Serendipity led me to Terence Tao’s blog where I discovered a wonderful analogy on the non-classical nature of quantum mechanics. Before I get there, I must tell you who Terence Tao is. He is a famous mathematician and the youngest ever Fields Medal winner (he won it in 2006). I learnt about him from a recent profile (unfortunately, subscription required) in New York Times. (If you are interested, you can watch his talk “Structure and randomness in the prime numbers” here; the slides are here).
Now to the analogy: why did I find it fascinating? It’s a slightly long story so bear with me.
If you go back to pre-Copernicus days, you encounter the concept of sublunary, literally “below the moon”, existence. At that time, the belief, at least in the Western world, was that there is a strict division between the pristine, lawful, unchanging cosmos above and our messy, fickle existence on Earth. Copernicus made this division obsolete. Eventually it triggered a different social order.
Then Charles Darwin brought the living and nonliving into the same realm. He showed how the astonishing diversity of life could arise from the physical process of natural selection. We now come to understand biological replication in physical terms. This understanding is still rippling through our social consciousness as we wrestle with issues related to cloning, genetic testing, nature versus nurture, etc.
In this context, quantum mechanics, despite its 1924 vintage, hasn’t permeated the social consciousness yet. There is no doubt that it’s made a big impact in terms of technology – we owe all of modern electronics to it, for instance – but that’s about it. QM has remained inaccessible to all but a few graduate students of physics. This is a shame. Wouldn’t it be nice to have good intuitive analogies for QM so that more people could appreciate it.
This brings me to Terence Tao’s insightful post on “Quantum Mechanics and Tomb Raider”. It uses a modified Tomb Raider computer game to describe many aspects of QM: the “many-world” existence of reality, the dual particle and wave existence, the quantization phenomenon, Bell inequality violation, and more. The post is simply delightful. I strongly urge you to read it.
It’s interesting that computer games that borrowed the concept of avatar from (Hindu) philosophy are now being used to provide viable analogies for QM. It’s possible that we might now see a connection forming between theoretical physicists and computer gaming much like the connection that exists between mathematicians and music.
On a deeper note, what if QM ceases to be so esoteric? Might it not then have a social impact much like Copernicus’ heliocentric theory and theory of evolution? I wonder what that social impact will be!
[You may be interested in a related post “Send Mathematics to the Rescue”.]
Sharad,
On a deeper note, what if QM ceases to be so esoteric? Might it not then have a social impact much like much like Copernicus’ heliocentric theory and theory of evolution?
What social impact has the Copernicus’ theory had? Sure, school kids can quote that Earth goes round the Sun etc. But I doubt it has changed any of our behavior and thinking.
Same goes for Theory of Evolution. We might theoretically understand that our bodies evolved during the time when there was scarcity of food and hence they tend to store fat as survival tactic. That’s not been much help to us in fighting obesity.
Science enables technology innovation which changes our social structure e.g. cars changed the structure of cities and human societies. However, to say that scientific ideas and understanding of scientific ideas has wider social impact is wishful thinking.
Ravi – You are right that technology changes social structure. But to assume that scientific ideas don’t do that is a big fallacy. Why else would there be a big quarrel about the theory of evolution even today? Back in the 16th century, heliocentric theory helped weaken the Church eventually setting the stage of the Reformation and the ensuing Protestant movement. Arguably the current egalitarian culture in Western society is based on these changes. Otherwise an entrenched class system would still be in place. I could go on but need to run to catch a flight
Sharad,
I would love to believe that scientific ideas change social structure.
Change in social structure is a complex problem with a lot of interacting variables.
The weakening of Church’s influence could be related to Heliocentric theory, or - it could be related to a number of things that industrial revolution brought on such as printing press.
The Freakonomics book and the recent controversy over its findings (
e.g. http://www.isteve.com/abortion.htm) show how exceedingly difficult it is to pinpoint causes of social changes to a single isolated reason.
Another example is the latest book ‘The halo effect’
http://www.amazon.com/Halo-Effect-Business-Delusions-Managers/dp/0743291255/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-7160545-5955805?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174927048&sr=8-1
which casts a critical eye on such revered management texts as ‘Good to Great’ and ‘Built to Last’.
As a skeptic, I love these
As a science fan, I would love to believe scientific ideas have significance in average Joe’s life.
Cheers,
Ravi