AN ESSAY BY THE PERPLEXED FOR THE BEWILDERED

By Paul Toscano

            Quantum mechanics is currently regarded by nearly every professional physicist as the most scientifically rigorous and coherent means for describing microcosmic and even some macrocosmic phenomena.  Quantum mechanics consists of mathematical equations that predict with astonishing accuracy the strange results of quantum experiments repeatedly performed carefully and precisely by notable scientists since the early 20^th century in laboratories all over the world.[1]   Through these experiments, physicists adduced that Newton’s laws, setting forth the relationship of force, mass, and acceleration, do not apply in the sub-atomic world.  To make sense of the weird quantum phenomena, new equations were developed that expressed these experimental results in terms of blurred probabilities rather than discrete certainties.  Because quantum mechanics undercut and subsumed Newtonian physics, it revealed cracks in the formerly settled and unassailable foundations of scientific and philosophical determinism.   The illuminations of quantum physics rendered obsolete the metaphor of nature as a machine.  Nevertheless, that metaphor persists because, though outmoded, it accords with our perception of the macrocosm and has never been replaced with an image that is both comprehensible and scientifically accurate.  In the absence of a more accurate visual metaphor than a clock, the complex and counter-intuitive illuminations of quantum physics have opened the door to various illusions and speculations regarding the exact nature of physical reality, many of which are pseudo-scientific, even though they are advanced as extensions of quantum theory. 

            My discussion of quantum data is presented here only as a foundation for my thesis that certain genuine illuminations of quantum physics have inadvertently encouraged the development and acceptance of certain illusions about reality that are seen by some to justify the misuse and abuse of power in arenas both political and religious. It is this cultural transformation of quantum illuminations into quantum illusions that I wish to explore as a variety of irreligious experience—albeit secular.

            Let me first provide some context. Modern science can be said to have been conceived anciently by the early Greeks and midwived during the Enlightenment by Galileo, Bacon, Newton, Descartes, and others.  Nevertheless, in this early period, science remained a mixture of supernatural and natural, theology and philosophy, subjective speculation and objective experimentation.  Newton himself was as interested in metaphysics as physics, in alchemy as chemistry, in the spiritual as the material.  It was only in the comparatively recent 19^th century that science came of age when the principles of positivism were finally articulated and advanced as the basis of the scientific method.  In 1842, in an effort once and for all to separate science from religion and philosophy, four German physiologists drafted a scientific manifesto in which they “angrily resolved that no forces other than common physico-chemical ones would be considered in their scientific activity.  No spiritual entities.  No divine substances.  No vital forces.”[2]

            With the clear enunciation of the principles of positivism as the epistemological foundations of the scientific method, science passed from its adolescence into its maturity.  By the end of the 19^th century, some people entertained briefly the idea that nature had been explained and that physics was at an end.  But anomalies in experimental data persistently defied explanation.  Eventually, exploration of these anomalies led to the development of a new physics.

            In the period between 1900 and 1930, the hegemony of Newtonianism was shattered by such breakthroughs as relativity theory and its propositions regarding the equivalence of matter and energy, regarding time and space dilation as the explanation for the constancy of the speed of light in a vacuum from any perspective, and by the bizarre mathematical formulations forced upon reluctant scientists by the results of experiments in the field of particle physics.  This is when the picture of nature as a clock was replaced by a blackboard full of abstruse equations.

            To understand why the illuminations of relativity and quantum theory so readily give rise to misconceptions, illusions and pseudo-scientific theories, I will attempt to describe a few of the weird and counter-intuitive concepts of reality accepted by most physicists today.  In doing so, I am mindful of my limitations.  I am not a physicist.  I’m math averse and unqualified and incapable of providing a competent scientific explanation of quantum mechanics. I am a literary man trying to translate into plain English some of the opaque discussions of experts in the quantum field.  Bear with me and keep in mind that my purpose is not to provide a scientifically rigorous description of quantum mechanics, merely one adequate enough to support my critique of certain dangerous derivative popular misconceptions that now influence modern belief-structures sacred and secular.

            Let me begin with a description of the attempts of scientists to determine the nature and properties of light.  This began in the 16^th century with Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens.  Newton speculated that light was a particle, while Huygens advanced the counter speculation that light was a wave.  In 1805, Thomas Young[3] conducted an experiment that settled the matter—for a time, anyway.  Young set up a room to serve as a camera oscura.  He manipulated the draperies to cause a beam of light to pass through a single pinhole in a barrier and then onto a screen where the beam created as expected a circle of light.  Young then caused the light beam to pass through two side-by-side slits.  This time the pattern created on the screen was not expected.  Rather than two side-by-side circles of light, there appeared a pattern of light and dark stripes or fringes.  The brightest stripe in the center was flanked by smaller dark stripes, and then—moving away from the center—by alternating thinning bands of light and dark.  This is called the interference pattern.  From it, Young concluded that light was a wave. 

            Here’s why. When the light passed through the slits, the light emanating from them formed concentric emanations that radiated out toward the screen.  The bubbling ripples of light from one slit interfered with those from the other; that is, the emanations superimposed or overlapped like the surface ripples caused by two stones dropped simultaneously and proximately in a still pond.  The light stripes on the screen resulted from the confluence of the peaks and troughs of the emanations from the two slits.  The dark stripes occurred where the peaks of the emanations from one slit were neutralized by the troughs of the emanations from the other.  Thomas Young concluded that this interference pattern could only be created by waves.

            This seeming triumph of the wave theory of light, however, was short-lived.   At the end of the 19^th century, two other experiments were conducted whose results contradicted those of Young’s double-slit experiment.  These were Heinrich Rubens’ black-body experiment and Heinrich Hertz’s photoelectric effect. Several complicated descriptions of these experiments have been published.  My descriptions, though not entirely complete or accurate are adequate for this discussion and have the added benefit of being comprehensible.

            A black body is an ideal object that perfectly absorbs and emits radiation.  Think of a chunk of metal placed in a closed oven and heated until it glows.  The glow is caused by the emission of waves in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum.  By Newtonian calculations as the black body heats up, the wavelengths should continue to increase in frequency infinitely, thus creating what is called “the ultraviolet catastrophe.”  Fortunately, this does not occur in nature.  At the turn of the 20^th century, no one knew why it did not.  Also, as the body cools, the wavelengths change as the color reverts from white hot back to cold black.  Precise spectrographic measurements of the cooling body revealed that the frequency of the wavelengths do not diminish on a continuous, sliding scale (like the sound a violin makes when one draws the bow across a single string and then slides a finger up or down that string creating a series of continuous wavelength changes).  Rather, as the heated body cools, the radiant energy diminishes in little jumps (like the sound a piano makes when a pianist runs a thumb down the keyboard, causing the hammers in the action to strike different length strings separately—the jump between the different strings is like the jump in wavelengths of the cooling black body).  The reason for the jumps had no explanation.  The experiment, however, suggested that light was a particle.

            The photoelectric effect discovered by Hertz involved the shining of a bright light on certain metal.  The light stimulated the emission of an electric current.  An increase in the intensity or brightness of the light did not increase the current; but changing the wavelength or color of the light did.  This phenomenon had no explanation, but this experiment also suggested that light was a particle.  The question of whether light was a wave or a particle was revived and left unanswered.

            Let me now turn to the discovery of the quantum.  In 1900, the conservative German physicist Max Planck, by a brilliant flash of intuition, came up with a mathematical constant to determine the size of the most basic unit of energy for each wavelength in the electro-magnetic spectrum—a size beyond which it could not be reduced.  This basic unit is called the quantum—the minimum size of energy in the universe.  A quantum is to the universe what a penny is to the U.S. monetary system—the smallest denomination possible.  No actual quantification of energy exists in the universe that is less than a quantum any more than an actual exchange of U.S. currency can take place that involves denominations less than a penny.  The discovery of the quantum, as a constant proportional to a given wavelength of energy, has been thoroughly verified.

            The discovery of the quantum led to an explanation of the black body effect.  For when the black body was heated, the radiation increased in jumps, but never achieved infinite frequency (the ultraviolet catastrophe); and when the black body cooled, the radiation emitted decreased in discrete quantum jumps as well.  This result was precisely predicted by the application of Max Plank’s constant for determining the quantum size or minimum packet of energy for each wavelength of light in the electromagnetic spectrum.  For this discovery, Plank won the Nobel Prize for physics.  In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper that applied Plank’s quantum theory to solve the mystery of the photo electric effect by theorizing that it was not the number of quanta (that is, the intensity of the beam of light), but rather the size of the each quantum (that is, size of the particular energy packet of a given wavelength) that, when striking the surface of certain metal plates, caused electrons to be emitted, creating an electric current.  For this discovery, Einstein won the Nobel Prize for physics.

            Let me know turn to the wave-particle paradox.  Despite advances made by the discovery of the quantum, the nature of light—particle or wave—remained a mystery.  The double-slit experiment said light is composed of waves.  The black-body and photoelectric experiments said light is composed of energy packets or particles.  As a result of these and many other clever experiments, early 20^th century physics came to accept that energy and matter, on the microcosmic level, exhibit the contradictory properties of both waves and particles—what some have called “wavicles”.  The wave-particle duality introduced into physics an uneasy and discomforting truce between the rival theories proposed by Huygens and Newton; the duality was accepted as scientifically sound, but left physics in a never-land of indeterminacy—a state of profound paradox.  Physics was becoming weird.

            Some preparation for quantum weirdness had already been laid by Einstein’s theory of relativity, which theorized that space and time contract and expand so that the speed of light remains constant in a vacuum from any perspective.  The idea of the constancy of the speed of light at 186,000 miles per second is usually misunderstood by lay people.  This concept does not mean that light travels at a constant rate in a vacuum, the way a car travels on a freeway when the cruise-control is set at, say, 70 miles per hour.  The concept is much weirder than that.  The oddity about light is that it always travels at the same speed no matter which way or how it is measured.  Let me explain.  A light beam moving away from a fixed observer travels at 186,000 miles per second.  But it is also true that if the observer is not fixed, if the observer is chasing the light beam, the chased light beam would still be measured moving away from the chasing observer at 186,000 miles per second.  Even stranger, if the light beam and the observer are moving toward each other, the rate of the light beam will also be measured at 186,000 miles per second.  This is what is meant by the constant speed of light in a vacuum measured from any perspective.  This oddity was explained by Einstein’s theory of relativity by the astounding conclusion that the space-time continuum expands and contracts so that the speed of light remains constant in a vacuum from the perspective of the observer in all these situations.  When the observer chases the light beam, space contracts and time slows so that the beam’s measured speed can never drop below 186,000 miles per second.  When the observer is hurtling toward the beam of light on a collision course, space expands and time speeds up so that the speed of the measured beam can never exceed 186,000 miles per second. This theory was proved by an experiment conducted in 1919 on the Isle Principe during a solar eclipse when dim starlight was measured as it passed close to the mass of the sun and was observed to bend in the presence of the sun’s gravity precisely as predicted by Einstein’s theory, which predicted that space contracts and time dilates in a massive gravitational field and that light passing through such a field of space and time would bend accordingly.  The results of this experiment constituted remarkable evidence of cosmic weirdness that would become a feature of the new physics.  

            Further weirdness ensued.  By the 1920s, technology had advanced so that scientists could propel a single quantum of light (i.e., a photon) through Thomas Young’s slitted barrier onto a light-sensitive film where its imprint would be registered for measurement.  Young’s experiment was repeated, only this time with a series of single photons propelled one after another through one of the open slits in the barricade.  When a series of photons was projected one after another like bullets from a gun through an opaque barrier when only one of the slits was open, then over time the pattern produced by the aggregate of photons hitting the film was as expected a circle of light.  However, when single photons were propelled one after another through only one slit of an opaque barrier when both slits were open, then contrary to expectation over time the pattern produced on the film by the aggregate of the photons was the interference pattern of light and dark fringes just as if two photons had passed simultaneously through each of the two slits and then interfered with each other. 

            Let me repeat this.  If both slits were open the interference pattern appeared.  If only one slit was open, a circle of light appeared.  This result occurred even though only one photon at a time was propelled through only one slit of a two-slitted barrier.  It was as if the photons “knew” when the other slit was open or closed. This remarkable and troubling result could not be explained by attributing “consciousness” to the photons without subverting the entire edifice of science erected on the theory of positivism.  Physics required a naturalistic explanation for why the interference pattern was produced even though only one photon at a time had been projected through one of the two open slits.  The unanswered question was: What was interfering with the single photon passing through one of the slits of the open double-slitted barrier thus creating the interference pattern?   This question has never been answered to everyone’s satisfaction. 

            Let me now turn to the wave function.  In the late 1920s, Niels Bohr, the putative father of quantum physics, proposed a solution of sorts to the weirdness.  His solution was to ignore it.  He refused to attempt to visualize what was taking place in the microcosm of nature as the photons traveled from the photon gun through the double-slitted barrier to the light-sensitive screen.  He would allow only a purely mathematical resolution of the problem.  He focused not on reality, but on the mathematical model.  In this approach he was aided by the work of Erwin Schrödinger, who in 1912 had come up with an equation that represents the quantum or photon a dispersion of numerical probabilities within the strict confines of the pre-determined experimental state.  This formula describes with great precision how those probabilities “collapse” into a discrete number, representing the photon, at the point of detection or measurement.  This equation, called the Schrödinger wave function, has great predictive power.  But it does not provide a description of what is happening in nature between the time the sub atomic wave-particle leaves the gun and the time it is detected by a measuring device.  At this juncture in the history of quantum mechanics, the microcosm could no longer be analogized to a clock.  But no metaphor was readily available to represent what was actually happening in the double-slit experiment. The clock metaphor persisted in the lay world, but was replaced in the world of physics by mathematical expressions beyond the ken of all but a few experts.

            Let me now turn to quantum uncertainty.  In 1927, Werner Heisenberg came up with a mathematical formula that expressed the impossibility of measuring simultaneously the momentum and the location of a sub-atomic wave-particle.  This formula, known as the uncertainty principle, has been the subject of much misunderstanding.  The principle does not mean that the subatomic world is uncertain because it is too small to be measured, or that our instruments are too large and clumsy to measure it.  Nor does the principle mean that observation of the microcosm alters the microcosm. The uncertainty principle means that it is not possible mathematically to measure simultaneously the location and momentum of the same wave-particle in the same experimental state.  It also points to the weirdest of all quantum phenomena to which I will turn next.

            I will attempt now to describe the phenomena of entanglement.  Scientists were able to isolate and study this phenomenon through the use of the interferometer.  An interferometer is a contraption that allows scientists to propel beams of in-phase sub-atomic particles through half-mirrors that are positioned to split the particle beam, sending the wave-particles along two different trajectories.   Wave-particles in phase are like sympathetically vibrating strings; they are in sync. I can’t fully explain this because the explanations are mathematical and out of my ken.  In phase wave-particles are said to be “entangled.”  Beams of such wave-particles can be split by propelling them at half-mirrors.  Half-mirrors are like tinted windows on cars.  When the light hits such a window some of the light passes through to the interior of the vehicle and some bounces off allowing an observer outside the car to see her own reflection in the window.  If such a half mirror is set at a right angle and a beam of in-phase wave-particles is directed at it, a pre-determined percentage of wave-particles will pass straight through on a straight line trajectory, while others will bound off at a 90 degree angle down another trajectory.  The two beams will then shoot along each of the “L-shaped arms of the interferometer.   It has been discovered by the use of magnets, principally, that any disturbance of an in phase wave-particle traveling down one of the legs of the interferometer will instantly be mirrored by its twin in the other leg of the interferometer.  The reaction occurs instantly as if no space or time differential existed between the two entangled twins.  The instantaneous response of the twin is referred to as “action at a distance,” which Einstein described with the word “spooky.”  It is troubling because it suggest faster than light communication between the in-phase wave-particles without any evidence of causation. This suggest that the wave-particles occupy exist out of space and time as we know it, or exist in some alternate dimension of which we perceive only an intimation. There is no adequate explanation for the phenomenon of entanglement, though quantum equations can predict the outcomes of entanglement experiments with extreme precision.

            The last weird quantum concept I will summarize is the notion of hyperspace.  In 1854, the shy and fragile mathematician, George Bernard Riemann gave a paper providing a sound mathematical description that proposed the existence of spatial dimensions beyond the three spatial and one temporal dimension we inhabit.  This concept was revolutionary and had immediate effect upon the popular imagination.  The 4^th dimension became virtually a household word; the concept could be used to explain everything from ghosts to heaven and eventually to such quantum weirdness as atemporality, aspaciality, and entanglement.  Hyperspace explains some quantum weirdness by increasing the number of spatial dimensions in which such phenomena occur. I cannot explain this except by reference to the famous book Flatland: A Romance Of Many Dimensions, written by Edwin Abbott and published in 1884.  Abbott’s imagined a two-dimensional world in which a circle can exist, but not a sphere. If a sphere passed through Flatland, it would appear first as a point, then as a widening circle until it reached its equator, after which the circles would decrease in diameter reaching a point that would disappear as the sphere exited the plane.  A flatlander could not conceive of a sphere at all, at least not until there was added to Flatland an additional third dimension that would create a three-dimensional space that could contain the totality of the sphere.  Additional dimensions, according to mathematicians, have the same effect on quantum weirdness.  Sadly, we cannot visualize this effect.  These additional dimensions can only be expressed mathematically.  But, apparently, they provide purely mathematical resolutions for some quantum effects.  But there is no experiential proof that such dimensions exist in reality.

            These discoveries precipitated the collapse of the view of the universe as a simple machine–a giant bowling alley or billiard table of planets and stars.  Reality was not only much more complicated, it was beyond visualization.  This notion cries out for an explanation: What is the universe really? Is there a true atom, an ultimate particle that cannot be cut into smaller pieces, a Higgs boson—what has been called a God particle? Is there a set of equations that can elegantly and precisely describe and predict all events, microcosmic and macrocosmic—a unified field theory?  Is there a way to preserve or at least analogize the universe that makes sense of the counter-intuitive outcomes of quantum data that seem desperately in need of a connecting theory?  Most physicists, relying on the assumptions of positivism, deplore such questions.  They do not want to be drawn into metaphysical arguments.  Beginning with Niels Bohr, most quantum physicists view their work as the creation and analysis of experimental measurements for the development of mathematical formulas that accurately describe and predict quantum phenomena.  This is no easy task.  Its fruits are extremely practical and beneficial.[4]  But it does not provide a single overarching vision of reality.  In the absence of a single picture of nature, quantum theory provides three scientifically sound but debated “interpretations” of quantum data.  The first of these is the Copenhagen interpretation; the second, the de-Broglie-Bohmian interpretation; and the third is the many worlds interpretation, referred to as MWI, and its variant the many minds interpretation, referred to MMI.  Each of these interpretations assiduously avoids the unscientific notion that quantum mechanics demonstrates that matter-energy is self-conscious and that, therefore, photons are “aware” of their surroundings; each avoids the equally unscientific notion that a superior consciousness is at work in the universe to cause the paradoxical phenomena. 

            The Copenhagen interpretation, formulated by Nobel prize-winners Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, is the oldest and most well accepted of the three.  This interpretation avoids any description of nature and restricts itself to mathematical descriptions.  It does not attempt to describe the real journey of a photon through the double-slit, but treats the quantum as a mathematical probability, an abstract trajectory, a mathematical construct whose location and momentum cannot be known simultaneously with precision.  Until observed and measured, the quantum exists mathematically at every point along this trajectory of probabilities.  Consequently, a single quantum passes through both slits mathematically in the form of probabilities. Such a mathematical construct tells us nothing about what interferes with the single photon passing through a single slit in the open double-slitted barrier.  The construct only provides a reliable means of predicting how the photons will create an interference pattern on the light-sensitive collecting screen and how the probabilities, when measured at one of the two slits, will collapse to zero, according to Schrödinger’s[5] wave function  formula.[6]  The Copenhagenists ignore microcosmic nature because it cannot be visualized, but can be treated as mathematical probabilities—a concept Einstein dismissed with the quip, “God does not play at dice with the universe.”  Einstein and his colleagues challenged the Copenhagen interpretation in a now famous 1935 memorandum called the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen or EPR paper, which was eventually successfully refuted, leaving the Copenhagen interpretation as the most widely accepted—an interpretation summed up by the motto of its adherents: “shut up and calculate.”[7]
            The second most popular interpretation, and one that is gaining ground, is the deBroglie-Bohmian interpretation, which departs from the Copenhagen interpretation’s rigorous denial of philosophical concerns with the actual nature of reality and the metaphysical speculations that such concerns necessarily encourage.  This theory was proposed first by Louis deBroglie at the 1927 Solvay conference, where it was rejected for its lack of formal rigor, but again more successfully revived by David Bohm, the American physicist.  It is mathematically identical to the Copenhagen interpretation, but posits the existence of a force of nature that accounts for the split existence of the wave particle at two different locations simultaneously until detection or measurement is made.  The nature of this new force is an unknown or hidden variable that as yet remains undetected.
            The third and least popular and most controversial interpretation of quantum mechanics is the many worlds interpretation, developed in a doctoral thesis in 1957 by Hugh Everett.[8]   This interpretation claims that the paradoxes of quantum mechanics can be resolved if every potential outcome to every potential event is allowed to exist in its own history, in its own world, that is, in its own objective reality through the mechanism of quantum decoherence (that is,  -splitting) rather than of wave function collapse.  This interpretation posits that every possible event (no matter how small or large) exists objectively in its own universe, requiring the existence of a near infinite number of simultaneous, parallel, non-communicating universes in which each probability is reified into a separate objective existence.  As of this date, there are no practical experiments that would distinguish between MWI and the Copenhagen interpretations.  In the absence of observational data, the choice between them is one of personal taste.[9]  A variant of this interpretation is referred to as the many-minds interpretation, developed in 1970 by H. Dieter Zeh[10].  MMI, an extension of the MWI, posits the concept that the indeterminacy represented by probability waves does not resolve when wave potentialities collapse into actualities or when potentialities actualize into different objective universes. MMI proposes that at the moment of actualization what is split is not the universe but the appearance of reality; in other words, it is the mind or consciousness of the observer that splits, allowing for different perceptions or different appearances of the objective world.  From this interpretation, the universe is a single objective reality perceived differently by multiple minds or consciousnesses.  This interpretation relies upon the mind-body duality to explicate the weirdness of quantum data.
            These three interpretations, while scientifically and mathematically sound, pull physics closer to metaphysics, a development of which only a comparatively few scientists and laypersons are aware.[11]  They tell us that the universe is not a machine and can no longer be accurately described on its most fundamental level as objective or particular.  Probability waves are posited by the Copenhagenists.  An unvisualizable alocal and atemporal microcosm is posited by the deBroglie-Bohmians.  Multiple, non-communicating objective worlds beyond scientific observation are posited by MWI; and a complex of subjective perceptions that place reality beyond the knowable is posited by the MMI variant.[12]  Because of their high strangeness, these interpretations have encouraged the notion that quantum theory can serve as a quantifiable, verifiable, and demonstrable basis for religious faiths of various kinds, sacred and secular, a notion that quantum physicists heartily deplore and dispute, but that is advanced by others, such as Gary Zukov in his The Dancing Woo-Li Masters and Fritjof Capra in his The Toa of Physics.[13] 

            The quantum-relativity retreat from Newtonianism and determinism has fueled speculations in the fertile imaginations of many seeking to make sense of a universe that, upon ever-closer examination, becomes not less but more mysterious.  Most of these speculations, unlike the three accepted quantum interpretations, are not grounded in quantum data or mathematics.  Some are products of thoughtful intuition and logical guesswork.  Others are more far fetched.  Yet others are the products of free association or egotism without much support from any science whatsoever.  All of these are perceptions of reality.  Some are clearly unsupported.  Others are more or less harmless, such as those new age religions that borrow heavily from oriental wisdom and belief structures.  Others, however, are clearly toxic because they inexorably lead to or invite practices and experiences that are damaging or despairing, irreligious experiences that attempt to ground themselves in science rather than theology.

            At this juncture, I will make a quantum leap—as in Star Wars, when Han Solo’s ship, the Millennium Falcon, vaults into hyper drive.  I will shift from technical descriptions of quantum theory, experiments and data to a critical discussion of what I believe are the two most dangerous misconceptions of the post-modern world.  First is the illusion of absolute freedom and unlimited potential.  And second is the illusion that social chaos can be avoided only by means of such controls as coercion, violence, war and the stimulation and appropriation by the powerful of the fear of death and extinction that exists in the masses of the powerless.[14]

            I do not believe that these ideas are derived from quantum-relativity theory.  I do believe, however, that such quantum concepts as indeterminacy, uncertainty, and probability have seeped into our consciousness where they contribute to the considerable angst that characterizes the post-modern world.  I understand that such ideas float around in a culture before they solidify either in the accepted wisdom of either the humanities or the sciences.  Certainly some of these notions presented themselves in the form of literature and art before then were advanced in scientific form as discoveries of the new physics.  But quantum-relativity theory has aided and abetted the acceptance and popularization of these ideas in non-scientific arenas, just as Darwinism led to the advance of social Darwinism; just as Freudianism led to the sexual revolution; just as relativity theory aided and abetted the acceptance of situational ethics; and just as computer science has altered our view of intelligence, consciousness and learning.  Powerful ideas, though not always understood clearly or appreciated fully by laypeople, manage somehow to find their way into a culture where they become entangled with perceptions of self and society. These ideas are not always correct.  But, right or wrong, they influence worldviews, causing individuals and institutions to reorder priorities and restructure agendas.

            Quantum and relativity theory have put the imprimatur of science on uncertainty, probability, indeterminacy and chaos and, consequently, have exacerbated the post-modern terror of social fragmentation and death.   The notion of indeterminacy and probability, though they tend to inspire optimists, tend also to provoke in pessimists not only fear by the view that the world is out of control, a situation that calls in their minds for the imposition of stricter controls, for near totalitarianism, seasoned with utopian agendas and advanced by misinformation and sentimentality, controls that, experience has shown, nearly always result in the loss of personal identity and individual liberty.

            It is no accident, I think, that as the concepts of quantum relativity were being developed and asserted in contradistinction to Newtonian determinism, political and economic efforts were being advanced that promised to re-instill confidence, identity, certainty, orthodoxy, and absolutism in every department of life—essentially to stop the deterioration of modernism, which was giving way to post modernism. As scientists were discovering the uncertainty, relativity, and probability of what appeared to be a mysterious and even chaotic universe, powerful political, economic, social, and cultural opposition to these ideas were marshalling in the form of communism and fascism.  If the world was, as science was apparently discovering, a place of uncertainty, then—despite the naïve and sentimental optimism of believers in human potential, freedom, and dignity—controls had to be enforced against human stupidity, ignorance, incompetence, laziness, selfishness, and greed.  The idea of the noble savage—fine talk for the salons of France—was in some minds clearly a fiction.  Experts needed to be authorized to use force if necessary to see that political, economic and social uncertainties were made certain, that potentialities were limited, and that freedom did not lead to social disruption.  The great dictatorships of the 20^th century were a reaction to the fear of fragmentation that characterized the post-modern world.  Quantum theory was of course not the source of this sense of deterioration, but it provided scientific validation for uncertainty and relativity by the hardest of the hard sciences.

            The way such control is now achieved is through institutions of power that fix outcomes by a process largely invisible to most individuals, but which is the hallmark of totalitarianisms from Hitler’s Germany, to Stalin’s Russia, to Mao’s China, to Pol Pot’s Cambodia.  That process involves the transference of the highest aspirations of the masses to leaders perceived to be invincible or infallible to whom the masses may yield their individual judgment for the alleged benefit of the collective.  In turn, such leaders identify for the masses elusive enemies upon whom the masses can transfer as onto scapegoats all their deepest fears and depraved inclinations.  Such enemies have been identified historically as communists, Jews, homosexuals, intellectuals, feminists, and even democrats—enemies who must be eliminated, by violent means if need be, to assure the collective’s survival, whether that survival is presented in moral terms as purity, in evolutionary terms as progress, in economic terms as prosperity, or in religious terms as being right with God.

            Objections to these illusions and the process of violent expiation they encourage may be stated a number of ways:  Forced morality is the greatest of the immoralities.  Authority is not competence.  The power and wisdom of the few can never supercede the power and wisdom of the many.  The innumerable contracts oral and written small and large among individuals and groups cannot be replaced by legislation because legislators can neither comprehend nor account for the numerous specific details involved in the interactions over which they seek to impose control.  Human potential exists, but is not unlimited, despite the endless student commencement speeches to the contrary. 

            Of course there is human potential.  But creativity arises not upon the alleged limitless nature of these potentials.  It arises, instead, upon the intellectual and spiritual effort required to see and transcend the restrictions that nature or God impose.  We should not say nor be told that we have unlimited potential because we don’t.  What some of us have is an imagination that must be educated to recognize and work through and around restrictions or, better yet, to use restrictions in creative ways.  This is the role of the humanities, to school the imagination and educate intuition.  But the humanities get short sheeted in modern higher education, where the emphasis is now on careers in science, medicine, law, accountancy, and business.  One of the results of the illusions about human potential is that we no longer see the humanities as the way to educate the young about the structures of logic and language that help to identify limitations and to employ the imagination to overcome them.

            As perilous as the belief in unlimited human potential is the belief that chaos will ensue if individual human freedom and initiative are not controlled by social engineering.  Social engineering is to the post modern world what the humanities were to the modern world.  Rather than educate the imagination or school the intuition as did the pre-modern and modern worlds, the post-modern world prefers to train students in the application of approved procedures.  The ability to interpret a text is not valued, while the ability to administer approved protocols is.  We force people to color inside the lines, and then complain when they can’t think outside the box.

            Oddly, the more we seek to control the material world, the less we understand and value nature—which is why, ironically, even an interest in quantum physics is beyond most Americans.  The more we believe in unlimited potential, the more hopeless and despairing our world becomes; for “If I have unlimited potential, there’s no hope; because my unlimited potential is insufficient to fill the need.”  The more we seek to engineer utopia, the more we create hell on earth.  The war in Iraq is an example of this delusion gone awry, and clearly not the first.  The more we seek to rid the world of evil by violence, the more evil is generated.  Mormon scripture refers to this as the demonic Master Mahan principle, that of killing to get gain—not only material gain, but to achieve the perceived expiation for our own sins. 

            We have been seduced to believe that we must kill to purify, that we must rid the world of sin, that we must sacrifice to God the unrighteous and irredeemable to ensure we will be the last survivors standing and thus prove to ourselves we are worthy to live.  And when we have succeeded, we will lift our eyes upon a sea of rotting corpses and be filled with self loathing and increased guilt—a guilt that will drive us to commit further expiations in blood until we have eradicated ourselves.  Shakespeare summed it up best:

        And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets

        In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters

        Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores

        And make a sop of all this solid globe:

        Strength should be lord of imbecility,

        And the rude son should strike his father dead:

        Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,

        Between whose endless jar justice resides,

        Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

        Then every thing includes itself in power,

        Power into will, will into appetite;

        And appetite, an universal wolf,

        So doubly seconded with will and power,

        Must make perforce an universal prey,

        And last eat up himself. Troilus and Cressida, Act 3, Scene 1. 

            I will conclude with a few eccentric observations the pertinence of which may not at first be apparent to you.  I find it both disturbing and alluring that the earliest Christian texts not only assert the divinity of Jesus, but his refusal to expiate by killing; he is depicted instead as expiating through his own willingness to be sacrificed:  “Greater love hath no man than that he should lay down his life for his friends.”  Simone Weil, a Jew converted to Christianity, did not feel she could enter heaven until everyone else had entered ahead of her.  This was the view of numerous mystics and thinkers, both theists and non-theists alike, from St. Francis, to Karl Barth, to Martin Buber.  I find it somehow comforting that we cannot know with certainty.  Truth is not available to us directly. Truth must be intuited.  We cannot look upon truth any more than we can see our own faces.  We see truth through a half-mirror, darkly.  We are likely to become the slaves of our perceptions unless we recognize them for what they are: tentative, incomplete, unreliable, unsteady, and paradoxical.  I find it amusing that we can make mathematical models of the universe that allow us to use it without understanding it.  We can analogize the cosmos to music, analogize the vibrations in an overtone series to quantum probability waves, and analogize a single note to a subatomic particle.  And yet we remain unable to imagine the possibility that a vibration may precede the existence of a string.  We can analogize the quanta to the preverbal prattle of an infant whose expression of meaning and intonation appears to precede vocabulary and syntax.  And yet we remain unable to imagine how the prattle can precede the baby.  Our inability to conceive an acausal or simultaneous reality is a failure of imagination.  We are unable to accept the stuff that dreams are made on or nightmares either.  I find it somehow compelling that we are pressed always by change, by the need to change, to give scope to others to change.  Change alone is constant, as constant as the speed of light, moving, defying any attempts to catch and hold it, even in our understanding.  I find it deeply troubling that our incapacity to see reality for what it is promotes fear, principally the fear of death, the fear of extinction, the fear of the cessation of reality.  Death is the frightful uncertainty we seek to avoid by creating and retreating into artifices of control, not only in theologies and hypotheses, but in churches, corporations, tribes, families, and nation-states.  We want to identify with these because they do not die, we think.  We think that by these identifications we can avoid the unavoidable.  Of course, death can be postponed, but usually by the visitation of death upon others.  It cannot be transcended, not by mortals.  Its inevitability should not be denied, but rather embraced and endured.