15-Uncertainty and Reality

            Uncertainty has a lot of meanings, as does reality.

            In quantum mechanics uncertainty usually means the strangely statistical nature of the observed state of a system relative to an earlier state. Since reality is intrinsically linked to observation—and we experience reality, we don’t just postulate it—uncertainty about observables matters.

            The most common example of quantum uncertainty is the dichotomy of waves and particles as explanations of physical effects. When you ask some questions, like which hole in a barrier a beam of electrons has gone through, it’s clear the beam behaves like a stream of tiny particles. When you don’t ask one of those questions, it’s equally clear the beam behaves like a continuous wave. Strangest of all, it doesn’t matter how you get the answer to those questions, or even who knows the answer. You may not know, but if ANYONE knows the answer or even could know the answer, the beam is made of particles. If no one could know—meaning nothing interacts with the beam in a way that could provide an answer—the beam is a continuous wave.

            So, what is that beam of electrons really? In all likelihood there is no answer to that in terms that we can conceive. We can say it’s both a wave and it’s particles, but those are just words. We don’t know what that means. It may not “really” be anything, just whatever makes sense according to what you want to know about it. 

            Our minds, our ways of experiencing reality, developed over tens of thousands of years of experience of the tiny corner of what we call classical physics that deals with our normal masses, velocities, and distances. The world of quantum physics has no analog with our experience, and it doesn’t overlay with it much at all.

            The best I can grasp all this is to look at the wave-particle duality as being like an optical illusion. The drawing below looks like either a shaded floor square with two cubes rising from it on each side or unshaded ceiling squares with a single shaded cube descending from the corner in the center.

            Which is it really?

            It’s neither. It’s really some straight lines and shaded areas drawn on a flat piece of paper. 

            The problem with the quantum dualities is there is no “flat piece of paper” that anyone has ever found that is the “root” reality, and there is a strong argument that one doesn’t exist. This means that if there is a deeper underlying reality to quantum mechanics, it is likely to be not less weird but more weird than what we observe now. 

            Personally, I think there is a way to contain all of this in the human experience, but it will involve more than our reasoning. It will have aspects of the Zen koans like the sound of one hand clapping or the gateless gate, or the joke, “Question: How many surrealists does is take to screw in a lightbulb? Answer: A duck.”

            Just as I argued in my essay “A Theory of Everything”, we may have to embrace experience that is not reasoning, not knowledge as we think of it. Cutting loose from the tether of rationality is risky, but under the right circumstances, the right time, the…something I don’t what…it may be the only path to joining ourselves seamlessly with the universe. 

            Irreconcilable uncertainty may be a guidepost pointing the way to a state of being in which we fully merge with the reality we observe.

            Hugh Moffatt
            Whitstable, Kent
            December 7, 2021