Many extravagant claims are made for quantum physics, and in comparison classical physics often seems to be dismissed, almost as though it is of little consequence.
Amongst other things, it has long bugged me that Buddhists hijack quantum mechanics and combine it with the worst of Buddhist philosophy—i.e. Madhyamaka—to create a monstrous form of bullshit. I've previously written three essays that try to address the perennial quantum bullshit that thrives amongst Buddhists.
- Erwin Schrödinger Didn't Have a Cat (29 October 2010).
- Buddhism and the Observer Effect in Quantum Mechanics (18 July 2014)
- Quantum Bullshit (05 October 2018)
Although, I don't seem to have had any appreciable effect on the levels of bullshit.
In this essay, I'm going to make an argument that classical physics is, in fact, much cooler than quantum physics, especially the bullshit quantum physics that doesn't use any mathematics
Life, the Universe, and Everything.
One way of describing the observable universe is to state the scales of mass, length, and energy it covers.
- The total mass of the observable universe is thought to be in order or 1053 kg. From the smallest objects (electrons) to the whole universe is about 84 orders of magnitude (powers of ten).
- The observable universe is about 4 x 1026 metres in diameter; and from the smallest possible length (the Planck length) to the whole is about 61 orders of magnitude.
- E=mc2 gives the total energy of the universe as about 1070 joules, and covers about 61 orders of magnitude.
Human beings can perceive roughly 18 orders of magnitude of mass, 12 of length, and 11 of energy, roughly in the middle of each scale. Much of the universe is imperceptible to our naked senses. Human beings evolved and thrived for hundreds of thousands of years without knowing anything beyond what we could see, hear, smell, taste, or touch with our naked senses.
It was the invention of the ground glass lens that alerted us to the existence of both larger scales (telescope) and smaller scales (microscope). And for this reason I count the lens the most significant invention in the history of science. I know people count Copernicus as the first European scientist, but to my mind he was merely a precursor. Galileo was the first to make systematic observations and thereby discover new things about the universe, e.g. acceleration due to gravity is a constant, the moon's surface is not smooth but cratered, and that Jupiter has satellites. Note that Galileo did not have evidence or a good case for a "heliocentric universe" (and his ideas about this were wrong in several ways, but that's another story).
400 years later, we have a number of hugely successful theories of how the universe works. We've identified four fundamental forces and two kinds of particle: fermions and bosons. However, no single approach to physics can cover all the many orders of magnitude. All of our explanations are limited in their scope. Newtonian mechanics fails with large masses or high relative velocities. Relativity fails on the nanoscale and especially at the time of the big bang. Quantum physics fails on the macro-scale.
Physicists still hope to find a way of reconciling relativity and quantum physics, which they predict will produce a single mathematical formalism that can describe our universe at any scale. After more than a century of trying, we don't seem to be any closer to this. To be fair a lot of time, effort, and resources went into pursuing so-called "string theory" which has proven to be a dead end, at least as far as reconciling nano and macro physics.
What I want to do in the rest of this essay is contrast classical physics and quantum physics.
Classical Physics
Classical physics is a primarily a description of the world that we perceive. As such, classical physics will always be salient and applicable to our lives. When we need a lever to move something, we use classical physics. When we want to describe the universe on the largest scale, we use classical physics. This means that classical physics is largely intuitive (even if the maths is not).
Classical physics is testable and has been extensively tested. While it was never my favourite subject, I studied physics as a distinct subject for four years up to undergraduate level and in that time I did many experiments. I was able, for example, to observe the applicability of ideas like Newton's laws of motion.
I have personally observed that m1v1 = m2v2 (i.e. momentum is conserved). And you can too, if you put your mind to it. Classical physics is highly democratic in the sense that anyone can test its predictions relatively easily.
Classical physics shows that the universe (on this scale) follows relatively simple patterns of evolution over time that can be written down as mathematical statements. In the 19th century, such expressions were called "laws". By the mid 20th century we called them "theories". Simple examples include:
- the relationship between pressure (P), volume (V), and temperature (T) of any gas is PV/T = constant.
- the relationship between voltage (V), current (I), and resistance (R) in a circuit is V=IR.
- the relationship between force and acceleration of an object with mass is F=ma.
The mathematics of relativity is considerably more complex than these examples, but one gains several degrees of accuracy (≈ numbers after the decimal point) as compensation.
An interesting feature of our experience of the world is that time goes in one direction. This is a consequence of entropy. We can always tell when a film is playing backwards, for example, because the causality is all wrong. Broken cups never spontaneously reform and leap up from the floor to appear unbroken in our hands. Whole cups common fall down to the floor and smash. Once again, classical physics is intuitive.
Classical physics has never been made into an analogy by New Age gurus. No one ever compared the Heart Sutra to classical physics. No one ever says classical physics is "weird" or counter-intuitive. The fixed speed of light is a little counter-intuitive but it doesn't lend itself to the kind of Romantic flights of fancy that make religion seem interesting. If anything, religieux are apt to dismiss the whole topic of classical physics as irrelevant to "spirituality". Classical physics seems to resist being co-opted by woo-mungers.
And then there is quantum physics...
Quantum
Mathematically, quantum physics is profoundly accurate and precise method of predicting probabilities. However, unlike classical physics no one knows why it works. Literally, no one knows how the mathematics relates to reality. There are lots of ideas, each more counter-intuitive than the next and each relies on a series of assumptions that are beyond the scope of the mathematical formalism. But each set of assumptions leads to radically different metaphysics! And there is no agreement on which assumptions are valid. And at present there is no way to test these theories. I've seen Sean Carroll argue that Many Worlds does make testable predictions, but as far as I know, they have not been tested.
Einstein was of the opinion that quantum physics was incomplete. Sadly his proposed solution to this seems to have been ruled out. But still, I think the only viable stance is to consider quantum theory as incomplete until such time as we know how it relates to reality.
Which brings us to the first false claim that is commonly asserted by scientists: "the universe is deterministic." This assumes that quantum theory explains how matter behaves. But it doesn't. We don't know how mathematics relates to reality. So we don't know if the universe is deterministic or not. The claim that the the universe is deterministic goes far beyond our present state of knowledge. Most interpretations of quantum physics treat it as probabilistic rather than deterministic. And this undermines all claims that the universe is deterministic.
Another common falsehood is "quantum mechanics is a description of reality". But it should already be apparent that this is simply not true. Physicists do not know how the mathematics of quantum physics relates to reality. All they know is that the mathematics accurately assesses the probabilities of the various states that the system can be in over time. It doesn't tell us what will happen, at best it tells us what can happen.
At the popular level, quantum physics is plagued by vagueness and misleading statements. Scientists talk about "the wavefunction" as an independent thing (hypostatisation) and even as a physical thing (reification), when is it in fact an abstract mathematical function. They talk about "wave-like" behaviour without ever distinguishing this from actual wave behaviour. "Observation", so crucial to some approaches, is vague and more or less impossible to define.
We see statements like "energy is quantised" as though all energy is quantised. But this is not true. If you measure radiation from the sun, for example, it smoothly spans the entire electromagnetic spectrum (the sun glows because its hot, and that glow is blackbody radiation which is smooth rather than discreet). Energy is only quantised in atoms. And the solar spectrum is itself proof of this because the atoms in the sun absorb energy at precise wavelengths, causing the spectrum of sunlight to have darker bands when viewed at a fine enough grain.
The quantisation in atoms is explained in terms of an electron in an atom being conceived of as a standing wave - which means it can only vibrate at frequencies that allow for a whole number of wavelengths. For example, the harmonic series on a guitar string is also "quantised": the diagram shows different modes of vibration. The top shows wavelength = string length. but the string can also vibrate at twice the fundamental frequency so that 2 wavelengths = string length, then 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 wavelengths = string length (out to infinity).
The energy levels for electrons in atoms show a similar pattern. But remember that an electron is 3 dimensional. Spherical harmonics look more like this
Which is similar to how we think electron orbitals look in Hydrogen.
Some of these results are confirmed by the shapes of molecules, which can be determined independently, for example by X-ray crystallography.
People talk about "measuring where the electron is in the atom". But this is almost pure bullshit. No one has ever measured the position of an electron in an atom. It's not possible. Within an atom, an electron is distorted into a spherical standing wave. "Position" is meaningless in this context. As are most other particle-related ideas. And remember, we cannot solve the equations when there are two or more electrons, we can only estimate (though current estimates are still very accurate).
We also see statements like "a system can exist in multiple states simultaneously", usually referred to as superposition (the "position" part is entirely misleading). This phrase is often used in popular explanations of quantum mechanics, but it’s misleading. The wavefunction describes a superposition of probability amplitudes, it does not describe a coexistence of multiple physical states. In fact, the term "state"—as it is usually used—is not applicable here at all, precisely because in normal usage it implies existence. In this context "state" confusingly means every single possible state, each with its own probability.
For example, if an electron has the wavefunction is ψ = ψ1 + ψ2 it doesn’t mean the electron is "in both states ψ1 and ψ2 at once." This is because neither ψ1 nor ψ2 is a physical state. Each is a probability distribution. So what superposition means is that, at some time, the electron's state has a probability distribution that reflects the combined amplitudes of ψ1 and ψ2. There is and can be no superposition of physical states, nor is their any theoretical possibility of observing such a thing.
All of those "interpretations" that treat the wavefunction as real simply assert its existence as axiomatic and introduce further a priori assumptions into order to try to make sense of this mess. If we make no assumptions then there is nothing about the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics that forces us to think of the wavefunction as a real thing rather than an abstraction. It's a probability distribution. Which is an abstraction.
Which means that the idea that the wave-function can "collapse" is nonsensical. All probability distributions without exception "collapse" at the point of measurement.
If I roll a die, I get one number facing up. It can be any one of the six numbers. And each number is equally likely to be face up after a roll. Before I roll the die, the "wavefunction" of the die describes 6 possible "states" each of which is equally likely. When I roll the die I get one answer. Has anything mysterious happened? I think not. Let's say I roll a 2. I don't have to explain what happened to 1,3,4,5 and 6. Nothing happened to them, because they are not things. They are just unrealised possibilities. I get one result because only one result is physically possible. But before I know which result I have, all the possibilities have a finite probability. There's nothing "weird" or "mysterious" about this unless one first reifies the wavefunction.
Indeed, the whole idea of the "measurement problem" appears to be based on a serious misconception (as far as I can see). The measurement problem is based on the idea that the Schrödinger equation describes a system as existing in multiple physical states. But it doesn't. It describes probability distribution of possible physical states. A potentiality is not an existing state.
The only time measuring becomes problematic is when we assume that the wavefunction is a thing (reification) or that it reflects existent states rather then potential states. And these moves are simply mistakes.
Ironically, the one thing that Schrödinger's equation is not, as Nick Lucid explains, is a wave equation. The generalised wave equation contains a second-order partial differential with respect to time (a distorting force is countered by a restoring force, causing acceleration). This is a fascinating observation. I gather that using the constant i (√-1) in the Schrödinger equation allows for some "wave-like" behaviour, but no one really talks about this in lectures on quantum physics. Nor do they distinguish "wave" from "wave-like". And we still have to insist that the "wave-like" behaviour in question is a wave of probability, not a physical wave.
But then Nick Lucid, who typically is quite lucid (despite his "crazy" schtick), also introduces his video by saying "Schrödinger's equation governs the behavior of tiny quantum particles by treating them as wave functions." No equation anywhere "governs" anything. The equation describes the probability of a range of possible states. It's a descriptive law, not a prescriptive law. And as Lucid goes on to say, the equation in question is not a wave equation, it's a heat equation. The one thing that Schrödinger's equation doesn't do is "govern the behavior of tiny quantum particles".
This generalises: physics is a description, not a prescription. Abstract mathematical expressions cannot "govern" concrete entities. And in the case of quantum physics, it doesn't seem to relate to the "behaviour" either, since it only predicts the probability of any given state following from the present state. So it's not even a description of actual behaviour, just a description of potential behaviour at any point in time. With the most precise prediction as to probability, we still don't know what's going to happen next, and the actual outcome could always be the least likely outcome. That's why quantum tunneling is a thing, for example.
Unlike classical physics, which every undergraduate students proves to their own satisfaction, nano-scale physics is impossible to observe directly. It takes massive, complicated, and expensive equipment to get information from that scale. Information goes through many stages of amplification and transformation (from one kind of energy to another) before anything perceptible emerges. And that has to be processed by powerful computers before it makes any sense. And then interpreted by human beings.
That blip on the graph at 125 GeV that the LHC produced as evidence of the Higgs Boson is abstracted to the nth degree from the thing itself.
At no time was a Higgs Boson ever observed, and at no time in the future will one ever be observed. What was observed was a particular kind of decay product, which the logic of the standard model says can only be produced if a Higgs Boson decays in the way that Peter Higgs predicted. Assuming that the standard model is right. Keep in mind that the model didn't predict the energy of the Higgs particle exactly. There was actually a lot of uncertainty. And the two different detectors actually measured slightly different numbers. Moreover, do you see how wide that peak was? That width is experiment error. Maybe the energy of the Higgs is 125 GeV, or maybe its a little more or a little less?
We cannot ever see the nano-scale. And because of this, we simply cannot imagine the nano-scale.
A 1 gram diamond, for example contains in the order of 5 x 1022 atoms. How big would that diamond be if each atom of carbon was 1mm3 or roughly the size of a grain of salt? It would be 5 x 1013 cubic metres. This is roughly the volume of Mount Everest. So an atom is to a grain of salt, as a grain of salt is to Mt Everest.
Imagination simply fails.
Conclusion
In short, at least at the popular level, quantum physics is a constant source of vague or misleading information. It is plagued by careless use of language and outright false claims by scientists themselves. The philosophy of quantum physics is difficult, but on the whole it fails to adequately distinguish epistemology and metaphysics. This is made worse by kooks and charlatans leveraging the confusion to pull the wool over our eyes. Sometimes, the kooks and the scientists are in a superposition: notably Eugene Wigner's theory about "consciousness" (another abstraction) collapsing the wavefunction. Wigner won a Nobel, but he was also a serious kook. And he has been responsible for a mountain of bullshit as a result.
Most of what is said about quantum physics outside of university lecture halls is bullshit, and quite a bit that is said in them is also bullshit or at least partially digested hay. Everything that is said about Buddhism and quantum physics is mendacious bullshit.
There is no doubt that insights gained from quantum physics are important and valuable, but the whole thing is over-hyped and plagued by nonsense. The actual work is largely about approximating solutions to the insoluble mathematical equations, which at best give us probabilities. It works remarkably well, but no one knows why.
The idea that quantum physics is any kind of "description of reality" is pure bullshit. It's a probability distribution, for a reality that no understands any better now than when physics genius Richard Feynman said: "No one understands quantum mechanics".
Classical physics on the other hand is seldom vague or misleading. It resists being leveraged by kooks by being precisely and accurately defined. It can readily be tested by more or less anyone. Classical physics is much less prone to bullshit. No one ever bothers to compare Buddhism to classical physics. Which is a good sign.
Classical physics is not only cooler than quantum physics. It is way cooler.
Coda
If anyone is still unconvinced that quantum theory has no conceivable relationship with Buddhism, then I invite you to watch this video introduction to quantum mechanics from an Oxford University undergraduate physics course. This is a no bullshit course.
I defy anyone to connect anything said in this video to any aspect of Buddhist doctrine.
