Quantum of Thought

The BBC can be forgiven for saving money by rebroadcasting programmes when they suddenly become relevant again, and when I heard Sarah Montague and Brian Cox discussing Robert Oppenheimer’s 1953 Reith Lectures a few days ago in a show which first appeared in 2017, I assumed that was just what the Radio 4 authorities were up to – linking the discussion to the recent movie about the physicist. But in fact Reith Revisited is being repeated as a series wholesale over August. This means it was a coincidence, and it was an equal coincidence that I’d just finished reading a book that covered the same subject at the time.

According to the presenters, one of Oppenheimer’s points was to make suggestions about how quantum mechanics might affect not just the approach of scientists to their own endeavours, but also have implications for society more widely. Sometimes, he argued, you have to treat light as though it’s a particle, and sometimes you have to treat it like a wave. Neither sort of measurement comprehensively defines the observed phenomenon: you need both. If this is the case with something as ubiquitous and obvious as light, with the absolute basics of physics, surely it is just so with the scientific project as a whole, and even more with the complex and subtle matters of human social organisation, of politics and economics. No one single viewpoint can manage alone. It’s a prescription for pluralism.

The book was Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall’s The Quantum Society from 1993, which, according to the price label, I bought from a branch of Oxfam at some unknown date. It was (apparently) one of a trio of books examining essentially the same theme at rather greater length than Robert Oppenheimer’s Reith Lecture. Dr Zohar essentially wrote the text to which her husband Ian Marshall then contributed ideas, and she doesn’t refer to Oppenheimer at all so we have to assume that she came up with her concept independently. She treats the quantum model of the universe as a ‘metaphor’ for understanding society, but also regards it as affecting reality very concretely. So the shift she’s suggesting is from an individualistic, ‘Newtonian’ culture in which people regard themselves as tightly bounded beings like atomic particles, to a ‘quantum’ world in which we see ourselves as simultaneously particles and waves, overlapping and interacting, and building something different as a result of our interactions that we could not have otherwise; but she also suggests that this model has a basis not just in the concept of the quantum but in the actual mechanisms of brain function which seem to obey the quantum rules of superposition and indeterminacy. I don’t swallow this all wholesale, but you can see the point.

Dr Zohar stresses that her vision for human social organisation along ‘quantum’ lines is not in any way relativistic – it assumes there is a real truth to be discovered, even if we rely on each others’ conflicting approaches and viewpoints to get there. Just as well, because the great point I would feel compelled to make (though we know anyway that Schrodinger’s great thought-experiment was devised to ridicule the idea that observation determines reality) is that God can already see inside the box, and is well aware what’s happened to the cat.