What is going on in quantum physics? Why are scientists who are drawing from the same evidence reaching wildly different conclusions? David Kordahl explores this and other questions in The New Atlantis:

Two new books on quantum theory could not, at first glance, seem more different. The first, Something Deeply Hidden, is by Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, who writes, ‘As far as we currently know, quantum mechanics isn’t just an approximation of the truth; it is the truth.’ The second, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution, is by Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, who insists that ‘the conceptual problems and raging disagreements that have bedeviled quantum mechanics since its inception are unsolved and unsolvable, for the simple reason that the theory is wrong.’

Given this contrast, one might expect Carroll and Smolin to emphasize very different things in their books. Yet the books mirror each other, down to chapters that present the same quantum demonstrations and the same quantum parables. Carroll and Smolin both agree on the facts of quantum theory, and both gesture toward the same historical signposts. Both consider themselves realists, in the tradition of Albert Einstein. They want to finish his work of unifying physical theory, making it offer one coherent description of the entire world, without ad hoc exceptions to cover experimental findings that don’t fit. By the end, both suggest that the completion of this project might force us to abandon the idea of three-dimensional space as a fundamental structure of the universe.

But with Carroll claiming quantum mechanics as literally true and Smolin claiming it as literally false, there must be some underlying disagreement. And of course there is. Traditional quantum theory describes things like electrons as smeary waves whose measurable properties only become definite in the act of measurement. Sean Carroll is a supporter of the ‘Many Worlds’ interpretation of this theory, which claims that the multiple measurement possibilities all simultaneously exist. Some proponents of Many Worlds describe the existence of a ‘multiverse’ that contains many parallel universes, but Carroll prefers to describe a single, radically enlarged universe that contains all the possible outcomes running alongside each other as separate ‘worlds.’ But the trouble, says Lee Smolin, is that in the real world as we observe it, these multiple possibilities never appear — each measurement has a single outcome. Smolin takes this fact as evidence that quantum theory must be wrong, and argues that any theory that supersedes quantum mechanics must do away with these multiple possibilities.

So how can such similar books, informed by the same evidence and drawing upon the same history, reach such divergent conclusions? Well, anyone who cares about politics knows that this type of informed disagreement happens all the time, especially, as with Carroll and Smolin, when the disagreements go well beyond questions that experiments could possibly resolve.

But there is another problem here. The question that both physicists gloss over is that of just how much we should expect to get out of our best physical theories. This question pokes through the foundation of quantum mechanics like rusted rebar, often luring scientists into arguments over parables meant to illuminate the obscure.

In other news: Randy Boyagoda writes about Sri Lankan Catholics’ pilgrimage to the Canadian Martyrs’ Shrine in Ontario. The shrine is “Canada’s nearest approximation of Our Lady of Madhu, in Sri Lanka. Founded in 1926 near Midland, Ontario, the shrine honours the seventeenth-century martyrdoms of Saint Jean de Brébeuf and his companions. It has since become the proxy destination for other Catholic immigrant groups seeking to continue pilgrimages and devotions associated with their home countries and religious communities. Last July, under the cover of family life and the writing life, I drove there to pray with some Sri Lankans.”

Astronomers discover the closest known black hole—a mere 1,000 light years from Earth.

Whence Peter De Vries? “Great but little-known American novelists are like air conditioners in the Yukon: few and far between. Every literature professor seeking a tenured position is trying to find one on whom to make his career. Hence, there are conferences organized on William Dean Howells and Ross Macdonald, and you could probably build a resort community in Florida out of all the retiring academics who gained their appointments by publishing monographs on Zora Neale Hurston. How is it, then, that Peter De Vries is mostly forgotten? How can it be that for many years his work was out of print, and that there is still no biography of him?”

Dozens of previously unknown works by artists like Wassily Kandinsky have been discovered in a small museum 800km from Moscow.

Britain’s birds and the plentitude of nature in poetry: “The nightingale has a long history in England, particularly in poetry and legend, but its natural history lagged behind—partly because the bird itself is so elusive (and commonplace when seen), and partly because its song alone is so spectacular—powerful, various, inventive, seductive, unpredictable, sometimes disturbing. Even John Clare did not know, when he wrote ‘The Nightingale’s Nest’ in 1832, that only the male sings; but nobody knew his poem either, which languished unpublished until 1978. That the bird flourished for centuries in Western Europe and the south of England, and survived the abuse of being caged (where it always died) and was sold to amuse courtiers and fops, is also well known. But the species diminished rapidly after World War II, so that Burrell and Tree could recall hearing a nightingale only once in the 1990s since coming to Knepp. ‘By 2001, the year we started rewilding, nightingales seemed to have disappeared from the estate altogether.’ National figures reflected a decline of 53 percent from 1995 to 2008, but at Knepp a reversal was underway by 2010, and soon the density of its nightingales was 7 to 11 breeding pairs per ten hectares, compared to the regional average of 2. The decisive factors seem to have been habitat changes, particularly the increase of scrubland and thickets of blackthorn, bramble, and leaf litter. What I like most about Tree’s account of Luscinia megarhynchos, however, is the way she describes its song—up against competition from the poets (Keats, Coleridge, Arnold, Hardy, T. S. Eliot, and all Eliot’s sources) and from recent naturalists (Richard Mabey and Michael McCarthy), plus John Clare who was both poet and naturalist.”

Photo: Étretat

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