A Comparison of Three Books Written by Physicists About Physics
Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution. Carlo Rovelli. Riverhead Books. NY. 2021.
Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality. Frank Wilczek. Penguin Press. NY. 2021.
Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and The Emergence of Spacetime. Sean Carroll. Dutton. NY. 2019.
How each author discusses the specifics of quantum physics is not the point of these essays. You’ll have to read the books yourself to find out how they get from posing the dilemma to their conclusions. I simply cannot do any better than they do in relating the facts and ideas behind quantum.
The Rapture
Rovelli’s last chapter asks in its title: But Is It Really Possible?
He opens with the closing quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest… “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
He then talks about how we actually see: our eyes don’t send information to the brain for it to process; instead, the brain sends info to the eyes on what they can expect to see. Only when the eyes see something unexpected do they send info to the brain to process. This brings on a discussion about consciousness, which leads to a quote from a 19th C. philosopher: “…instead of calling ‘hallucination’ a false perception, we must call external perception ‘a confirmed hallucination.’”
That description of vision becomes a metaphor for science: we seek out discrepancies from what we expect and build our scientific knowledge thusly. A quote from Bogdanov summarizes it: “The difference between the psychological and physical [scientific] orders boils down to the difference between experience organized individually and experience organized socially.”
Rovelli says, “This is quantum theory.”
And then on to his conclusion; there is something unexpected we are seeing through quantum mechanics and must send to the brain to process: the world is not made of things.
Instead, “The best description of reality that we have found is in terms of events that weave a web of interactions. ‘Entities’ are nothing other than ephemeral nodes in this web. Their properties are not determined until the moment of these interactions; they exist only in relation to something else. Everything is what it is only with respect to something else.”
“Every vision is partial. There is no way of seeing reality that is not dependent on a perspective—no point of view that is absolute and universal.”
“And yet, points of view communicate. Knowledge is in dialogue with itself and with reality. In the dialogue, those points of view modify, enrich, converge—and our understanding of reality deepens.”
“Relations make up our ‘I’ … it is for this reason … that everything we have been able to accomplish over the centuries has been achieved in a network of exchanges, collaborating.”
His last three pages are his personal testament to why he was drawn to physics and how it has exceeded his expectations. He goes mystical on us, describing quantum physics as “extraordinarily beautiful,” and “makes lighter the transitory and bittersweet flowing of our lives.”
“The interconnectedness of things, the reflection of one in another, shines with a clear light that the coldness of eighteenth-century mechanism could not capture. Even if it leaves us astonished. Even if it leaves us with a profound sense of mystery.”
Wilczek’s last chapter is titled “Afterword: The Long Voyage Home.” “The fundamentals of science are not comfortable. As they teach us, they challenge our habits of thought.” We understand that our understanding is “eternally inadequate.”
“The fundamentals of science can undermine faith in perceived beliefs and conventional wisdom.”
“That undermining process can go much further, beyond merely discrediting absurdities” like believing Apollo pulls the Sun across the sky in his chariot. It can undermine our appreciation for nonscientific art, philosophy, traditions, and religion.
“…Science tells us many important things about how things are, but it does not pronounce how things should be, nor forbid us from imagining things that are not. Science contains beautiful ideas, but it does not exhaust beauty. It offers a uniquely fruitful way to understand the physical world, but it is not a complete guide to life.”
The child of Wilczek’s introduction—an imaginary construct to relay his ideas, but not so imaginary as she is based on his observations of his newborn grandchild—grows up to realize the truth of the fundamentals of science and must now make a choice to be born again herself.
Will she “reconsider her division of experience into internal and external worlds?” She knows “matter is built up from a few kinds of building blocks, whose properties and behavior we understand in detail.” And she takes advantage of that knowledge whenever using her smart phone.
She knows that she and others she knows “are made from the same sort of matter as the rest of the world,” and how molecules and atoms can accomplish the feats of metabolism, heredity, and perception.
“These understandings do not subtract from the glory of life. Rather, they magnify the glory of matter.”
He asserts “it is radically conservative to adopt” Francis Crick’s astonishing hypothesis: “the mind, in all its aspect, is ‘no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
“Upon that realization, the division of experience into internal and external worlds comes to seem superficial.” For babies who are learning and for adults as a rule of thumb, it can be helpful to see that separation, but “our best understanding suggests that there is just one world, after all. Matter, deeply understood, has ample room for minds. And so, also, it can be home to the internal worlds that minds house.”
“There is both majestic simplicity and strange beauty in this unified view of the world. Within it, we must consider ourselves not as unique objects (“souls”), outside of the physical world, but rather as coherent, dynamic patterns in matter.”
“I have been at pains to be clear that science teaches us what is, not what ought to be. Science can help us attain our goals, once they are chosen, but it does not choose our goals for us.”
There is a connection between that unified view of the world and a moral attitude. Our morals have changed over time, with a common theme being a “widening circle of empathy. With progress, we’ve come to consider people and creatures as having intrinsic value and being worthy of profound respect, just like ourselves. When we see ourselves as patterns in matter, it is natural to draw our circle of kinship very wide, indeed.”
Carroll’s last chapter is titled “Epilogue: Everything is Quantum”
“What would Einstein have thought of Many-Worlds quantum theory?” Not like it in some ways, and like it in others: He “was bothered by the spooky action at a distance implied by quantum entanglement.” Many-Worlds treats time as emergent; Einstein saw it as fundamental. He would not like describing reality as a vector rather than as matter and energy in 4 dimensions of space-time.
On the other hand, he would like that Many-Worlds returns to a “description of the universe” featuring definite, deterministic evolution. That it “reaffirms the principle that reality is ultimately knowable.”
He relates a story by Einstein about when he was a child and saw a compass. He was amazed by how the needle seemed to move on its own. Einstein says, “Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.”
Carroll claims that Einstein was “bugged” by the Copenhagen physics, which “replaced the crisp rigor of good scientific theories with a fuzzy paradigm in which an ill-defined notion of ‘measurement’ played a central role.” “He was always on the lookout for…the principle that would restore intelligibility to that which had drifted into mystery. Little did he suspect that what was hidden might be other branches of the wave function.”
Of course, Carroll explains, it doesn’t really matter what Einstein would have thought, but it is useful to imagine possible reactions if only to “be reminded of the connection between debates of the past and research in the present.”
Indeed, how we tell our stories of the past matters in the present and going into the future.
“The issues discussed in this book stem directly from the discussions between Einstein and Bohr and others in the 1920s.” The conclusions swung Bohr’s way, and “quantum mechanics settled in as entrenched dogma.” This approach has been successful in experiments and designing new technologies, “but as a fundamental theory of the world, it falls woefully short.”
Carroll has laid out a case for why Many-Worlds explains things best, but what makes him “melancholy are professional physicists who dismiss foundational work and don’t think the issues are worth taking seriously.” He hopes that if nothing else, after reading this book we’ve been “convinced of the importance of getting quantum mechanics right once and for all.”
He’s optimistic for how things are progressing. Technological innovations have helped with the foundational work, including quantum computing, quantum cryptography, and quantum information.
“We’ve reached a point where it is no longer practical to draw a bright line between the quantum and the classical realms. Everything is quantum. This state of affairs has forced physicists to take the foundations of quantum mechanics a bit more seriously, and has led to new insights that might help explain the emergence of space and time themselves.”
“I think we’ll be making progress on these difficult puzzles in the near future. And I like to believe most of the other versions of me on the other branches of the wave function feel likewise.”
The Wrap Up
What all three books have in common is the lack of a fully objective description of quantum physics: what is known, what isn’t known, and a fair description of each alternative interpretation to account for those differences in knowledge.
In the terms of Adler and Van Doren (How to Read a Book), these books are expository, non-fiction theoretical books. But they each have a strong component of the practical as well, in which they are persuading their readers to take a certain perspective.
Carroll is the least of these, except to encourage his readers to at least understand the Many-Worlds theory and to accept that academic quantum physics has largely given up on finding the answers to what makes quantum tick. I am sympathetic to his view; I too want to be assured that quantum, indeed all branches of science, are actively seeking to understand what makes their field of study work. He sees a strong distinction, currently, in quantum (and only in quantum physics) between “what we see and what really is.”
But his solution, the Many-Worlds theory, is not any more understandable to me than any other explanation of physics. And it is equally difficult to accept:
A typical human cell has around 100-200 trillion atoms; Carroll says in humans about 5,000 atoms potentially create 25000 new branches, per second! There’s 7.9 billion people on the planet. Earthworms and rocks and microscopes and more can also create branches. We’re talking about a LOT of new worlds. Not probalistic to my simple mind.
And my readings of the Standard Model of quantum suggest that physicists are indeed looking to understand the fundamentals of physics. What is the Large Hadron Collider about? What is the work of astrophysicists on black holes and star formation about, if not to understand what makes physics tick? Or are they really just concerned about applied physics?
Rovelli and Wilczek explicitly mix the theoretical and practical. Many of the books I’ve read on quantum over the years do this. From Dancing Wu Li Masters to The Holographic Paradigm in my early years of reading about quantum, to more recent years reading Hawkins, Tyson, Deutsch, and others, there is a strong tendency to turn the facts of physics into a mindset.
I think this tendency arises from what Carroll called the distinction in quantum: that the act of measurement matters. He claims it shouldn’t. Rovelli revels in it, seeing it as a freeing of our minds to understand how reality is a construct of interactions, of relations. Wilczek also glories in this distinction of quantum, and sees it as an opportunity for rebirth into a whole new way of seeing.
For both Rovelli and Wilczek, I can see them gladly joining the astronaut in 2001: A Space Odyssey as he plummets into the black hole. They want humanity to move to another, higher level of understanding and therefore action. Take the leap into the abyss and accept the outcome.
There is something confirming for me with their outlook. It would so comfortably help me to continue my own transition from a world-view that included a faith in religion, to a world of spiritually-infused action, and then into a science-based alternative vision of a mystical life.
But along with realists like Pinker, Dawkins, and others, I now have a strong drive to be grounded in the facts of life. Thus my sympathies to Carroll’s call. Let’s not give up on trying to find the fundamentals of quantum physics, to continue pursuing truth, even in the face of continued successful experiments.
So what would help this lay person to better understand the actual claims of physics? A better exposure to the experiments themselves. All three authors talk a great deal about how physics continues to be successful in every experiment done. But I frankly find it hard to track their explanations of the experiments. So I’ve started watching these experiments in action on YouTube; other services such as The Great Courses, are also available to help us lay people understand quantum experiments better.
But to me, this exhortation to think differently is not yet substantial enough for me to believe in it wholeheartedly. I’ve been on this journey before. I have travelled the trails of mysticism, of spirituality, of seeking a unified truth. But now, after so many missteps, I’m skeptical.
I can’t help but wonder if these calls to action, to think differently, are an evangelical way for physicists to deal with the ultimately unexplainable results they are seeing over and over again in quantum experiments. If they and their colleagues are seeing these results repeatedly but cannot quite put their finger on why they work, perhaps if they convince many more laypeople to interpret the results with some certain mindset then it will justify their thinking as well. They too could rest easy at night that they are not crazy, they are seeing reality, they are interpreting life correctly.
Rovelli leaves us with a relational perspective of reality, Wilczek with an ever-widening circle of empathy. I cannot go wrong with these views. These I can accept, but without also using them as concepts that define quantum physics.
It is agreed by all authors that we do not yet know everything about quantum. Gravity is still a big mystery and contributes to our current lack for a Unified Theory of quantum. Dark Matter and Dark Energy are also huge unknowns. I’m going to hold off jumping feet first into the abyss of science-based mysticism for now. To me, Einstein might yet be vindicated; we might indeed find more deterministic laws of nature and would no longer be so amazed by our ignorance-turned-mystical about probabilities, the observer in the act of measuring, and uncertainties.
So what did I learn from reading these three books? I learned a lot from Carroll, and also from Rovelli. I now appreciate more fully that there is a distinction in quantum physics between scientists who are pursuing studies and experiments that accept the Standard Model (applied physics) and those who are rogue enough to continue exploring what the fundamentals of quantum are about.
It almost seems to boil down to those physicists who relish in the principles of uncertainty, such as Rovelli and Wilczek, and those who desire certainty, such as Carroll.
I experimented with this added knowledge by reading some other works about physics to see if I could pick up their assumption: do they accept the Standard Model or are they pursuing another interpretation?
I read a simple introduction to physics, 50 Physics Ideas You Really Need to Know, by Joanne Baker. It is written and organized to introduce a simple lay-reader like myself to the basic concepts of physics, from Mechanical Physics to modern Astrophysics. It explicitly deals with the Standard Model, or the Copenhagen Interpretation, in several of its four-page chapters. It also mentions the Many-Worlds Interpretation put forth by Everett.
However, I interpret that the book is mostly based on the Standard Model. Even though it offers perhaps the best objective account of quantum physics I’ve come across thus far by mentioning these alternative interpretations in a couple of chapters, most of the chapters assume the acceptance of the Standard Model.
Then I read two articles in Scientific American about quantum (found at my local library: Eureka Springs Carnegie Library).
The first, The Unseen Universe (Scientific American, Volume 325, Number 4, October 2021, pp. 56-63), is discussing a sub-atomic particle called muon. The author explicitly mentions the Standard Model throughout the article. After having read these three books, I now feel I have a fuller appreciation for what she is talking about when she mentions the possibility of new experiments either calling into question the Standard Model—how it might need to be revised if the experiments have certain results, or deepening our understanding of that model.
The second article, Bohmian Rhapsody (Scientific American, Volume 326, Number 1, January 2022, pp. 70-75), mentions in the second sentence the Standard Model and an alternative theory, Bohmian mechanics. Tellingly, none of the three books in this review mention this theory, but already I feel more empowered to read this article thanks to a better understanding of quantum from those books.
I also note that in the space of three months, Scientific American also published two articles that discuss the foundations of quantum mechanics, something that Carroll had so passionately called for in his conclusion.
Then there’s the Scientific American article The Origins of Space and Time (Scientific American, Volume 326, Number 2, February 2022, pp. 26-33). It talks about String Theory, which deals with quantum gravity. Interestingly, only Carroll mentions String Theory, in less than two pages. The issue of gravity is an outlier in physics, with its own can full of worms, and seemingly separate from the issues these three books address.
As Feynman said, I, too, don’t understand quantum physics. But I, and the quantum scientists of the world, will keep on trying.
So while there is so much to quantum mechanics that I will never comprehend it all, after reading these three books I now have a somewhat fuller appreciation of just one of the many different approaches to the science. This is largely due to Carroll’s voice contrasted by Rovelli’s with Wilczek’s background harmonics. Quantum physics works: experimentally, practically, even philosophically. But how it works and in what very specific steps it works: these questions are still open to further understanding for us humans. Physics is apparently still, despite being a hard science, very much in flux. What fun!
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