The Ironic Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
This is a wave function symbol drawn by psychedelic artist Nikita Petrov, my Russian friend. The wave function is a mathematical widget at the heart of quantum mechanics. It works, but we can’t know precisely why it works or what it means. So says the ironic interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Hoboken, May 25, 2024. When I set out to learn quantum mechanics several years ago, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder predicted that someday a quantum interpretation would be named after me. I didn’t take her seriously, because I figured she was kidding, being ironic.
I love irony. In The End of Science, I coined the phrase ironic science to describe theories that shouldn’t be taken seriously, because they can’t be tested in the same way that genuine science can. String theory and Freudian psychoanalysis come to mind.
Quantum mechanics is a hybrid of genuine and ironic science. In its mathematical form, quantum mechanics is the most powerful, precise theory ever discovered; it has withstood countless tests. The theory is ironic in the sense that its meaning is maddeningly ambiguous.
Experts have proposed many “interpretations” of quantum mechanics, which purport to explain what it means. Just sticking to ones I mention in the book I wrote on my quantum experiment, there are the Copenhagen, pilot-wave, many-worlds, many-minds, relational, it-from-bit, QBism, If-ism, superdeterminism and agential-realism interpretations.
I see all these interpretations as ironic, not to be taken seriously, because they cannot be experimentally distinguished from each other. Choosing one interpretation over another is a matter of taste, not truth. You dig many worlds, I’m into it from bit.
Contemplating this situation, and recalling Sabine’s ironic prediction, I came up with the ironic interpretation of quantum mechanics. It’s really a meta-interpretation, which says there can be no definitive interpretation of quantum mechanics, no final statement of what it means. This is the implicit position of physics professors who disdain interpretation and command students to “Shut up and calculate.”
Einstein and his intellectual heirs, notably physicists David Bohm and John Bell, reject the shut-up-and-calculate stance, insisting that physics must be more than a set of formulas for cranking out predictions and applications. They want truth.
The ironic interpretation encompasses both seemingly contradictory positions. You keep trying to understand quantum mechanics while acknowledging that final understanding will always elude you, because words, numbers and all means of representing “reality” fall short. This perspective resembles negative theology, which tries to describe God while stipulating, as an axiom, that God transcends description.
A corollary of the ironic interpretation is pluralism, the idea that there are many ways to see the world. Engineers are pluralists without making a fuss over it. Faced with a problem like building a new bridge over the Hudson, engineers don’t ask, What is the final, definitive, true solution to this problem? That sort of thinking is dumb, counterproductive. 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 the past and predict the future. It can help us build a greener car or deadlier drone. On a more personal level, a solution can help us cope with mortality or keep us from taking things for granted.
Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian fabulist, epitomizes the ironic, pluralistic perspective. In his story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Borges imagines a world whose sages have concluded that reality is inexplicable. That assumption, far from discouraging speculation, inspires it. Borges writes:
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.
Borges, that old joker, says that in Tlon the most fantastic metaphysical proposition of all is materialism, which holds that matter exists even when not perceived. Tlonians love materialism precisely because it’s so absurd. The joke is that here on Earth, materialism is common sense, and science’s default stance—although quantum mechanics makes it harder to be a materialist.
Does the ironic interpretation apply to itself, and does that mean it is self-refuting? Well, yes, I suppose so, in the same way that art is self-refuting. Art, the lie that tells the truth, is intrinsically ironic. Just as a wave function consists of many superposed possibilities, so art seethes with possible meanings. Take any John Ashbery poem, like “Wakefulness.” Here’s an excerpt:
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, humdrum, and yet it’s baffling, weird, because it’s about the weirdness. We live, we love, we walk and talk as though we know what’s going on, but we don’t, really. Like all great poets, Ashbery 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 poetry is notoriously difficult, but it is ingratiating in comparison to physics. I can convince myself that on some level I’m getting an Ashbery poem, 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 devoid of 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 funny 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 dabbled in interpretation even as he scorned it. How ironic.
Gell-Mann’s 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 for that matter to any metaphysical propositions; all are ironic, more akin to fiction than to science. Regard such fancies with “perfect contempt,” and you might stumble across something genuine.
A final proposition: 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 help us see life anew, that ease our pain. And we keep changing our minds in response to new experiences, including encounters with other seekers--like mine with my frenemy Sabine Hossenfelder.
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. There is no final answer, only a never-ending conversation. So decrees the ironic interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Further Reading:
Quantum Mechanics, Plato’s Cave and the Blind Piranha
On God, Quantum Mechanics and My Agnostic Schtick
Quantum Mechanics, the Chinese Room and the Limits of Understanding
Is the Schrödinger Equation True?
Conservation of Ignorance: A New Law of Nature
And when you’re done with those, check out My Quantum Experiment, from which this column is adapted.