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Throughout human history there have been a few times where our entire perspective on the very nature of reality has been changed. The Copernican revolution gave us a home, one that albeit put us on a spec rotating our Sun and not the other way around in the vast galactical cosmos. The Darwinian revolution gave us a family, one that told us that our chimpanzee relatives and all living species on our planet share the same common ancestor as us. One of the more recent revolutions, and one of the more important revolutionary paradigm shifts celebrates its centenary which the United Nations has dubbed the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology.
While the quantum story starts in 1900 when Max Planck discovered that energy is released in discrete packets called quanta, the quantum “revolution” started, if we were to pinpoint one place and time to mark the “true” inauguration of quantum mechanics, on the wee hours of June 1925, when Werner Heisenberg, an aspiring, young physics postdoc, at the tender age of only 23 and relatively unknown at the time would, as the story goes, climbed atop a boulder on the tiny 1 km^2 island of Heligoland off the northern coast of Germany and elegantly gleam at what we now know as matrix mechanics, the first formal mathematical formulation of the physics that started off messy and took a quarter decade to mature, one that completely disrupted our views of the world and put into light how mother nature seemed to play dice with the universe as we know it.
With Heisenberg’s formulation of matrix mechanics, a whole spectrum of unresolved “questions” has been laid to earth. A cat that can be dead and alive at the same time. Is something a wave, or is it a particle? How can it be both? A “particle” (electron) that can go through two slits at once. Two “particles” the universe apart can someone “know” the state of the other one that leads to “Spooky action at a distance”. “God plays dice with the universe.” It’s we the observer, or more precisely how we measure something that leads to a collapse to either one state or another. An electron that can teleport through walls. And if you want to know the precise location of an electron you won’t be able to know its momentum.
While our grasp of quantum mechanics has given rise to unimaginable technologies, such as the lasers that store our precious memories on DVDs and blaze information through the ethernet cables of the Internet, the microchips that power our smartphones and laptops, help generate non-invasive images of the human body with MRI machines, and powering our GPS signals, as well as leading to the emerging vision of quantum computing, we indeed owe a lot to quantum mechanics. But we are still quite some ways from the ultimate pinnacle on the quest to truly understand the scientific and philosophical implications of quantum mechanics. It isn’t rocket science, it’s quantum mechanics.
While ever since Issac Newton formulated classical mechanics, up until quantum mechanics arrived on the scene, classical mechanics has done the job quite well, if not perfectly. Newton has told us that the planets orbit the Sun in the same way as how an apple falls from a tree. Basically, with the initial preconditions of something, we can with 100% accuracy calculate where it will end up. But in quantum mechanics, things aren’t quite that simple. In classical mechanics, if you’re sloppy, or if you have a broken-down ruler, you might get slightly different measurement readings once or twice, but that doesn’t change the length or height of whatever you’re measuring. Just like when you measure your height you might get 6”1’, while your uncle Joe might tell you that you're 5”10’, and when you go to your doctor for a physical, they might tell you that you’re in fact 5”11’, but nonetheless that doesn’t physically change how tall you are; you’re 5”11’ no matter what. But according to quantum mechanics, as a metaphor, you could be 6”3’ one time, 5”2’ another, and maybe only 1 inch tall some other time, because it is the act of measuring that causes your “height” to be determined, and this is the biggest difference the deterministic elegant classical mechanics, and the mind-boggling chaotic quantum mechanics. The main difference is that because as of now all measuring devices are macroscopic in size and follow the laws of classical mechanics; for classical objects that are being measured they’re the same size in scale of the measuring instrument, thus the measuring instrument doesn’t “disrupt” the object being measured. But for objects at the quantum scale, the measuring instrument will “disturb” the object being measured which causes the result to be uncertain. And this is precisely the problem when it comes to quantum mechanics, the question is where is the boundary between classical and quantum? When does something act in accordance with the classical mechanics formulated by Newton at the macro level and when does it start to be governed by the microscopic quantum laws? This question has puzzled physicists for the past 100 years, and very likely this it will continue to do so, well that is if a future prodigy stumbles upon a precise border, or maybe there just isn’t one in the first place and the theory of quantum mechanics will be “overthrown” and replaced in a scientific revolution like how Thomas Kuhn laid out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Over the course of the first century of quantum mechanics, many tend to overlook the statement by Richard Feynman, who once said, “I think I can safely say that no one understands quantum mechanics.” Well, it’s safe to say that after 100 years still no one really understands quantum mechanics. And many have probably forgotten the heated debates between Bohr and Einstein on the fabric of reality, where Einstein stubbornly insisted that “God” does not play dice with the universe and Bohr pessimistically saying that we shouldn’t tell “God” what to do and just “give into” nature because of its complementary manner. While one can “end” the great debate over what the essence of quantum mechanics is by invoking Feynman, or take a respective side of Einstein’s or Bohr’s views; the main reason why the whole debate over what quantum mechanics fundamentally is has been so persistently heated to this very day is because quantum mechanics is essentially counterintuitive. And it is because of how bizarre quantum mechanics seems that has given rise to many different if not even more head-scratching interpretations of the matter.
While there have been many formulations, explanations, and interpretations of quantum mechanics, with three major ones standing out from the rest, and these are in no order of significance: Copenhagen, many-worlds, and QBISM.
The Copenhagen interpretation, pioneered by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, is the major interpretation of quantum mechanics that is still widely taught in textbooks. Essentially Copenhagen is synonymous with uncertainty, complementing Bohr’s correspondence principle, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and the Born rule named after Max Born that also states an electron has a probability of being found in a certain location. Copenhagen’s major insistence is that something is only real once it’s measured; before it’s measured even though it can be perfectly described by the Schrodinger equation no one can be sure what it is exactly – but only after it is measured it can exist in all possible states. With Bohr and Heisenberg being firm believers in the Copenhagen camp, the Copenhagen interpretation tells us that we should not be discussing whether or not something actually exists but how to describe it after we can observe it. In the case of Schrodinger’s cat, which was originally formulated by Schrodinger to show that quantum mechanics is incomplete and as a rebuttal to Copenhagen and then eventually started to write about biology, but nonetheless Copenhagen says that his cat is dead and alive simultaneously until someone opens the box and looks.
The many-worlds interpretation is the most sci-fi friendly interpretation, and it has been the subject of many movies and TV shows. Many-worlds, or parallel worlds, leaves more to the imagination; you’re hard at work here in this world while you might be relaxing on a beach in another. Though while its original proposer, Hugh Everett did not intend for it to be a silver screen hit interpretation of quantum mechanics, the fundamental idea of many-worlds is that with every measurement the universe “splits” into parallel existing realities. Essentially all the possible states of something exists in other parallel worlds, when we observe something, we only see one possibility while all the other possibilities cease to exist here but continue in some form or another in a parallel time and space – one in which we can’t “communicate” with. Along the lines of this logic, then essentially, we can say that Schrodinger’s poor cat is alive here in this world and unfortunately met its demise in another.
Lastly, QBISM also a radical interpretation in its own might, saying that is our subjective beliefs, prior and posterior that help shape the very reality of our world. QBISM states that the quantum mysteriousness is just a reflection of our subjective understanding and interactions with the subatomic quantum world, and attempts to put the observer or scientist back into science. QBISM states that it is the beliefs we formulate and the new information that we constantly obtain to update our beliefs which leads to what’s being observed to be in the state that it is in, just like how our feline friend locked in the box is either alive or dead.
While all three major interpretations have their own views on the matter of quantum mechanics, all of them revolve around key point: how to resolve the uncertainty that quantum mechanics brings. In the words of Claude Shannon, “Information is the resolution of uncertainty”, but if the universe is truly random, no matter how much information we can obtain and our ignorance won’t matter either – we’ll still not be able to pull the veil of uncertainty to reveal what’s beneath. If this is the case, we may need to resort to mixed strategies, which as stated in quantum mechanics pioneer John von Neumann’s book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, in the case of a deceptive “opponent” the best way is to use a mixed strategy; since we don’t know what strategies mother nature adheres to, or maybe mother nature doesn’t have any good strategies either, thus information is key, but more importantly we need an effective way to process the “cards” that mother nature deals us and find the most valuable information from them. We humans might not have the raw power to do so, but maybe with the help of machines, and not just any machines, we may be able to play this grand game of strategy with nature and discover her laws. Essentially on our quest to understanding nature we are searching “it from bit.”
Other than being remembered for stating that no one really understands quantum mechanics, Richard Feynman said in his lectures that were compiled into the book The Character of Physical Law, he believed that a machine would never be able to blindly come up with scientific theories, because ever the best of an educated guess by a human only comes around once in a blue moon. And yes, while we agree with him that it does take a prodigy to completely disrupt our views of nature, we’d like to humbly point out that he may have underestimated the power of Darwinian evolution. Why do we say so? Well first let’s look at Feynman’s original quote: he said, “We’ve set up a machine, a great computing machine, which has a random wheel in it, that makes a succession of guesses. And each time it guesses a hypothesis about how nature should work, it computes immediately the consequences and makes a comparison to a list of experimental results it has at the other end.” He then goes on to state, “And as usual, nature’s imagination far surpasses our own. As we’ve seen from the other theories, they are really quite subtle and deep. And to get such a subtle and deep guess is not so easy. One must be really clever to guess. And it’s not possible to do it blindly, by machine.”
In which on the subject of machines, we can’t stop to think, no pun intended, “Can machines think?”, as posed by Alan Turing. Whether or not machines can “think” are another matter, one which we might never know, but in the meantime, we know that machines can certainly compute – and they can compute better and faster than us. Thus, while we do agree with Feynman that machines alone cannot find scientific theories on their own, but maybe a machine can utilize Darwinian natural selection to evolve the most satisfactory possible theory from a randomly generated group of possible ones that will “fit” the best in explaining the natural phenomena of mother nature – all the while without overly relying on differential equations or integral calculus.
Mathematics indeed is a very powerful tool that we have at our disposal in our toolbox, and as elegant and good-looking differential equations look when peering through the many veils of nature can be, but overly relying on mathematics to attempt to deduce the secrets of the universe by inductive reasoning alone may at times reach a dead end. Just like how Einstein stubbornly insisting that the moon is still there when no one looks at it, the point emphasized shouldn’t be whether the moon is there or not when we look at it, in the literal sense the moon is there but it’s not there just because we asked, we can “prove” that the moon is there from experience (the moon rises every night just like how the sun rises every morning), and through language alone we can merely describe that the moon is indeed there but as to why and how it came to be there we might never know. But as residents in this vast universe that seems to have come from nothing, we cannot propel ourselves outside and take a glance at the entire cosmos, the best we can do is to by playing this grand game with nature to obtain the most valuable information to “fight” nature; if we’re lucky we may be able to formulate something like Newtonian mechanics, but if nature is indeed uncertain and “God” does play dice with the universe, by drawing upon two of the greatest scientific theories we’ve ever discovered, quantum mechanics and Darwinian evolution, we just might have a chance to not only ask can we play dice with God but to actually do so.
In the words of Heisenberg himself, “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” And in the 100 years since his formulation of matrix mechanics, we have seen that mother nature seems to not play “her” cards in conventional ways, and “God” likes to play dice with the universe, but in our strange universe, governed by its strange laws, it just might be the marriage of the strangeness of quantum mechanics and the natural wonders of evolution that just might give us a chance to play a hand with mother nature and throw a round of dice with “God”.
Here's to the next 100 years: whether or not our descendants will still be asking does God really play dice with the universe or have found an answer to if we can play dice with God; maybe when we’re long gone, they’ll look back at us and say amongst the then current Einstein’s, Bohr’s, and Heisenberg’s – how in the world did our ancestors believe in quantum mechanics? But maybe, just maybe nature itself doesn’t “adapt” to anyone or anything, it’s constantly evolving and never has been set in stone for anyone to find its deepest secrets, and in 100 years, 200 years, or 1000 years, it’ll still be humankind adapting to nature and not the other way around.