Loving and hating the spookiness of Quantum Physics

Raju Korti
A recent article at pains to establish how Quantum Physics and Consciousness can come together to help us understand the true nature of reality has set me back by at least 47 years. That was the time when the likes of Max Planck and Albert Einstein had just begun to stir and torment my abstract imagination. Quantum Physics, true to its spirit, took me -- and I suspect many others of my ilk -- on a long journey of love-hate relationship with the subject. The simplicity of the theories I had been grappling until then was getting shaken at its roots with the advent of these two gentlemen along with co-conspirators like Satyendra Nath Bose, Englert Brout  and Peter Higgs. From the apparent simplicity of Newton's Laws of Gravitational Forces to the multiple conundrums brought forth by Niels Bohr, Warner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger, not to speak of many others who contributed in queering the pitch, it was a wave that encountered several troughs and crests dotting this love-hate saga. There is an inherent paradox with Quantum Mechanics. You love it and hate it for the same reason but then that is its USP.

While referring to the Bible of Applied Physics by Robert Resnick and David Halliday when pursuing my Engineering, Quantum theory fascinated me no end. I found the underlying theoretical constructs riveting and I would often marvel how it was driving modern scientific discovery and delivering tangible, life-saving applications in the world. This love was partly jilted because of the now-I-understand-now-I-don't Heisenberg and Schrodinger. Heisenberg was still within the physical grasp of the mind but Schrodinger took my breath away with his theory that had more mathematics than theory in it. I particularly liked Heisenberg because his understanding that "Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think," gelled with my confused mind.

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look also appear changed. It is absolutely impossible to read any popular account of Quantum Physics without running into the words "probability" or "uncertainty". That makes it a tricky cud to chew on when you know that probability is a human concept that has no real application in Mother Nature. May be that makes it an even more interesting fodder for thought.

Until Physics explained to me the nature of the particles that make up matter and the forces with which they interact, my boundaries of wisdom were restricted to the three physical dimensions of Mass Length and Time. The fourth dimension of Time-Space Continuum began to upset the apple-cart. It compulsively took one to the Einstein's later theory, the General Theory of Relativity which describes how gravity affects the shape of Space and flow of Time. My rather flimsy understanding of the subject notwithstanding, I was propelled into the surreal world of Higgs Field which hypothesized the field had a carrier particle called Higgs Boson. All the consternation over this particle being named as God particle vanished when it was learnt that Nobel laureate Leon Lederman had actually poked fun at at it calling it as Goddamn Particle because it was too difficult to detect its existence. If it was beyond Lederman, what could someone like me do than to give it up as a bad joke?

The beauty or trouble with Quantum Physics, depending on the way you look at it and how much of it is within your comprehension, is there is no single theory. There is Quantum Mechanics, the basic mathematical framework that underpins it all which came from the stable of Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrodinger. It made out a case for how the position or the momentum of a particle or group of particles changes over a period of time. The handicap of the Quantum Mechanics got crutches from Einstein who established that to understand how things work in the real world, Quantum Mechanics must be propped up by other elements of Physics. Multiple quantum theories made it more interesting, esoteric and befuddling at the same time. It took years to realize that these theories in their ramshackle condition were given a semblance of order through a "standard model" of particle Physics held together with a make-shift tape but giving a comparatively much accurate picture. The God particle emerged from a tumult to give all other particles their mass.

At a basic level, Quantum Physics predicts very strange things about how matter works that are completely at odds with how things seem to work in the real world. How they appear seems to depend on how we choose to measure them. Only that before we measure them, they seem to have no definite properties at all. That leads to the fundamental conundrum about the basic nature of reality. I am inclined to think that there must be some better or more intuitive theory out there that humans are yet to stumble upon. The world is at some level quantum but whether Quantum Physics is the last word about the world remains an open question. 

If you find the Quantum Theory hard to swallow, you are not alone. Schrodinger himself did not like it and was sorry he had anything to do with it. You may hate it or love it but you can't ignore it. In a book gifted to me by a researcher, Einstein has been quoted as saying " If it (the Quantum Theory) is correct, it signifies the end of Physics as a Science." And how I would hate that. I would rather let Quantum Physics remain in the realms of a relentless ferment and its romantic abstract. The book also quotes Max Planck, the father of Quantum Physics: "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness. To me that's the real Planck's Constant.