Last May, I planned to fly to Namibia, Africa, for a wilderness trek with three friends. When the pandemic forced us to cancel our trip, I started casting about for something to do. I felt listless, restless. Then iconoclastic physicist Sabine Hossenfelder posted a video on YouTube, “Understanding Quantum Mechanics #2: Superposition and Entanglement.” Watching the video, I felt the same frustration I’ve felt for decades when quantum explanations become mathematical. I hit a wall.
My degrees were in English and journalism. I took one class in physics and two in calculus, but I remember little from those courses. Ignorance hasn’t stopped me from writing about science, as my critics like pointing out. I’ve written about physics, the mind-body problem, cancer, mental illness, war, you name it. I have twinges of imposter syndrome, especially when reporting on highly mathematical fields —including mathematics itself! But I’ve convinced myself that my job as a journalist isn’t to know what experts know. It’s to know enough, learn enough, to judge which experts and theories are credible.
But Hossenfelder’s video made me wonder: What would it take for me to grasp quantum mechanics the way that physicists do, math and all? The more I thought about learning quantum mechanics, the more excited I got. But would it be possible at my age and with my lack of training? How long would it take, and how should I start? I ran these questions by friends with quantum expertise, including Stevens physicists Chris Search and Ed Whittaker.
My advisors were almost too enthusiastic about my project (perhaps because they want to see me suffer). Several recommended that I begin by reading Quantum Mechanics, The Theoretical Minimum: What you Need to Know to Start Doing Physics, by Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind. The back-cover blurb says the book “provides a tool kit for amateur scientists to learn physics at their own pace.” Perfect.
There’s an irony here. Susskind and I butted heads in 2006 after The New York Times published my essay “In Defense of Common Sense.” Many modern scientists, my essay pointed out, have disparaged common sense, contending that it can thwart a scientific understanding of nature. I contested this position, arguing that common sense, which I defined as “ordinary, nonspecialized knowledge and judgment,” is often “indispensable for judging scientists’ pronouncements.”
As examples, I pointed to physicists’ quest for a unified theory, which has led them to postulate the existence of infinitesimal strings, extra dimensions, and extra universes. “All these theories are preposterous,” I wrote, “but that’s not my problem with them. My problem is that no conceivable experiment can confirm the theories, as most proponents reluctantly acknowledge. The strings … are too small to be discerned by any buildable instrument, and the parallel universes are too distant. Common sense thus persuades me that these avenues of speculation will turn out to be dead ends.”
Susskind, a string and multiverse enthusiast, went after me on The Edge, a website for hifalutin intellectual chitchat. He concluded: “Instead of dyspeptically railing against what he plainly does not understand, Horgan would do better to take a few courses in algebra, calculus, quantum mechanics, and string theory. He might then appreciate, even celebrate, the wonderful and amazing capacity of the human mind to find uncommon ways to comprehend the incomprehensible.”
At the time, I shrugged off Susskind’s attack, which I’d heard many times. Experts often insist that only other experts are qualified to judge them. In other words, you must become indoctrinated into a field before you can criticize it. No journalist can accept such a rule. But here I am, 14 years later, taking Susskind’s advice. And not only that, I’m reading his book! I’ve also enrolled in a course at Stevens: PEP 553: Quantum Mechanics for Physicists and Engineers, taught by Ed Whittaker.
I have no idea whether my quantum experiment will succeed. Ed is a terrific teacher, but PEP 553 is tough, and I’m by far the dumbest student in the class. I keep turning to Wikipedia for quick reviews of differentials, integrals, wave functions, complex numbers, and Euler’s formula. It’s so hard remembering all those odd notations! But I’m enjoying myself in spite, no, because of my sense of disorientation. I feel as though I’m on the border of a strange new territory—far stranger than Namibia would have been—that is challenging my preconceptions and forcing me to see the world anew.
What might happen as a result of my quantum experiment (assuming I don’t give up in frustration before I make any real progress)? If I get to the point where I can pontificate cockily about wave functions and the measurement problem (an enormous if), will my view of physics change? More specifically, will I have insights into the meaning of quantum mechanics? And perhaps its potential role in consciousness and free will?
That’s hard to say. Those who know quantum mechanics intimately—that is, mathematically—disagree on its implications. In fact, learning quantum mechanics poses a paradox. Richard Feynman famously said, “I don’t understand it. Nobody does.” So even if my quantum experiment succeeds, I’ll never arrive at a point where I can say, “Ah, I get it.” The best I can hope for is to know a little more about what I don’t know. I’ll happily settle for that. Then, as the world descends further into chaos, I can sit in my apartment contemplating the wave function of it all.
John Horgan directs the Stevens Center for Science Writings. This column is adapted from a column he wrote for Scientific American.
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