I learned too late last night that I was out of coffee: the stores were closed. I mumbled something about breaking into my hoard of stale camping coffee and went to sleep. This morning, before I truly woke up, Becky walked in the front door. Unflaggingly thoughtful person that she is, she’d run to the Starbucks a mile or so up the road to buy some beans and a cup of plain, non-flavored, non-adulterated black coffee.
She handed me the cup. I drank it, and I saw that it was good. And the caffeine and the morning were the next day.
And all was well until the caffeine hit and the world was no longer without form, or void, and the dark was divided from the light on the side of the cup, and I saw that it said this:
When Einstein explained his theory of relativity, he couldn’t express it in the precise, scientific writing of physics. He had to use poetry. Poetry: the connection of words, images, and the relationships that gives [sic] them meaning. Quantum physics changed the world. No longer can we view the world in separate, mechanical ways, but we must accept the reality of interconnection, unity, and togetherness. Life is poetry.
— David Seel
English Teacher from Annapolis, MD.
This is part of ”The Way I See It,” a series of short, pithy excerpts written by erudite non-Starbucks-employed authors, including the ever-thoughtful Jonah Goldberg, whose cup says
“Everywhere, unthinking mobs of “independent thinkers” wield tired clichés like cudgels, pummeling those who dare question “enlightened” dogma. If “violence never solved anything,” cops wouldn’t have guns and slaves may never have been freed. If it’s better that 10 guilty men go free to spare one innocent, why not free 100 or 1,000,000? Clichés begin arguments, they don’t settle them.”
... thus decrying the use of clichés in a statement that is itself entirely composed of cliché.
Most of the offerings are not so obnoxious. Unfortunately, I did not get a cup with a non-obnoxious offering. I got a piece of anti-intellectual lie masquerading as thoughtful defense of poetry.
“Lie” may seem to you too strong a word. But consider this very first sentence in David Seel’s piece:
When Einstein explained his theory of relativity, he couldn’t express it in the precise, scientific writing of physics. He had to use poetry.
This would, of course, be news to Einstein, who announced his Special Theory of Relativity through the radically unorthodox method of publishing in a respected physics journal, using blissful, evocative poetry such as
Now to the origin of one of the two systems (k) let a constant velocity v be imparted in the direction of the increasing x of the other stationary system (K), and let this velocity be communicated to the axes of the co-ordinates, the relevant measuring-rod, and the clocks. To any time of the stationary system K there then will correspond a definite position of the axes of the moving system, and from reasons of symmetry we are entitled to assume that the motion of k may be such that the axes of the moving system are at the time t (this “t” always denotes a time of the stationary system) parallel to the axes of the stationary system.
I especially love the use of metaphor and allegory in this passage:
Let a point charge of electricity have the magnitude “one” when measured in the stationary system K, i.e. let it when at rest in the stationary system exert a force of one dyne upon an equal quantity of electricity at a distance of one cm. By the principle of relativity this electric charge is also of the magnitude “one” when measured in the moving system. If this quantity of electricity is at rest relatively to the stationary system, then by definition the vector (X, Y, Z) is equal to the force acting upon it. If the quantity of electricity is at rest relatively to the moving system (at least at the relevant instant), then the force acting upon it, measured in the moving system, is equal to the vector (X’, Y’, Z’ )
But that first sentence of Seel’s is just an easily debunkable falsehood. The thing about quantum physics changing the world so that we must no longer hew to our limited, linear ways of thinking and incidentally validating poetry? Pernicious garbage.
Let’s get this out of the way first: I challenge Seel to write a single piece of non-linear poetry.
More importantly, quantum physics has long been abused as a way to peddle bullshit. It is usually invoked as a kind of rhetorical squid ink by people who couldn’t get a 2 on the Physics AP, with the intent of obscuring the logical and factual flaws in arguments they make to buttress their superstitions. Exhibit A: homeopathy. Faced with the disturbing news that simple math tells us that there is no active medicinal ingredient in water at homeopathic dilutions, the adherent will often claim that something affects the water at the quantum level.
The quantum squid ink trope reached its nadir in the 2004 movie “What The Bleep Do We Know!?,” in which the filmmakers — alleging to have produced a fictional semidocumentary — selectively and misleadingly edited an interview with the one actual quantum physicist portrayed in the movie. As Salon reported soon after the movie’s release:
David Albert, a professor at the Columbia University physics department, has accused the filmmakers of warping his ideas to fit a spiritual agenda. “I don’t think it’s quite right to say I was ‘tricked’ into appearing,” he said in a statement reposted by a critic on “What the Bleep’s” Internet forum, “but it is certainly the case that I was edited in such a way as to completely suppress my actual views about the matters the movie discusses. I am, indeed, profoundly unsympathetic to attempts at linking quantum mechanics with consciousness. Moreover, I explained all that, at great length, on camera, to the producers of the film ... Had I known that I would have been so radically misrepresented in the movie, I would certainly not have agreed to be filmed.”
Quantum mechanics is important and mind-bending, to be sure. But it does not repudiate what classical physics knew about how the universe operates: it explains why the world operates the way classical physics describes it. Quantum physics underlies our boring, prosaic, conventionally linear lives. It is the reason water boils at 100 degrees Celsius at sea level, the reason a sharp knife cuts a tomato better than a dull one, the reason dry-fucking is no fun.
Here’s a handy guide: if a person tries to explain away an unusual claim in terms of quantum mechanics, he or she is almost certainly bullshitting you unless the subject being discussed is a) colder than anything you will ever encounter, b) faster than anything you will ever ride, or c) too small to be resolved using a light microscope. Otherwise, quantum mechanics explains the world as it is.
But that’s not what bothered me about the passage.
Ed Abbey wrote some unbelievably moving prose, and espoused execrable ideas about gender and race. Jeffers was a misanthrope, and not the fun kind. Rexroth had favorable things to say about British food. Wondrous poetry is often penned by those with flaws. And Whitman… Whitman gave generations of anti-intellectuals literary aid and comfort with but one work.
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Oh, how many times I have heard this poem cited in support of the soulless scientist, his
(always he, excepting the women in lab coats and severe hairstyles who eventually and inevitably loosen their hair, go into soft focus, and swoon a tidal wave of passion at the undereducated hero)
his heart a dried stale crust of bread, a stamp collector, putting each treasure into its proper sterile container, going home evenings to relax by doing math. It is only we the ignorant, who know nothing about anything, who grasp the importance of it all. You white-coats with your mass spectrometers and stethoscopes and Tesla coils, heads buried in lists of Greek squiggles, ears muffled by recordings of static: you just don’t get it. Never mind that patient observation of repeated events, in wildlife biology or geology or learn’d astronomy, often has more to do with meditation than with math. Never mind that no one goes into the sciences anymore, at least not most of the sciences, except for passion.
I am not an expert at anything, in fact. But I know a few things about the desert. I know a few plants, a few animals, some of the theoretical geology that underpins the landscape. I know that some people don’t know what I know about those plants, animals and rocks. Which person is more likely to speed through the desert impatiently, decrying the sterile waste as useless, praying for a Starbucks on the horizon so that he might read the wisdom of Jonah Goldberg in urbane and air-conditioned comfort, away from the heat and spiky, venomous things?
Not the one who sees the difference between Yucca schidigera and Yucca baccata, and who can thus notice the places where one species grows and the others do not, or who sees a line of juniper among the yucca and almost without thinking can deduce the existence of a hidden flaw in the rock through which groundwater rises, or who hears a bird song and knows that mere weeks ago the singer sang in Guatemala.
I lied, before, a little: there is one unusual thing I know of in my life for which quantum mechanics provides an explanation. I know nothing of quantum mechanics, really. I have tried to learn calculus twice in my life, and I have failed to learn calculus twice in my life. I can only grope with metaphor. What is matter, and what energy? An explanation I have heard is that each piece of matter, each pulse of energy is a knot in the mathematical fabric. I have no way to gauge the accuracy of that metaphor except to know that it is false at its root: neither knot nor fabric. But let’s pretend. An infinitesimal kink in the ether rubs up against another, and some abstract but overwhelming force binds them. Another knot joins. Another. Different bunches of knots possess different properties. There are a limited number of ways in which the knots can cluster. But the clusters can bunch up into larger clusters, each of which also has its own characteristic behavior. Some bunches hold other bunches at a distance. Others they clasp tight, with still other clusters as intermediaries for that attraction. Pile bunches on bunches and we enter the realm of chemistry. About a hundred different kinds of chemistry-level clusters combine in oddly predictable and consistent ways: water molecule, formaldehyde molecule, quartz crystal. We have put perhaps a dozen layers of complexity between us and that first knot. A million layers more and the clumps begin to replicate themselves with deliberation. They begin to understand themselves, to deduce the existence of the first, smallest knots.
The unusual thing in my life explained by quantum mechanics? My tendency to stop at a glimpse of a piece of broken glass, in awe of the sheer fractal bravado of existence.
There is a passage by one of the flawed poets above-mentioned, to which I return time and again in this context.
It seems to me that Keats was wrong when he asked, rhetorically, “Do not all charms fly ... at the mere touch of cold philosophy?” The word “philosophy” standing, in his day, for what we now call “physical science.” But Keats was wrong, I say, because there is more charm in one “mere” fact, confirmed by test and observation, linked to other facts through coherent theory into a rational system, than in a whole brainful of fancy and fantasy. I see more poetry in a chunk of quartzite than in a make-believe wood nymph, more beauty in the revelations of a verifiable intellectual construction than in whole misty empires of obsolete mythology.
Apropos in this case as well. But there’s a preceding sentence in the original from which I steal that Ed Abbey quote that I usually omit.
Just as the earth itself forms the indispensable ground for the only kind of life we know, providing the sole sustenance of our minds and bodies, so does empirical truth constitute the foundation of higher truths. (If there is such a thing as higher truth.)
The world has had enough poetry that scorns measurement and verification. The world has had enough quantum mystics. There is a difference between knowing what you’re talking about and making shit up on the fly, and Schroedinger’s cat has nothing to say about that second one.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Categories:
Science
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