Quantum as anything

There’s an article that bothers me this week in New Scientist(subscription). It’s written by an intelligent person and published by some intelligent people. Yet when I read it, it seems utterly trivial. My first reaction is that I’m missing the point, but I can’t see where. The article is “The Om of Physics” by the Dalai Lama. He compares the Buddhist theory of Emptiness, which states that everything is connected to everything else in a mystic but most excellent way with the insights coming from Quantum mechanics.

Dalai Lama. Photo by Mrpattersonsir.

It’s very feasible that I’m missing the point. His explanation of the Buddhist theory of emptiness was that nothing has an intrinsic, independent and objective existence. I struggled with that because I believe there is an objective reality. Re-reading made my misunderstanding clear. The emphasis is on independent. The example he gave was of petrol in an engine. When it gets burned there’s no intrinsic ‘petrolness’ which remains untouched by the process. You could argue that the atoms that make up the hydrocarbons remain and are getting reconfigured, but even there they’re not isolated from the rest of the universe, they’re still making partnerships with other atoms in different ways. So it turns out that I agree with him.

It gets more difficult later on. However I read later sections of the article I cannot make any real sense of them, beyond “Isn’t the universe bodacious?” He argues that uncertainty is built into the universe and that the uncertainty principle is compatible with the Buddhist understanding of uncertainty. I think it is, for the same reason as action replays in sport are also compatible with Buddhist uncertainty. It’s because they’re not talking about the same thing.

The Uncertainty Principle is, as Vroomfondel would say, a rigidly defined area of doubt and uncertainty. It defines how the standard deviations in measuring position and momentum relate to each other. So you know accurately how uncertain you are about something.

The Dalai Lama seems to think that there’s a fundamental difference between predictable, deterministic classical physics and unpredictable non-deterministic Quantum physics. I thought Lorenz showed that classical physics could produce unpredictable results and many problems involving chaos are based on classical physics. Equally the Balmer series shows that Quantum physics is capable of producing predictions. Even if the comparison did hold, I’m not sure what it would meaningfully tell me about Buddhism or Quantum mechanics. I can’t recall any papers deriving mathematical principles from Buddhism and I doubt that the Dalai Lama is going to ban certain things from Buddhism based on the Pauli Exclusion Principle.

I have been in favour of a moratorium on things like the application of chaos in the social sciences. I’m not quite so certain today, but this kind of thing makes me deeply uneasy. I can see how a skim of a book with pictures of fractals could inspire thoughts about scale in society. It’s reasonable to mention that. But is it reasonable to build a big edifice of interdisciplinary theory based on it?

I attended a conference last year on complexity and society, and the papers I liked were the mathematical papers. One person showed how social innovation of gestures (he used the clenched victory fist tennis matches) can be modelled by a power law. Another team showed how Bronze Age trading networks could be described using a Hamiltonian operator. This last is as Quantum as it gets and while I have queries about its use, it was certainly thought provoking and, if I could get to grips with Hamiltonian operators, it could be very useful. Yet this paper went down very badly with many archaeologists who simply didn’t understand how the paper could draw its conclusions. That’s not a slur on archaeologists. One of the side effects of spending years learning about archaeology is that you don’t have that time to learn the complicated maths. But if social scientists cannot cope with the difficulties of real Quantum mechanics or chaos, then what is gained by using them as fuzzy analogies?

This is a problem that I’m tackling from the opposite direction at the moment. I have a seminar to give and because I’m indecisive I’m preparing two, one on ancient history, the other on archaeology. I probably won’t decide exactly which one I’m giving until I open PowerPoint. I’m not happy with either. The problem with the ancient history one is that I feel it’s somewhat pretentious in places. Having lightly skimmed some Habermas I think his theory of meaning, as far as I understand it, has some interesting applications to stories in the ancient world. Habermas’s social theories seem quite close to extelligence. This is attractive, because the people I’m talking to don’t have an interest in biology so I’d have to explain selection of culture and lose quite a bit of time in the talk. Habermas approaches similar problems, but uses language familiar to social scientists, so there’s less of a translation issue. My problem is that I’m not sure I understand his work well enough to present it as a just so story. There are historians and archaeologists who name drop a philosopher as a magic wand to fix any need to think about certain assumptions, and that’s bad practice. This is certainly a problem for me, as Habermas’s theories are based on modern society, so while I like what he’s saying can it be applied to ancient Greece and Rome?

I’ve been down to get a cup of tea and I still don’t have an answer. If I were planning to give a bad astronomy talk then I’d want to do it in front of an audience of astronomers, so they could tell me where I’d made mistakes. The seminar audience is almost certainly all going to be better orientated in social sciences than me, it might be worth taking advantage of that to fix some of my misconceptions early on. —–