Chapter 12                                 Part B 

But according to quantum theory, these things that I think I am seeing are temporary. If they are given enough time, they will collapse. Exactly how any one object or particle will collapse and what it will become next we cannot ever say with certainty. We can make predictions, some with very high degrees of probability to them, but we cannot “pre-know” any event with certainty no matter how clever or well-supplied with data we are. Cause and effect don't always connect. Odd things, external and internal, can, and sometimes do, interfere.  

 

                               artist's conception of giant meteor entering Earth's atmosphere

            I can't know when I go to stretch out my arm that my arm will stretch out. One day it may not. When that day will come, I can't say. I can't know that the sun will rise tomorrow or that the pen that I just bumped off of my desk will fall to the floor. A giant meteor may strike the Earth tonight. My pen may get caught in a kind of anti-gravity field which, until today, I knew nothing about.

I can't know anything for certain, ever, period. I can only calculate the probabilities that I will experience these events and objects. In usual, everyday life, I base my estimates of the probabilities of all the various experiences that I might encounter on my memories of past experiences, on generalizations formed by studying those memories, and on belief-habits acquired from my culture. My estimates are very accurate most of the time. But I can't know anything for certain.

In the terms of everyday human experience, this means that change that one can plan for is not real change. There is only one rule and that is the rule which says that there are no rules, or at least not any hard and fast ones. Or, as the old saying has it, life is full of rude awakenings.

The point of one of the seminal books of our time, "The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn, is that even in the most rigorously logical and real, material world-grounded of fields, namely Science, there are no certainties. All of the models of reality that have ever been constructed by the human mind have undergone major revisions or even total overthrow in the past. There is absolutely no reason for us to assume that any of our culture’s mental models of reality at any level of resolution – from the sub-atomic, to the human-scaled, to the cosmic – will be used by anyone to guide their research a century from now. There is nothing in the idea of an electron that is immune to being superseded by another, more useful, scientifically effective idea, any more than there was in the ideas of the ether or phlogiston - two once widely-believed scientific ideas that are now obsolete.

                                     artist's conception of atoms inside a strontium clock 

And electrons themselves? Am I saying they will cease to exist? Why, that's absurd. Actually, it isn't at all. Quantum physicists are saying something much more radical. Electrons were never there in the first place. The way we were taught to draw a solar system-like sketch of the atom in high school is only a useful model of sub-atomic reality. What is really down there cannot be drawn at all.

The waves of light that enable human beings to do what we call "seeing" are longer than the dimensions of this hypothetical "electron". "What does an electron look like?" is a meaningless question. An electron doesn't "look" like anything we can imagine, even if we could pool all of the seeing, understanding, and imagining that our species has ever done. That solar-system-like model of the atom is merely a useful model that has enabled some scientists to do calculations and then make predictions about the phenomena that these hypothetical particles will produce at the level that is observable to us if we prod those particles in certain ways that are available to us in our labs.

But no physicists really think there are hordes of little bullets whirling around down at the sub-atomic level. That model has had its uses, but we must not get attached to it. Its day is all but up. New results are defying many of the ideas and assumptions implied by that model.

However, what matters for the purposes of this book is that the quantum model of reality, even if we can't "picture" it, has profound implications for our worldview. Therefore, it also has profound implications for our ethical beliefs, values, cultural morés, and patterns of survival-oriented behavior.