he can get me to see the world as he does. Maudlin projects supreme confidence in his judgements. If he doubts himself, he does a good job repressing it. He pursues truth with a passion approaching ferocity. His style is reassuring--you feel you are in the hands of a hyper-competent expert--but he can be overbearing. I resist him now and then, like a lapdog who, on a walk with his owner, keeps sitting down to assert his independence.

Maudlin insists in his book that a scientific theory, to be worthy of the name, must tell us “precisely what exists and how it behaves.” He doesn’t argue this position so much as proclaim it as a self-evident axiom. He believes quantum mechanics can tell us what exists and how it behaves, although not in a straightforward way. He rejects the idea that quantum mechanics represents merely our beliefs about the world, as QBists claim. Quantum mechanics is “ontic,” he says, meaning it’s about what actually exists, what is real. He zeros in on entanglement, which he sees as the quintessential quantum property.

During our Zoom talk, Maudlin gives me a minilecture, with slides, that exposes entanglement in all its oddness. You start with three particles whose spins are entangled, which means they are described by a single wave function, as if they were one particle. You let the three particles zip away from each other; then you measure their spins, getting a certain combination of results, as dictated by the wave function. You cannot derive any final, measured results from any initial configuration that specifies the spin of each individual particle. Hence, the entangled particles do not and cannot have specific values before you look at them. This is what John Bell established with his famous theorem and what the PBR theorem of Rudolph et al. reinforces.

In his book, Maudlin ruthlessly analyzes attempts to derive a model of the physical world from quantum mechanics. He’s especially hard on the many-worlds hypothesis, which he finds incoherently vague on the question of when and how worlds branch. He’s almost as hard on a hidden-variables model that invokes something called the pilot wave, even though he seems to favor this model. Louis de Broglie invented the pilot-wave model in the 1920s, and David Bohm refined and promoted it beginning in the 1940s.

The pilot wave is a kind of reification of the wave function. It is a force field that controls the behavior of particles and hence eliminates quantum randomness and uncertainty. The pilot wave is nonlocal; when you measure one particle, you disturb the pilot wave and hence all other particles under its influence instantaneously. Everything is entangled. Bohm’s interpretation fulfills Maudlin‘s stipulation that a theory tell us what exists and how it behaves--but at what cost?  

Maudlin acknowledges that the hidden variables postulated by Bohm’s theory will probably always remain hidden. Physicists have found no empirical evidence for the pilot wave, and it’s not clear how such evidence could be obtained. Because of its nonlocal nature, Bohm’s model isn’t compatible with special relativity, which prohibits propagation of effects faster than the speed of light. That means the model can’t serve as the basis for quantum field theory, which includes relativistic effects. And this is the best interpretation?

Maudlin is blessed, and cursed, with intellectual conviction. His commitment to truth makes him insist on a debatable definition of a theory: It must tell us how the world works. But maybe we can’t know how the world works. Maybe science is more about power than truth, and maybe when it comes to the meaning of theories, agnosticism is the most sensible position. Newton wasn’t sure why his mathematical model of gravity works. Why should gravity decrease in proportion to the square of the distance between two objects? That seems unreasonable, a spooky coincidence, and Newton, wisely, feigned no hypothesis.

With trepidation, during our Zoom chat I tell Maudlin my reaction to his book. If his goal is to show that quantum mechanics can be rendered intelligible, I say, I’m not sure he succeeds. He makes all the interpretations, including Bohm’s, look preposterous. Maudlin is unfazed by my remarks. Yes, he replies, all the interpretations have problems, including the pilot wave. But they serve as demonstration proofs that you can fashion a description of reality out of quantum mechanics; in the future, we’ll surely do better.

Maybe. Maybe not. We’ve had a century to make sense of quantum mechanics, and we’re more confused than ever. Maudlin doesn’t even consider how consciousness might fit into a quantum picture of reality, although his heroes John Bell and David Bohm both dwelled on this puzzle. Maybe we live on an island of knowledge bounded by quantum mechanics, and beyond that boundary lurk dragons made of mist.

Bohm’s Fish Tank

Talking to Maudlin brings back memories of David Bohm, whose reputation has surged lately. Bohm, along with Einstein and John Bell, is the hero of What Is Real?, Adam Becker’s history of attempts to explain quantum mechanics. Becker notes that Bohm “remains an intensely polarizing figure. He is written off as a kook, a deluded mystic, a hopelessly conservative throwback who wanted to return to the physics of Isaac Newton. He is also hailed as a visionary.”

I interviewed Bohm in 1992 at his home outside London. He was recovering from a heart attack, and he looked ghastly. His hands trembled, his face was pale with a tinge of blue, his lips purplish. He had an ancient-mariner gleam in his eye; he seemed desperate to get things off his chest. I was often so baffled by what he was saying that I didn’t bother asking for clarification, I just smiled and nodded. But he could be rivetingly lucid.

Bohm seized on de Broglie’s pilot-wave hypothesis in the 1940s, he told me, because he was dissatisfied with the Copenhagen interpretation, which reduces quantum mechanics to “a system of formulas that we use to make predictions or to control things technologically.” Like Tim Maudlin, Bohm thought physics should explain the world, not just give us tools to manipulate it. He rejected the shut-up-and-calculate mindset.

But unlike Maudlin, Bohm suspected that reality is ultimately unknowable. He rejected the claim of Hawking, Weinberg and other prominent physicists that physics can achieve a “final” theory that explains the universe. Belief in final knowledge can become self-fulfilling, Bohm warned. “If you have fish in a tank and you put a glass barrier in there, the fish keep away from it,” he said. “And then if you take away the glass barrier, they never cross the barrier, and they think the whole world is that.”

Bohm was a spiritual as well as scientific seeker. In the 1960s he fell under the spell of Jiddu Krishnamurti, who introduced an intellectual form of eastern mysticism to the west. Krishnamurti said we can achieve self-knowledge through a form of meditation that calls for intense scrutiny of our own thoughts. Initially sympathetic to this idea, Bohm ended up rejecting it. Examining your mind changes it, Bohm said, just as measuring an electron alters its course. Hence we cannot achieve final self-knowledge, any more than we can achieve a final theory of physics.

Bohm stressed the importance of “playfulness” in science and in life, but he struck me as a tormented soul. For Bohm, truth-seeking wasn’t a game. It was a dreadful, necessary and ultimately impossible task. Bohm was desperate for enlightenment, but he knew it isn’t attainable, not for any mortal being. No one gets out of the fish tank alive. Two months after our meeting, Bohm had another heart attack and died.

Back to hockey for a moment. Long ago we played a late-season game when the ice was rotten around the margins. Our ringleader then was Lars, an enormous alpha male who grew up in Nazi-occupied Norway. After an errant pass, the puck ended up on the edge of the ice. While trying to retrieve the puck, Lars broke through the ice and plunged into the water. The rest of us laughed and laughed. The pond wasn’t deep, there was no real danger. Lars hauled himself back onto the ice, water streaming off him, and bellowed, “Let’s play!” 

Lars no longer skates with us. A few years ago, he slipped into dementia. The rest of us, including his son Nils, miss him, mourn him, keep playing. The game must go on. 

PsiQuantum

Emily, as she often does, brings me, no, yanks me down to earth. She hasn’t invested in cryptocurrencies, but she’s intrigued by them. One of her investing pals says quantum computers might render cryptocurrencies obsolete by cracking the blockchain encryption. Emily asks, Is that true? Can quantum computers do that?

It is reasonable for Emily to expect an answer from me. She has patiently—well, maybe not patiently--listened to me yammering about Terry Rudolph’s model of quantum computing, with the white and black balls falling through weird boxes into little clouds. But when I was absorbing Rudolph’s tutorials on quantum computing, I never thought I was learning about actual, real-world, quantum computers; I thought I was learning about quantum mechanics, the otherworldly theory. 

I reply to Emily’s question: I don’t know or care about quantum computers. I’m interested in the philosophical and spiritual implications of quantum mechanics, not its commercial potential. Or words to that grandiose effect. Emily reiterates her complaint that I, an alleged science journalist, am appallingly ignorant and incurious when it comes to practical, real-world matters. Irritated, I do some googling and find a Forbes article: “Here’s Why Quantum Computing Will Not Break Cryptocurrencies.” The article says that as quantum computers advance, so will commercial encryption methods; the former will probably never catch up to the latter, certainly not any time soon.

The article is too glib to satisfy Emily. I assure her that, although quantum computers are generating lots of hype, they will probably never amount to much. Emily asks, How do you know that if you don’t know anything about them? What about your new friend, the guy who wrote the book you’ve been reading? Didn’t he start a quantum-computer company? Why don’t you ask him about cryptocurrencies?

Reluctantly, I email Terry Rudolph: 

I told my girlfriend about your company, and she asked me to ask you if you're going to bring cryptocurrency crashing down by making it easy to break the code.

Rudolph responds that quantum computers might in principle make it easier to crack the codes protecting bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and hence to steal them. He adds:

Unfortunately this proposed business model has not gained much traction with the various [venture capitalists] who have invested in us, so we have to resort to things like improving drug design, solving global warming, etc.

Solving global warming? I assume Rudolph is kidding. A week or two later, we talk via Zoom, which we’d been planning to do since I finished Q Is for Quantum. I’m primarily interested in Rudolph’s personal history and thoughts on the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics. Quantum computing is way down my list of questions. We chat for well over an hour. Rudolph is in California, where his company, PsiQuantum, is based. He is sitting in a bare white room. He’s 47, with longish brown hair and a diffident air. He speaks with an indeterminate Aussie-British accent. He is as self-deprecating in person as in his writings, at least at first.  

Rudolph grew up in Malawi, Africa. His parents are schoolteachers. His father is descended from a long line of white settlers of Africa, going back 300 years. His mother is the child of Erwin Schrodinger and a woman he met in Ireland in the 1930s. Rudolph’s mother, who was brought to Malawi as a child, told her son about his grandfather was when he was 21; he was already studying physics in Australia. Rudolph was shocked, not inspired, by the news. He certainly didn’t feel fated to become a great physicist.

Rudolph is clearly uncomfortable talking about his lineage and relieved when we turn to physics. In graduate school, Rudolph considered focusing on string theory but decided that he would probably make only minor contributions, given that “the level of math is extremely high.” Also, string theory and other unified-theory candidates pose the same questions as plain old quantum mechanics: What is there when we’re not looking? How can distant events affect each other instantaneously? Rudolph’s obsession with these questions led to his work on the PBR theorem, which Pooh Bear defends in Q Is for Quantum.

Up to this point, Rudolph has been humble and self-effacing, as in his writings. When I finally ask about his company, PsiQuantum, he switches unexpectedly into a super-confident mode. For decades, he says, quantum computing has been little more than a hypothetical possibility; researchers wrestled with the technical complexities of keeping qubits in superposition for long enough to perform useful calculations. But because of recent advances, quantum computers might soon live up to their enormous promise.

Rudolph gives me a minilecture, with diagrams, showing how the PsiQuantum computer works. It uses real-world PETE boxes to make qubits out of light, and it has robust, fault-tolerant error-correction. The error correction tells you that a misty state has changed--perhaps because a stray photon flipped the color of a ball—but not precisely how it has changed.  “You’ve received some information,” Rudolph says, “but you haven’t received all of the information.” The qubits thus remain in the misty state that gives the computer its peculiar power.  

Rudolph’s fervor surprises me. No offense, I say, but I assumed your company was a hobby, a fun but long-shot project for a middle-aged physicist. Rudolph laughs good-naturedly. PsiQuantum, he assures me, is a very serious enterprise. Since he and others founded the firm in 2016, they have operated in stealth mode, trying to avoid premature attention. But they have hired 150 excellent engineers and raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and they expect to raise much more money soon. Some of the world’s biggest, most powerful companies are vying to build the first commercially viable quantum computers, but PsiQuantum, Rudolph says, is leading the pack.

Toward the end of our Zoom chat, I ask, Will we always be stuck with the paradoxes of quantum mechanics? Is nature explicable? Rudolph replies that he hopes to understand entanglement and nonlocality before he dies. But he’s not sure humans are designed for understanding reality; we’re wedded to certain concepts, like space and time, that might prevent us from seeing things clearly. [1]

If PsiQuantum builds the first commercially successful quantum computer, I say, that should provide some consolation. “Yeah, I would be happy with that,” Rudolph says, laughing. “But I would still be like, ‘How the hell is this stupid thing working!’”

Quantum Computing Hype

Rudolph’s assertions about PsiQuantum leave me in a state of cognitive dissonance. In all our exchanges, including our Zoom chat, he has struck me as modest and compulsively honest, as well as kind. I like Rudolph a lot. But as a responsible journalist, I must doubt his claim that his company is the frontrunner in the race to build quantum computers. Clearly, I need to put my metaphysical obsessions aside, at least temporarily, and look more closely at quantum computers.

My timing is fortuitous. Quantum computing has been generating a flood of reports, especially in business media. Pundits predict that quantum computing could spawn a trillion-dollar industry within a decade. Hundreds of companies are now investing in quantum computers, including tech giants like IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and Google. A startup called IonQ just announced a $2 billion deal that would make it the first publicly traded firm dedicated to quantum computers. IonQ plans to produce a device roughly the size of an Xbox console soon.

The hype is over the top. Quantum computing, The Wall Street Journal reports, could “speed up calculations related to finance, drug and materials discovery, artificial intelligence and others, and crack many of the defenses used to secure the internet.” Business Insider says the technology could help us “cure cancer, and even take steps to reverse climate change.” Quantum computers could counter climate change by helping researchers design more efficient batteries and solar cells. Apparently Rudolph wasn’t kidding when he told me his company might solve global warming.

These claims disturb some experts, notably Scott Aaronson. When I interviewed him for Scientific American a few years ago, Aaronson said he became entranced with quantum computing in the late 1990s, when he was a teenager. He saw the technology as a thrilling refutation of a depressing book he had read, The End of Science. Quantum computing was “this profound story at the intersection of computer science, physics, engineering, math, and philosophy that was only just beginning rather than ending. The field was, and remains, a major source of counterexamples to your thesis about everything fundamental already having been discovered!”

But Aaronson is worried about misinformation and hype surrounding quantum computing. In addition to contributing to the field, he serves as its watchdog, debunking claims by ignorant, overly enthusiastic reporters as well as by his fellow experts. In a recent blog post, Aaronson worries that over-promising by experts has gotten out of control. “What’s new,” Aaronson says,

is that millions of dollars are now potentially available to quantum computing researchers, along with equity, stock options, and whatever else causes ‘ka-ching’ sound effects and bulging eyes with dollar signs. And in many cases, to have a shot at such riches, all an expert needs to do is profess optimism that quantum computing will have revolutionary, world-changing applications and have them soon. Or at least, not object too strongly when others say that.

Days later, Aaronson elaborates on his concerns in a live, two-hour online discussion with other experts in Clubhouse, an online platform. George Musser, a physics writer aware of my quantum project, invites me to join the conversation. Here is my summary of points made by Aaronson and others during the powwow:

*Quantum-computing enthusiasts have declared that the technology will supercharge machine-learning. It will revolutionize the simulation of complex phenomena in chemistry, neuroscience, medicine, economics and other fields. It will solve the traveling-salesman problem and other conundrums that resist solution by conventional computers. It’s still not clear whether quantum computing will achieve these goals, Aaronson says. Optimists might be “in for a rude awakening.”

*Popular accounts often imply that quantum computers, because superposition and entanglement allow them to carry out multiple computations at the same time, are simply faster versions of conventional computers. Those accounts are misleading, Aaronson says. Compared to conventional computers, quantum computers are “unnatural” devices that might be best suited to a relatively narrow range of applications, notably simulating systems dominated by quantum effects.

*The ability of a quantum computer to surpass the fastest conventional machine is known as “quantum supremacy.” Demonstrating quantum supremacy is extremely difficult. Even in conventional computing, proving that your algorithm beats mine isn’t straightforward. You must pick a task that represents a fair test and choose valid methods of measuring speed and accuracy. The outcomes of tests are also prone to misinterpretation and confirmation bias. Testing “creates an enormous space for mischief,” Aaronson says.

*As quantum computing attracts more attention and funding, researchers have a stronger incentive to mislead investors, government agencies, journalists, the public and, worst of all, themselves about their work’s potential. If researchers can’t keep their promises, excitement might give way to doubt, disappointment and anger, Aaronson warns. The field might lose funding and talent and lapse into a quantum-computing “winter” like those that have plagued artificial intelligence.

*Other technologies, like genetic engineering, high-temperature superconductors, nanotechnology and fusion energy, have gone through phases of irrational exuberance. But something about quantum computing makes it especially prone to hype, Aaronson suggests, perhaps because quantum “stands for something cool you shouldn’t be able to understand.”

During the Clubhouse discussion, participants accuse several companies of hype, including IonQ, the startup with the $2 billion deal. No one mentions PsiQuantum, Terry Rudolph’s company. Rudolph doesn’t participate in the Clubhouse discussion, but he and Aaronson know each other. They co-authored a paper in 2007, and in 2018 Aaronson let Rudolph plug Q Is for Quantum on Aaronson’s blog.

When I email Rudolph after the Clubhouse discussion, he says Aaronson’s concerns about hype do not apply to PsiQuantum, which has not sought attention as aggressively as other companies. But as in our Zoom chat, Rudolph asserts that PsiQuantum is closer than any other firm “by a very large margin” to building a “useful” quantum computer. A useful computer, Rudolph says, can solve “an impactful problem that we would not have been able to solve otherwise (e.g., something from quantum chemistry which has real-world uses).” 

That goal requires millions of qubits and robust error-correction. PsiQuantum expects to build useful machines by the middle of the decade with the help of the semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries. The computers will be room-sized, and most users will access them remotely. “Obviously, I have biases,” Rudolph says, “and people will naturally discount my opinions. But I have spent a lot of time quantitatively comparing what we are doing to others.”

Can PsiQuantum produce commercially viable computers as quickly as Rudolph predicts, and is the company really leading all the competition “by a very large margin”? Hell if I know. Even after reading Q Is for Quantum and dozens of popular and technical articles, quantum computing baffles me. I’m certainly not going to invest my retirement money in this misty technology, and I wouldn’t advise Emily or anyone else to do so.

The history of fusion energy, which came up during Aaronson’s Clubhouse discussion, gives me pause. Fusion occurs when two atoms of a light element, such as hydrogen, are squeezed together to form a heavier element, such as helium, releasing a spurt of energy. The Sun is a giant fusion reactor. By the 1950s, physicists understood fusion well enough to build hydrogen bombs, which make the fission bombs we dropped on Japan look like firecrackers. Soon, physicists promised, they would harness fusion to produce an inexhaustible source of energy.

In 1982, when I was in journalism school, I visited a lab at Princeton that housed an experimental fusion reactor. Called a tokamak, it was a huge machine, adorned with cables and dials and flashing lights, that compressed hydrogen plasma with powerful magnetic fields. It looked like a prop for a cheesy sci-fi film. I loved it. Physicists at the lab claimed that cheap, clean fusion energy would transform the world. If you had asked me then whether we’d have fusion energy by now, almost 40 years later, I’d have said, Of course! 

The Princeton tokamak never achieved its goal of producing more energy than it consumed; it shut down in 1997. Fusion research limps along today, sustained in part by the military, which remains interested in fusion weaponry. [2] But just because fusion energy hasn’t worked doesn’t mean quantum computing won’t work. So I decide. I write a cautiously hopeful column for Scientific American about quantum computing. The column veers between Aaronson’s concerns about hype and Rudolph’s hopes for PsiQuantum. My final paragraph is upbeat:

If [quantum computing] gives scientists more powerful tools for simulating complex phenomena, and especially the quantum weirdness at the heart of things, maybe it will give science the jump start it badly needs. Who knows? I hope PsiQuantum helps quantum computing live up to the hype.

After Scientific American publishes my column, shills for quantum-computing companies pester me. They brag about their clients’ rapid progression toward quantum supremacy and offer me interviews with researchers and executives. Maybe writing a positive column about quantum computing was a mistake.

During the Clubhouse meeting with Aaronson and other experts, I ask only one question: Do quantum-computing researchers accept money from the military? Yes, Aaronson replies, military agencies support him and other researchers, but that support does not influence the field in any significant way. His own funding, Aaronson assures me, comes with no strings attached. I do not mention this exchange in my Scientific American column.

Impure Science 

Meanwhile, I’m reading another dense, difficult, philosophical treatise on quantum mechanics: Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning by Karen Barad. A former student of mine, Tim Luft, who shares my quantum obsession, recommended the book. I open Meeting the Universe Halfway hoping that it will take me back to what I love: hifalutin metaphysics unrelated to money or other practical concerns. But Meeting the Universe Halfway thwarts my expectations.

Barad (they/them) became a philosopher after getting a Ph.D. in particle physics. They are a professor of feminist studies, philosophy and the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Barad’s analysis of quantum riddles is strikingly unlike that of Tim Maudlin. Whereas Maudlin’s analysis is largely ahistorical and apolitical, Barad insists that the conundrums posed by quantum mechanics must be considered in their social context. Barad hints at where they are going in “Acknowledgements.” Quantum entanglement implies that we

lack an independent, self-contained existence. There is no “I” that can take credit for a book, because books are necessarily collaborations… It is not so much that I have written this book, as that it has written me.

This passage makes me cringe, as do other sections of Meeting the Universe Halfway, at least early on in my reading. Barad seems too self-consciously progressive and postmodern, too inclined to see science as a reflection of social and political attitudes. The jargon doesn’t help. One chapter is titled, “The Ontology of Knowing, the Intra-activity of Becoming, and the Ethics of Mattering.” 

But Meeting the Universe Halfway grows on me. Unlike Maudlin and most other quantum explainers, Barad proposes a metaphysics with political and ethical scope. Barad’s quantum-inspired perspective, which they call “agential realism,” is subtle. Barad rejects conventional objectivity, which assumes that only matter matters. But Barad also rejects the postmodernism claim that reality is unknowable and objectivity impossible, and they warn against “romanticizing” quantum mechanics to bolster simplistic feminist and queer assumptions about identity. Agential realism calls for a new kind of objectivity, which acknowledges the interdependence of matter and mind.

Up to this point, agential realism resembles QBism, another interpretation that casts doubt on conventional objectivity. But agential realism is far more radical than QBism. Agential realism draws attention to, and challenges, our culture’s militarist, capitalist, racist, sexist, homophobic status quo. Agential realism suggests that physics cannot be pursued in isolation from politics, economics and ethics. Nor can we draw clear lines between “pure” and “applied” science. We cannot treat what is, what can be and what should be as separate questions; they’re all part of the same hideously tangled world knot. Suffering is real, injustice is real, war is real. If your metaphysics doesn’t include suffering, injustice and war, you need a new metaphysics. [3]

I remember Scott Aaronson’s claim that the military gives him money with no strings attached. Barad, I’m guessing, would say that there are always strings attached. Page 389 of Meeting the Universe Halfway presents a topological map linking “quantum physics” to, well, everything. To fields like genomics and molecular biology. To technologies like MRI, satellites, cryptography, artificial intelligence, nuclear bombs. To individuals like Turing, Hitler, Shockley, Teller, Roosevelt, Reagan. To homophobia, racism, World War II, Hiroshima, the McCarthy hearings, the war on terror.

Rather than trying to establish guilt by association with this map, Barad is merely illustrating the point that science is never “pure.” Quantum physics “is part of a complexly entangled web of phenomena that include scientific, technological, military, economic, medical, political, social and cultural apparatuses.” The topological map in Meeting the Universe Halfway shows “quantum computers” hovering in the upper-right corner, not far from “banking,” “surveillance” and “imperialism.”

Perturbed by Barad’s analysis, I google “quantum computers” and “defense” and find articles on military applications of quantum technologies, including computers, encryption and sensors. The U.S. and its allies are reportedly working hard to maintain their lead over China and Russia, which are also developing quantum weaponry. “Quantum Science to Deliver Cutting-Edge Technologies to War-Fighters,” exults a recent Defense Department press release. What is real? A quantum arms race is real.

Once again, the cruel, crass world intrudes on my quantum experiment. I’m skating along, happily contemplating the mysteries of existence, and, Oof! The ice cracks beneath me. Quantum mechanics is far more than a metaphysical riddle; it is a powerful tool, which can be used for ill or good. Shills claim quantum computing can save us, by curing cancer or reversing global warming. Maybe. Or maybe quantum technologies will hasten our self-destruction. When I ask Terry Rudolph about military applications of quantum computing he responds:

Of course it is hard to be sure that naive humanitarian optimists will get to direct early use of the technology before the 5-star generals. The only way I can see to try and ensure that happens is to be on the inside trying to ensure it :)

Yes, PsiQuantum has taken military money. So have I. In 2005, a firm called Centra Technology, which was under contract with the National Counterterrorism Center, which is overseen by the CIA, asked me for ideas for opposing terrorism. I assumed the query was a prank, but it wasn’t. I came up with a few ideas—like disseminating literature on nonviolent activism to potential terrorists--for which I was paid. I haven’t done anything like that since. But the school that employs me does defense-related research. I’m not pure.

If I were a real science journalist, the kind that Emily wants me to be, I would stop pondering the meaning of quantum mechanics and delve into how quantum technologies might actually change the world, for ill or good. I would shut up and investigate. But that’s not what I want to do with my wild and precious life. I want to keep looking for a way out of the fish tank.

Last Game

I just played what was probably my last hockey game of the winter. The ice is good, and I manage not to fall on my sore right elbow. Driving home I muse again over how physicists might model hockey. A good model wouldn’t depict my buddies and me as identical spheres in a vacuum. It would represent individual player’s strengths and weaknesses, and it would show how each player interacts with others, teammates to whom he might pass and opponents whom he is trying to deceive with feints and jukes. He or she. Richard’s daughter is one of the best players; she’s a beast, relentless on defense and offense.

A model must take randomness into account. Pond ice is often so rough that the puck skips over sticks. Team formation jumbles things further. We pile sticks in the center of the ice, then someone pushes half the sticks toward one goal and half toward the other. Sometimes one team has more individual talent, but the other team prevails, because it has better chemistry.

Sports engineers have surely modeled hockey with an eye toward improving players’ performance. A model wouldn’t do me any good. After almost 60 years of playing, I’m all instinct and reflex, competence without comprehension. My favorite move is the spin-o-rama. I skate toward my opponents’ goal with the puck on one side of my body, then I spin around and shoot from the other side. I pull the spin-o-rama today on Tim, but he isn’t fooled, he knows me too well. I rarely deceive anyone with the spin-o-rama. I do it because it gives me joy, especially when it works, and it makes my buddies laugh.

I’m an old hippy peacenik, so I try to play hockey just for fun, sublimating my desire to win. When I feel myself getting too competitive, I stop for a moment to take in my surroundings: the carved-up ice, the cloud-streaked sky, the winter sun hovering above the trees, my ragtag hockey buddies. Pay attention, I tell myself, be grateful. As soon as I resume playing, I become a monomaniac again, trying as hard as I can to score and to prevent the other team from scoring.

Notes

1. Spooky Action at a Distance, the excellent 2016 book by George Musser, explores recent theoretical attempts to find geometries that precede and give rise to space and time.

2. It will take a lot to alter my pessimism about the prospects for fusion energy. Example: For decades Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, a federal weapons lab, has sought to produce fusion reactions—which are, essentially, mini-thermonuclear explosions—by compressing a tiny sphere of fuel with giant lasers. In December 2022 Livermore announced that its laser machine had achieved a “major scientific breakthrough,” producing more energy with a fusion reaction than the machine consumed. Unfortunately, Livermore has a long history of making hypey pronouncements aimed at getting more funding from the government for its laser program. This “breakthrough” is just more of the same.

3. The idea that what is, what can be and what should be are “all part of the same hideously tangled world knot” is also the theme of my book Mind-Body Problems. A caveat comes to mind: I might be projecting my own ideas onto Barad’s book. In an earlier draft of this chapter, I summed up Barad’s theme as, “Fuck the patriarchy!” I cut that line after Barad said they found it “fantastically offensive.”

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