Confessions of a Namedropping Humblebragger

When I wear this groovy cap, I am humblebragging.

June 20, 2023. As I toil to finish a book, mean reviews often pop into my head. As I wrapped up My Quantum Experiment, this line came to mind: “John Horgan’s book is one long humblebrag.”

Usually my innate cockiness propels me past spasms of self-doubt, but the sting of “humblebrag” lingered. When bullied by a bad feeling, such as fear or self-loathing, I try to overcome it by confronting it, which means writing about it. In this column I confront my fear that I am a humblebragger.

Humblebragging is a type of deception. False modesty. You pretend to deprecate yourself but intend to impress people. Example: I can’t believe my stupid book got fantastic reviews and became a New York Times bestseller! Or, from a Harvard graduate: Harvard is so overrated! (Harvard freshmen get humblebrag training during orientation.)

Another example: Learning how to multiply matrices in your 60s is really hard! Variations on this theme run through My Quantum Experiment, which chronicles my struggles to learn quantum mechanics. Early on, I describe grappling with Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum by physicist Leonard Susskind and co-author.

My pal Sabine Hossenfelder (I’ll get to namedropping later) recommended Susskind’s book, but I found it hard, harder than the famously hard novel Ulysses (my favorite book). I kept writing WTF? in Susskind’s margins, because his terms and notations were so foreign to me. I had to study trigonometry, logarithms and calculus for the first time in 40 years and linear algebra and complex numbers for the first time ever.

In a paroxysm of hubris, or masochism, I nonetheless enrolled in a course at Stevens Institute of Technology: PEP553: Quantum Mechanics and Engineering Applications. PEP553 is an introductory course. How hard could it be? Hard, it turned out. I was the class dummy. Even with the help of two smart, kind study buddies, I couldn’t complete homework. When I whined about PEP553 to my brother, he said it was like I took a graduate course in French literature without knowing French.

I attended every zoom session of PEP553 but finished in a funk. Then I discovered Q Is for Quantum by physicist Terry Rudolph, which conveys the gist of quantum mechanics with simple algebra. Q Is for Quantum is short but dense. I had to read and re-re-read the parts on how qubits let you crack a code more efficiently than plain old bits. 

Calculating with qubits is just a step-by-step procedure, which anyone can master with practice. But after I grasped Rudolph’s system, enough to do simple calculations with it, it still baffled me. I felt as though Rudolph had taught me how to perform a magic trick, like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. But after I learned the trick, it still seemed like magic; I didn’t know where the rabbit came from.

Okay, enough humility [see NOTE]. Now comes the bragging. I ended up learning a lot from my studies, in my halting, half-assed way. I learned about the “particle in a box,” a toy model that dramatizes the difference between classical and quantum physics. I learned how the Born rule, which calls for squaring things called probability amplitudes, ensures that your calculations don’t leave you with embarrassing negative probabilities.

I learned the difference between bounded states, which cycle within certain parameters, and unbounded states, which fly off to infinity. I learned about the principle of least action, which I call the law of laziness.

I learned that in linear algebra A x B does not always equal B x A, and this “non-commutativity” underpins quantum uncertainty. Non-commutativity also implies that the order in which you measure things determines their spin and other properties, which subverts the whole premise of objectivity. I learned how entanglement is just a special case of superposition involving two or more things. I’m proud of myself for learning all this stuff, which I convey as clearly as I can in My Quantum Experiment.

I also finally understand what Richard Feynman means when he says no one really understands quantum mechanics. He means the math works, but neither he nor anyone else can say why it works; sophisticated mathematical models, if anything, conceal rather than reveal what is happening in nature. Not even Feynman, a supremely talented quantum magician, really knows how he pulls those rabbits out of hats.

This realization emboldens me to second-guess actual quantum experts. I knock defenders of leading interpretations of quantum mechanics, including many worlds, superdeterminism, QBism and the pilot-wave model. I reiterate my long-standing complaints about string and multiverse theories.

I propose that physicists who master the mathematics of quantum theory calculate like machines, without really knowing what they are doing. They exhibit what philosopher Daniel Dennett calls “competence without comprehension.” I compare physicists to the man in the famous Chinese-room experiment, who pretends to understand Chinese but doesn’t.

Throughout my book, I veer between self-flagellation and chest-thumping. I am a know-nothing one moment, a know-it-all the next. Some readers might find my bipolar schtick contradictory or incoherent. But humblebragging, I’ve decided, is unavoidable for expressing my worldview.

Life has always bewildered me. I became a science writer because I thought science would give me answers. And it has, sort of. At the same time, the more I learn, the weirder things seem. My quantum experiment has reinforced my conviction that bewilderment is the right response to existence.

This view puts me in an awkward position. I humbly confess that I don’t get existence, but I arrogantly insist that no one else really gets it either. Not Buddha, Plato, Einstein, Weinberg, Witten, Hawking, Hossenfelder. All theories of everything, whether scientific, philosophical or religious, are wrong. Not even God, if there is a God, knows what’s going on.

I have role models. One is Paul Feyerabend, a philosopher who bashes arrogant know-it-alls in science and philosophy. Feyerabend dances past self-contradiction with humor, irony and savage self-laceration. I also identify with Socrates, who decrees that wisdom consists in knowing how little you know. The big difference between me and Socrates is that I am genuinely, truly humble.

Okay, back for a moment to namedropping. My Quantum Experiment is speckled with passages along the lines of: As [Famous Expert] once told me…. Famous experts include Wheeler, Weinberg, Witten, Linde, Penrose, Gell-Mann, Bohm, Kuhn, Hossenfelder. Can I talk about namedropping without namedropping? Maybe, but why should I?

Name-dropping is a form of bragging: I have chatted with this cool celebrity! But name-dropping is only bad if you do it for its own sake, because you’re hoping the celebrity’s glory will reflect off you, or you’re appealing to her authority. I mention celebrities if they have something interesting to say, and I often question their authority.

A final point: All writers are implicitly bragging. You write because you have insights to convey, and tales to tell, that others should take the time to hear. Even the most humble, self-abasing writers are narcissists, or they wouldn’t, couldn’t write.

Okay, I think I’ve talked myself out of my self-criticism. Yes, My Quantum Experiment is one big humblebrag, but that’s okay, because my humility is sincere, and my bragging is justified. So is my name-dropping. Yes, I am a proud, namedropping humblebragger.

NOTE: Humility is a paradoxical trait. My buddy Robert Wright, after I mentioned on Twitter that I planned to write about humblebragging, quoted Golda Meir: “You aren’t great enough to be humble.” The implication is that if you really feel humble, you don’t talk about it; as soon as you express humility, you’re no longer humble, you’re humblebragging. The same paradox applies to enlightenment. Lao Tzu says: He who speaks, does not know. He who knows, does not speak. So anyone who talks about enlightenment is not enlightened, including Lao Tzu. The paradox applies to despair, too. T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland is one long shriek of despair. But if Eliot really despaired, he would have jumped in the Thames or drunk himself to death rather than writing this interminable poem.

Further Reading:

You can read My Quantum Experiment online for free. Or you can buy a paperback or e-book edition from Amazon.