Carlo Revelli (2022) Heligoland. The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics. Translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell.

I’d always hoped to use a sentence telling folk that Einstein and yours truly struggled with quantum physics. I’m reminded of  Richard Feynman's remark -he  had great comic timing, but was also a Nobel winning theoretical physicist - ‘nobody understands quanta’.

I’m pretty good at writing books with no beginning, no middle and no end. Not so good at the actual maths. I’ve leaned on Carlo Revelli for this.

Heligoland seems a good place to start. The British army blew up the island at the end of the Second World War. Why not? There were thousands of tons of left over explosives sitting there doing nothing. Nothing comes from nothing. Only it doesn’t.

Revelli also tells us it was a sacred island (past tense) battered by the North Sea. Notable for having one tree. The place where a young Werner Heisenberg, who was bit of a shagger, as young people tend to be, went to ponder an anomaly in classical physics. Niels Bohr had alerted him to it. Electrons in atoms, circled, it was believed, like small planets, the nucleus. Their energy was measurable as was their distance from the nucleus. But there was no formula to determine how much energy it took these circling electrons used changing to a different orbit, or in determining when this would happen. What is now referred to as quantum leaps.      

As Rovelli states:

‘In every eye of every ladybird there is an extremely elaborate structure of cells, connected to neurons that guide and enable them to live. Every cell is a city, every protein a castle of atoms, in each atomic nucleus an inferno of quantum dynamics is stirring, quarks and gluons swirl, excitations of quantum fields.’

Most of us get lost in the second part of the second sentence. We may have a rough idea of how the ladybird’s eyes work. Its retinas, like human’s, are light sensitive. It picks up these signals. And like a projectionist in a cinema, project them somewhere into the back of our brain, which decodes them, turns them the right way up, and allows us to identify objects such as a cat.

When I’m holding a niece and teaching her about animals, I help her by adding noises when differentiating between dogs and cats in pictures we have hanging on the wall in our lobby. Conventional (and conversational) psychology, suggest that me meow, meow, meowing, and woof, woof, woofing helps her identity the object we call a dog or cat. Different neurons recognise the sounds I’m making with neurons that recognise shapes. Others that recognise smells wonder what kind of animal I am?  These shapes, sounds and smells are mainframed in memory. We add recognition of what a cat or dog is to this data. She recognises what a dog is and ‘woof, woofs’ with me. It’s a great game. You should try it at home.      

Rovelli suggests our interior world works the other way. Most signals to our brains do not travel from the light outside our heads to the brain to assemble, but in the other direction. From the brain to the eyes. Looking is not seeing. We look with our eyes, but see with our brain. I think it’s cute when my niece meows at a dog.

We do it.

‘In the words of the nineteenth-century French philosopher Hippolyte Taine, we can say that the “external perceptions is an internal dream which proves to be in harmony with external things; and instead of calling ‘hallucination’ a false perception, we must call external perception a ‘confirmed hallucination’”.

Our mental maps are skewed and hardwired towards conformity and continuity. The conceptual grammar of how the world works in mechanistic classical physics is cause and effect. In quantum theory, the cause is also the effect. All things are related and interdependent.

Most of us may be negligent (dogging it) when studying and understanding Einstein’s discoveries in space and time, but we all like the story of Schrödinger and his cat. What Dirac called the principles of superposition or quantum interference. Commonly known as being in two places at once. Jesus did it all the time. It often happened in Star Trek. ‘Beam me up, Scotty,’ would be the cry. And something would happen and the machine would show all the photons fading and rearranging into something we recognised as being not quite right.

Shit, Scotty would have to boot the quantum teleportation machine to get it working properly. Because everybody knows if Scotty does nothing, Captain Kirk and Spock are left on Planet Schrödinger with his cat.

According to Schrödinger theory, the wave of each photon separates into two parts. The wee spangly bits on The Starship Enterprise. And the wee spangly bits on Planet Schrödinger with his cat. They are in both places at once.

In interdependent worlds, measurement is interference. When Scotty checks were Captain Kirk or Spock are they can only be one place. They can only be one body, one particle. They cannot be half or Captain Kirk and half of Spock mixed up.

But intention alone works. Scotty waiting for his senior officers in the teleportation booth, effects whether they stay on Planet Schrödinger with his cat. Even if he does not throw the switch. There is a correlation between when he did and what he intended to do and where Captain Kirk and Spock end up.

According to the ‘Many World’s’ interpretation, Captain Kirk and Spock remain on Planet Schrödinger with his cat. Captain Kirk and Spock are also beamed up by Scotty and whisked away to different worlds, where the same thing happens infinitely.

Hidden variables attempts to hide infinite copies of Captain Kirk or Spock or endless repeats of Dad’s Army. Bohm devised an equation which suggested electrons and Captain Kirk and Spock, move in physical space, and are guided by Schrödinger. But we cannot see Schrödinger’s wave (the Hidden Variable has a ghostly function). We can only see its effect. We’re in the world of I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m still scared of them. Quantum jumps that fail (the spangly bits in Scotty’s teleportation portal) are the cause of Schrödinger's wave collapse, which has not been observed.

I’ve said more than I should about Physical Collapse. The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics, I never understood any of it, but I’m sure you’ll do better. Read on.  

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