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Quantum Certainty

“All models are wrong, some are useful.” — George Box To be fair, I was wearing a pink bathrobe and eating a piece of gluten-free cherry pie in someone else’s house. It was New Year’s Eve. I told a stranger I was studying physics. His face lit up. He said, “I’m a big fan of Deepak Chopra.” This kind of response used to annoy me. It still does. But not as much, and wondering why it annoyed me taught me something about people, some of whom I love. “Words matter.” — Barack Obama Deepak Chopra is not the only person who has endowed the word “quantum” with spiritual glitter. Still, he’s been the most effective. My new friend could not remember the name of the actual physicist from the podcast they were telling me about, but they remembered that Deepak was there. Most people are not physicists, so they hear the word “physics” and connect it to the closest thing they’re familiar with — popular science articles and new-age-spirituality-self-help-motivational things — which for decades have been about or inspired by quantum physics, quantum uncertainty, and the certainty of book sales with the word “quantum” in them. I am a writer, physics student, and ethical human interested in the rightness and usefulness of words. I want to understand you, and I want you to understand me. Let me define what physicists mean when they say “quantum,” as in “quantum physics.” “The game I play is an interesting one. It’s imagination in a tight straitjacket, which is this: that it has to agree with the known laws of physics.” — Richard Feynman A quantum is a discrete unit of energy. There seem never to be .75 photons of light. There is one, or there isn’t, or, famously, there can be one and not be one simultaneously until we observe it. That’s it. Energy comes in discrete units called quanta. Sometimes, they’re called particles. Everybody’s next question, even the physicists who created quantum theory, is, does “until we observe it” mean that our consciousness affects the photon? To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. No. A camera sensor can observe the photon. The solar cell on a calculator can observe it. We could check our data and observe what the photon’s position was a moment ago, back when we were unaware of it. Of course, quantum mechanics is much more complicated than that, and if you have ten years to study it, you should. If you don’t, I get it. No one can care about everything. We have to do the laundry. “I’m a magnet for all the crackpots in the world, but they are of interest to me, too. A favorite pastime of mine is to reconstruct their thinking processes.” — Albert Einstein Let’s get back to Deepak Chopra. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, or he isn’t, until I observe him. His latest book, Quantum Body, states: “Very little about your real body is talked about in medical textbooks… Your real body is a quantum creation, it arises from the quantum field that created the universe…” Is he saying doctors don’t understand that your body obeys the laws of quantum mechanics? That seems unlikely. Doctors use X-rays, MRI machines, PET scans, and many other technologies designed to take advantage of the quantum mechanical properties of your body. Also, which quantum field created the universe? Was it the electron field? The Higgs field? There is a different quantum field for every particle. So, “the” quantum field doesn’t make any literal sense. Speaking of fields, to be generous, Deepak Chopra is not in the field of physics. One of his co-authors, Jack Tuszyński, is a trained physicist but works as an oncologist. The other is Brian Fertig, an endocrinologist. I’m pretty sure that Jack and Brian aren’t the only doctors who understand that bodies obey the laws of quantum mechanics. If you’re a doctor, leave a comment and let me know if this is news to you. The authors go on to discuss the difference between the body we think we have and the book's namesake, the quantum body. They assert that the quantum body “doesn’t get sick or grow old.” I just had the flu. Are they saying that wasn’t real? Or are they saying electrons don’t get sick? Are they using the word “quantum” as a metaphor or a metonym? “Russia denied any wrongdoing” is an example of metonymy; “Russia” is a stand-in for something else — in this case, an official spokesperson. A friend of mine, a neuroscientist and researcher, said, “Physics is the soul of the sciences.” “Soul” is not a scientific word. One could even argue that it’s misleading. However, it expresses something that would be lost if the sentence was paraphrased as “the work done on the principles and theories of physics underlies the foundations of all the sciences.” The word “soul” was clear to me as a metaphor, meaning something like “a thing that, whether visible or not, underlies these other things.” Metaphor is an ancient technology that did what it was designed to do; it compressed...