Quantum Astrologer

Albert Einstein thought quantum mechanics was spooky.

 

Or maybe we should call it quantum non-mechanics, as suggested by David Bohm, because “everything we have learned says there is no physical mechanism to be found within the theory.” The stories behind this, and more, can be found in a unique and delightful book, The Quantum Astrologer’s Handbook by Michael Brooks. 

 

Famous historical figures of quantum mechanics make their appearance in the book, as do contemporary ones. More importantly, Brooks deftly describes the strangeness of the quantum world through its foundational concepts. Feynman thought that no one really understands quantum mechanics. Brooks would agree with him, but still thinks it’s worth trying to explain the key points using the best analogies he can provide, without equations while still leveraging mathematics. If you think that’s an impossible feat, I dare you to read Handbook. In my opinion, of such books I’ve read aimed at a general audience, it’s the best one thus far.

 

Here’s one example that jumped out at me. After introducing the wavefunction, imaginary numbers, and the concept of a ‘phase’ (you’ll know what these mean when you read the excellent analogies in his book), Brooks clarifies the importance of de Broglie’s insight into the particle-wave conundrum. I had a murky idea of this before being illuminated by Brooks. If you’ve taken G-Chem 1, you’ve come across the famous de Broglie equation (or relation). But there’s a problem: “de Broglie’s electron waves travelled too fast: their speed exceeded the speed of light… To get round this, de Broglie reasoned that there must be a component of these waves that represents something outside the physical universe ruled by Einstein’s speed limit… de Broglie’s genius was to make phase into something physical, a quality in its own right, and locate it outside of our normal physical reality. An electron has a mass and a velocity, say, and it has a phase.”

 

Ugh, that’s too science-y, you might be thinking. But here’s where the book shines. I can’t describe it more succinctly than the two-liner on its back-cover: “The Quantum Astrologer’s Handbook is a science book with the panache of a novel. It is a work of and about genius.” There is a time-bending science-history-detective novel embedded throughout its pages. The protagonist of the story is one Jerome Cardano of Italian Renaissance fame. Having done his painstaking homework, Brooks traces the ups and downs of Cardano’s life story by imagining how this astrologer and medieval scientist laid the foundations leading to the strangeness of the quantum world and its extra dimensions. Cardano calls it the aevum. Contemporary string theory calls it the holographic principle.

 

I wish I had Brooks’ facility with words and phrases to describe the Handbook. All I can say is that this strange genre-crossing fifth-wall-breaking approach embedded in the book seems appropriate given the subject matter. It was a page-turner. I had trouble putting it down!

 

Today, Astrology (and its chemical cousin Alchemy) are often relegated to the pseudoscience of the medieval world. For good reason. Much of it is mumbo-jumbo and charlatanry. But we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Brooks brings out hints of astrological thinking in contemporary conceptions of the quantum world. These are the things that seem ‘outside’ of our physical reality. Not that they’re unreal or unphysical in all dimensions, perhaps just the ones we can access through experiment and fit to our mechanics modeling mind-set. Perhaps we should seriously consider non-mechanics, as Bohm suggested.

 

One reason why I found Handbook compelling, and the de Broglie story illuminating, is because I’ve been struggling through similarly murky ideas in the theory of complex systems. How do we distinguish between life, a seemingly complex system, with non-life?

 

And is a type of complexity one facet of this distinction? I’ve read around the edges of complexity theory, much of it murky to me and with too many mathematical equations I didn’t understand. I’ve alluded to a definition of complexity in a previous blog post, distinguishing it from the complicated. Then I stumbled across a paper by Donald Mikulecky, and I realize where my ideas came from.

 

The short article (title, abstract, and citation shown above) is published in an obscure journal. I’d never heard of Computers and Chemistry, and I’m a computational chemist. And the article isn’t about computational chemistry per se. In fact there’s little specific mention of chemistry in its pages, although its presence is certainly implied. However, there is a very clear definition of complexity, and how one distinguishes complex systems from non-complex ones. In a nutshell, Mikulecky thinks that the Newtonian paradigm of mechanics (both static and dynamic) has led us to merge mental models with reality. We, in the ‘hard’ sciences, have often obscured the distinction between epistemology and ontology. Complexity needles and pokes us at the edges of our paradigm, seemingly elusive, but hinting that something is wrong with our framework.

 

Mikulecky asks three questions: “Why is the whole more than the sum of its parts? Why cannot function be ‘assembled’ from our knowledge of structure? Why are complex systems different from simple mechanisms?”

 

His answer: “The complex system possesses something that the machine or the simple mechanism does not. It is the truth or falseness of that assertion that is at the heart of complexity. If there is no ‘something’ then complexity becomes a synonym for complicated and we have nothing more to say… The essence of the ontology of complexity is in the existence of something that is lost as the system is reduced to its parts. Otherwise, the whole is merely the sum of its parts, but the whole may be a more complicated arrangement of the parts…”

 

Does this sound astrological to you? Spooky, maybe? The ghost in a machine? Perhaps “a quality in its own right located outside of our normal physical reality” (to use Brooks’ discussion of de Broglie)? I must confess that I’m still stumbling around the edges, like the blind men figuring out the shape of a strange beast – perhaps an elephant, maybe a hippo, or Leviathan?

 

There isn’t a good conclusion to this story. Yet. Maybe because we’re like the prisoners of Plato’s cave confined to our mechanics framework, both classical and quantum. Instead of confronting the difficult unknown, it’s easier to substitute it with something easier to think about.

 

And so my three simple thoughts are to:

1. Consider assigning Handbook as reading for my Quantum Chemistry course.

2. Design and wear a T-shirt that says “Quantum Astrologer” instead of “Quantum Mechanic”.

3. Write The Handbook of Atomic Alchemy and perhaps become rich and famous. Or be shunned as a pseudoscientist by future generations.