THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF QUANTUM PHYSICS
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached February 18, 2001, at the First Unitarian Church of HonoluluOne of the lines in the song we sang this morning is "Sing we no governed firmament, cold ordered regular." The science that I was taught in school indeed was that 19th century science of the clockwork universe, "cold ordered regular." My teacher taught us that an electron was this little tiny "thing" that went zipping around a nucleus like a planet going around the sun. Even as it was going on I was having righteous indignation with my teachers because I had heard that there was this interesting stuff called "quantum physics." I got the only "D" in my high school career. I would not shut up.
My fascination with physics has goes way back. It is partly that there is a grandeur here that brings me up short. It does not fit my expectations. It is counter-intuitive, cutting across my common sense. It stretches me, forces me to look closer, and makes me realize that the world I live in is not created in the image of my familiarity.
Here we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of quantum physics and they're still calling it the "new physics." Books about physics and the so-called "new physics" describe a world that is somehow denatured, a cosmos that is without purpose, without meaning, with no religious significance, without the ability to stir you to awe at a sense of its grandeur, without the ability to stir you with a sense of duty in response to the common commitments we find in our midst. I hear that rhetoric again and again and it bothers me! Physics, for me, does exactly the opposite.
I am no physicist and I know that there are several of you out there. How many of you have at least some understanding of quantum physics? (A disturbingly large number of hands went up !) I'm relying on you to tell them, when I have finished, exactly the degree of baloney that I'm full of. I realized when I put the announcement of this sermon in the newsletter that I had bitten off more than I could reasonably expect to chew in this brief time. I want to launch into it anyway and make some points; partly by way of simply celebrating what I think is one of the most exciting events of the 20th century.
What's a quantum?
I have a ring that has an alexandrine stone in it. It's a particular kind of amethyst that has a little bit of chromium in it. Because of the peculiarities of the chromium atom the ring actually changes color depending upon what the light is. When I am in some kinds of light it will be almost a ruby color. In others, it will be a pale blue. And under some conditions it will be purple. It changes color according to the color of light available to strike the outer electrons of those chromium atoms.
An electron does some rather interestingly peculiar things. Before the turn of the century there were scientists that were quite convinced that we had a real problem with atoms because the electron should lose its momentum and circle in and bang into the nucleus. It shouldn't stay out there indefinitely, continuing to go round and around. It should v-e-r-y slowly lose its energy and crash, the same way the Russian Space Station Mir is going to come crashing back into our atmosphere and hit the ocean someplace out near Australia.
Around the turn of the century we began to have the instruments for measuring some of this stuff much more finely. It was observed that a photon of light hits an electron, the electron absorbs that photon of light, becomes more energetic, and moves out to an outer ring, then releases that photon of light and bounces back in again. The amount of light that is released when it moves from ring to ring is always a particular multiple of an amount of light. That's what Nils Bohr called a "quantum." The light doesn't come in infinitely changeable amounts. It comes only in chunks. You can have one chunk, two chunks, three chunks, one quantum, two quanta, three quanta; but you can't have one-and-a-half quanta.
You have all heard that an electron is sort of like a wave and sort of like a particle. This is part of our problem. We bring our common-sense metaphors about the world we're familiar with to issues where those metaphors really don't quite fit. What is perfectly clear is that an electron is not a particle and it is not a wave. It is something else entirely. Our metaphors of particle and wave seem to almost fit some of its behavior some of the time and other parts of its behavior another part of the time. But, in fact, it is neither.
Imagine holding two ends of a rope loosely and shaking one end up and down. Now imagine freezing that rope in mid-wiggle and connecting the two ends. You could only connect one complete wave. You can't get half a wave -- it just won't fit. You can't get two-thirds of a wave. You can only get a whole wave or two or three or four or five or six going around.
But, in fact, that electron isn't going around. That electron is around the nucleus. What quantum physics posits is that you actually have a cloud, as it were, around the nucleus and the electron is that cloud. If you bang into it, one way or another, that electron becomes someplace. But in any given moment before something interacts with it, the electron is in varying degrees of probability all around in that cloud. It is everywhere at once. It is not an object that is "somewhere." It's a wave form that is all around there.
When that electron is influenced in some way -- by a photon hitting it, a measurement being taken, or by another particle coming close enough to interact -- that electron can move closer to and farther away from the nucleus only by the amount of one complete wave. And when it gives up some energy it gives it up in units of one complete wave. We live in an area with lots of rainbows, so most of you are familiar with the fact that light is different wavelengths. Those eight colors there across the sky are differing wavelengths of light. The different colors that come off of my ring are as a result of those electrons bouncing out and then going back in and releasing quanta of light.
The quantum calculations, the mathematical formulae, describe the characteristics of those waves forms and can account for the behavior of the electrons and photons. As long as you stay with relatively simple systems the mathematics works wonderfully. Once you get too many atoms involved in the same interaction, the math completely breaks down. Even in the fastest computers that we have the anticipation of having in the near future, for more than a couple of atoms interacting, it would take as long as the universe has left to do the calculations. That's how much math is involved and how complicated it is.
When the cloud breaks down and the event occurs at a place -- they call that the collapse of the wave form -- interesting strange things occur. But they are weird and strange only because we keep bringing our billiard ball notion of things bouncing off each other to our attempt to understand them. The minute you let go of the notion that these are billiard balls bouncing off of each other, some new phenomena become possible.
Everyone of you probably has in your possession right now or laying around your house at home, things that exist only because of Nils Bohr and Heisenberg and von Newman and Schrodinger and Dirac. They worked out the mathematics of what's happening at that very minuscule level and were able to make predictions as to what those strange phenomena would be. Everything you have that has an electronic chip or a laser, for example, uses those phenomena. When you listen to your CD's on your stereo, you are listening to the effect of our learning how to make predictions about what's going to be happening at that infinitely small level of quantum mechanics and applying it.
Back there at the beginning of the century they began with the information coming from observations about what was happening at those levels. They constructed a mathematical model that accounted for the observations seen. They said, "If these things are true, then this and this and this should be true." They set up experiments to test whether those additional pieces were true. Some of them were and that confirmed parts of the model. Some of them were not and they had to go back and change the mathematics.
What we have in quantum mathematical systems is a set of mathematical conceptual models that have come to be because we paid attention to what's happening, changed the model until the model reflects what, in fact, the various experiments show are going on. The problem still is that there are some effects going on and some predictions made that don't quite mesh with the model. You may be surprised to know that the mathematicians are saying that this is an excellent tool, works very well for a lot of jobs; but is, in fact, wrong. They know that it's wrong because some of the predictions don't work and some of the things that should happen they don't see.
You will read in science fiction books and in books and articles about physics something called the "many worlds interpretation." It is as if, when this cloud of probability collapses and one event out of those many possible events occurs, that in fact all of those events occur. We just happen to be living in the universe in which this particular event occurred. But all the rest of those universes exist, too. For every quantum event that occurs multiple universes branch off.
Nils Bohr, the guy that invented the idea, disagreed. He insisted that we make observations, we construct models to account for the observations, we make predictions, we modify our mathematics according to the feedback from those, and all we have is a conceptual model. It is only a map, corrected as best we can correct it. It is NOT the territory. Yet I have read a number of articles where it certainly looked to me like great physicists had mistaken the map for the territory. Certainly as this stuff is interpreted to you and me, the more dramatic, far-out possibilities are the ones that reporters on science keep sticking in your magazines and newspapers, rather than the relatively straightforward pieces that the Copenhagen interpretation insists it is. The quantum effects are mind-boggling only because we keep bringing to them our common sense metaphors that don't fit.
You have a conceptual model here, a tool that works. One of the problems with the thing is that it looks like, at that level, what's functioning is probability. That's why my opening reference to the "governed firmament, cold ordered regular." This is what lead Albert Einstein to dislike quantum physics intensely and to insist that God does not play dice with the universe. Unfortunately for Albert Einstein, it does appear that, in fact, God does play dice with the universe. Those predictions based on probability work and, so far, no other conceptual models work at that level nearly as well as quantum mechanics does.
But we do interesting things with the vocabulary and the metaphors that come out of it. How large is a quantum leap? Most of you assume that a quantum leap is a pretty big jump, right? A quantum is the Plank length, which is so vanishingly small that if one tries to give it to you in terms of how many of those would stretch across the point of the sharpest pin, it would be a very large number. A quantum is puny. Yet we talk about quantum leaps. What quantum leap really refers to is this jump with no apparent continuity. It's the discontinuity of that jump that is referred to as a quantum leap.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle simply says you can't measure the location of a particle and its momentum at the same time. In order to tell where something is you have to stop it and then you don't know what its momentum was. If you're measuring its momentum you don't really know exactly where it is on that trajectory. How is it that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle has become a massive ontological argument for our not having to be really too terribly precise about things we don't really want to be precise about?
The story used to be told about the person that would go to the dirty book store and wander through the dirty book store reading all the books, and then walk out yelling, "I knew it! I knew it!" Well, I engage in a variation of that perversion. I like to go to the book store and go to the section of books that has all the New Age books in it. I read through the New Age books and walk out going, "I knew it! I knew it!" Because what happens today is that writers use the power vocabulary of the highest high priests of our culture, the scientists. They borrow their metaphors and borrow their images and apply them in areas that -- ach! -- it is sometimes painful. And because they sound so scientific, it sounds like the New Age philosopher is telling us something that is clearly and profoundly true because they're using a profoundly scientific vocabulary.
When science vocabulary gets imported into religion and metaphysics we must be very careful to do what good science does: check your inferences against observations. Remember that it is a conceptual model, and not the territory. And don't trust your intuition. Perhaps the single most significant learning experience that I have had in my life is the experience of being forced to admit that what looked so logical and reasonable and common sense to me wasn't true. Somewhere on my insides I had a desire to believe that what was familiar to me was the truth. The willingness to give up that intuitive certainty is one of the ways to open up the possibility of actually having new and unprecedented experience.
We live amongst this awesome splendor. From the cloud of uncertainty of the electron shells of the very atoms of our being to the clouds of galaxies whirling through space/time: a play, a dance, a connected evolving dialog of relationship, identity and individuation, resolving, dissolving and repeating.. There is a beauty and a grandeur to it.
In our attempt to understand it, whether our metaphors be drawn from science and mathematics, or from religious myth and human meaning-making, there always remains a GAP. The GAP between our maps, our images, our conceptual models, and the territory, the actual stuff, the being and doing of the cosmic dance. We can narrow that gap and we should. Yet the gap remains and will remain. A complete Theory of Everything would be the recapitulation of the whole cosmos all over from the very beginning, the most ultimate aria da capo. But there is a moment when that gap does not exist or is not a problem.
That gap disappears when we are willing to be fully present with one another, not struggling to figure you out or figure me out, but let ourselves be truly with one another. It may be the only place in our lives where the gap can ultimately be eliminated. So if you want to do something that even the quantum physicists cannot do, try practicing that very difficult discipline of really being present to one another.