An old movie portrays a paranoid, crazy general who sends U.S. warplanes to drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union. Its title, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, refers to an ex-Nazi scientist who serves as scientific advisor for the U.S. President. Upon the imminent apocalypse, Dr. Strangelove hurriedly accepts the prospect of living in underground shelters with “a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead.”
The similar title, The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty, surprised me because Planck and Einstein did not teach me to love uncertainty. Planck was a conservative physicist who valued causal explanations and reluctantly tolerated quantum mechanics. Einstein insisted that we should not love quantum mechanics but instead should devise a theory that causally explains its results, as the authors acknowledge.
Quantum Moment is based on an undergraduate course at Stony Brook University, co-taught by philosopher Crease and physicist Goldhaber, about the cultural impact of quantum concepts. As usual, the authors embrace the strangeness of quantum theory rather than urge that it be replaced with something better. They nicely discuss its influence on novels, movies, sculptures, cartoons, children's books, poetry, politics, and TV shows. They chase the word “quantum” from cruise ships to beer to dishwasher fluid to Family Guy. For example, they discuss a wonderful sculpture in London titled “Quantum Cloud.” The book also includes photographs of physicists and it reproduces multiple lively cartoons. In one cartoon, a theorist explains to a boy that if the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, then when an awful bomb explodes maybe the boy will survive in at least some worlds. But the theorist warns: in those worlds the boy would be horribly maimed and would therefore suffer miserably. The boy replies: “Yay!!!!”
Interspersed between the cultural fluff, Quantum Moment summarizes the contributions of many physicists, starting with Newton and Planck. It includes charming accounts of Percy Bridgman's and John Bell's initial revulsion toward quantum mechanics, and their reluctant acceptance of it. Bridgman worried that quantum theory would generate a “playground of the imagination of every mystic and dreamer,” fostering bizarre nonsense about spirits, telepathy, free will, and chance. Bell realized that John von Neumann's “proof” that there are no hidden variables in quantum mechanics was foolish nonsense. Quantum Moment includes other neat vignettes, especially about Hugh Everett and David Kaiser.
The book is pleasantly written; handling jargon gingerly while also using silly big words such as unpindownability, fruitloopery, magification, and macroscopicity. The authors thoughtfully discuss people's reactions to the apparent “schizophrenia” of quantum mechanics. To some, its mysteries seemed exciting and magical. Others were disturbed by the murky, irrational, and bizarre mysticism of its interpretations.
I confess that I'm in the latter camp. I think that our knowledge of quantum phenomena is grossly incomplete; that we should persistently ask why questions instead of assuming that there is no why; and, that the Moon does exist when we're not looking at it, as Einstein said. Chatter about complementarity, the free will of electrons, multiverses, etc., makes me cringe. So a few times I actually had to set down the book, exasperated by some people's speculations.
Overall, the authors argue that the quantum has had an inspiring and beneficial impact on culture and on the humanities in particular. I'm afraid I disagree. I don't blame the theory's equations, but its sensationalist interpretations. As spokesmen for physics, Crease and Goldhaber paint an upbeat portrait of quantum theory. But its cultural impact leaves much to be desired. Time and again they refer to physicists' discomfort and embarrassment at how many people have twisted quantum concepts. My favorite parts of the book are those that reveal a recurring tendency for narcissistic escapism in the capricious interpreters of quantum theory.
I should note some shortcomings. There are some problems of sequence, e.g., reactions to the uncertainty principle are discussed before the principle is explained.
It is inaccurate to repeatedly say that Einstein wanted “a full restoration of the Newtonian Moment.” The book also needed descriptions of key experiments, say, to actually describe Compton's experiments, Zeeman's findings, or even Heisenberg's gamma-ray thought-experiment. Without that, readers will only vaguely understand some of the concepts discussed. There are mistakes in the discussion of thermal radiation. The radiation of a red-hot iron poker does not peak in the red range, it peaks well in the infrared. It is also incorrect to say that as a body gets hotter, the profile of its emitted radiation “tapers off sharply at higher frequencies.” To the contrary, its profile of radiation intensity versus frequency expands at higher temperatures, while its profile of radiation intensity versus wavelength tapers off sharply at higher temperatures. The authors say that different materials radiate “the same spectrum of colors at the same temperature,” but no, this is a common mistake: the assumption that material objects are blackbodies. Actually, the thermal radiation spectrum of an object is the product of its distinct spectral emissivity and the blackbody spectrum at that temperature.
The authors also try to give “a good way to picture how entanglement works” by sketching the 1995 experiment of Pittman et al. on “ghost imaging.” Some photons are sent to the left, some of them crossing through a screen with letters cut out. Other photons (entangled to the first) travel to the right, crossing no screen, yet “all the right-moving photons” echo the letters on the left, say the authors. This is just not true; actually many right-moving photons were systematically disregarded. Had they been taken into account there would then be no such corresponding image. Entanglement is inessential here because ghost imaging has been carried out with pseudothermal light, which behaves as a classical electromagnetic wave. Moreover, a single beam and detector can generate the same ghost images, showing that such images do not depend on nonlocal two-photon interference.
The authors remark that quantum mechanics shows that natural phenomena “can be more whimsical than fairies.” Still, they say that quantum mechanics “has yet to make a prediction that has been proven wrong.” I've heard this before. But suppose that quantum theory says that the probability that an event will happen is 98%. Now suppose that the event does not happen. Even then, someone says that the prediction was correct. An implicit interpretive rule is at work: if the theory does not predict what really does happen in this specific case then we should not blame the theory, because “it is not possible” to make a more accurate prediction. Hence its predictions always seem correct.
Alongside the theme of how physics has influenced culture, the authors ask another question: Has culture influenced quantum theory? Crease and Goldhaber appreciate Kaiser's historical account of how some hippies helped to revive the popularity of quantum theory. However, the authors criticize a famous paper by historian Paul Forman that analyzed why German physicists in particular rushed to abandon causality around 1920.
Forman discovered that such physicists disdained causality years before Heisenberg rejected causality. Germany's defeat in World War I led Germans to resent and denigrate the previously dominant mechanistic mindset. Crease and Goldhaber shrug off Forman's findings as having “serious flaws.” For example, they mention that Einstein introduced probability into quantum theory in 1916, before Germany was defeated. However, it is unwarranted to imagine that physicists who rushed to ditch causality around 1920 did so because of Einstein's papers of 1916; they did not link their concerns to those papers. Besides, that was not Einstein's argument. In 1916, Einstein used statistical thermodynamics, Bohr's theory of spectra, and Rutherford's statistical law of radioactive decay as “hypotheses” about the emission and absorption of radiation to derive Planck's radiation formula. Einstein remarked that the role of “chance”—in quotation marks—was a “weakness” in his derivation, and that his hypotheses were not confirmed results.
Physics students should know that by 1919, there was a conscious hostility toward physics in postwar Germany. Scientists complained that educated Germans succumbed to rampant mysticism including belief in miracles, occultism, spiritualism, theosophy, metaphysics, astrology, superstitions, and new religions. This tide of anti-rationalism generated contempt against positivism, causality, mechanical explanations, and the “all suffocating determinism.” Rationality was blamed as the evil root of crass materialism. A prominent minister of education declared: “We must acquire a reverence for the irrational.” Crease and Goldhaber mention some of these findings by Forman.
Like other German writers, the historian Oswald Spengler denied the objectivity of science and he excoriated the notion of causality as artificial and “soul-destroying.” In 1918, Spengler reported: “a sudden and annihilating doubt that has arisen about things that even yesterday were the unchallenged foundation of physical theory,” including causal laws. He noted “increasing use of statistical methods, which aim only at the probability of the results, and forgo in advance the absolute exactitude of the laws of nature.” He said that material objects conceived as “detached from the living act of the observer” seemed deathly and drained by mathematics, as an “eternal embarrassment of all physics.”
Against the “tyranny” of irreligious science, Germans hoped for a new science, based on intuitions, vitalism, spontaneity, and mysticism. In this cultural context, Forman showed, German physicists lost their old confidence in rationality and began to overtly yearn for an acausal physics. Quantum theory, with its perplexing interpretations, arrived promptly to soothe the newfound phobia against determinism. To hurriedly erase the apparent paradoxes of quantum theory, Bohr and Heisenberg willfully chose to, in their words, “renounce” traditional standards of reason, explanation, and comprehension. They learned to love uncertainty.
The book Quantum Moment itself illustrates how quantum concepts have influenced culture. It echoes the decision to shirk causal explanations. The authors write: “it would be starting off on the wrong foot to try to understand the connection between science and culture as Forman does, as one of causal interaction.” Actually, I like that foot, especially in physics.
Alberto A. Martinez is Associate Professor of History of Science at the University of Texas at Austin. Recently he has researched the evolution of myths in the history of science and math. He is the author of Science Secrets: The Truth About Darwin's Finches, Einstein's Wife, and Other Myths, among other books.
