“We choose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery. We cannot make the mystery go away by explaining how it works.”—
Richard Feynman, Caltech lectures, 1962 (via fdanbo)
I got turned onto this quote yesterday by Dan-o while we were out on a smoke break at work and we got to discussing quantum mechanics (because that’s how you make small talk in Kendall Sq., Cambridge). I was remarking on how striking it is that as far as our individual perception of the world goes we all still very much live in a Kantian/Newtonian universe, how our experience of sensations and the way we talk about them are all still very much in the language of classical mechanics, as if the quantum theories, though accurate, do not offer a narrative that coincides enough with human subjectivity to let us speak in its terms.
Dan-o countered that the pedagogy of physics had come a long way over the last century—that the folklore and the storytelling and the metaphors had evolved greatly since Bohr &co.—and that today’s physicists are actually internalizing quantum mechanics in ways we haven’t really seen before.
Sounded like a lot of bullshit to me. I mean come on: it’s a particle and a wave? Position or velocity but not both? Time dilation? Who can actually internalize any of that?
But here’s the thing you have to realize about Dan-o. Dan-o is a smart dude. Dan-o went to MIT. Dan-o can answer just about any question about just about anything. Dan-o has been known to alter the gravitational pull of Saturn’s moons just by thinking really hard about something. But here’s the real kicker: Dan-o doesn’t listen to music while he writes code because he finds music too distracting. Instead he listens to Feynman lectures. He says they’re “soothing”.
So yeah, maybe he was right. I mean if anyone could perceive fluctuations in the passage of time while riding the subway I guess it would be Dan-o.
Aw shucks!
Except now all your followers are going to find my tumblr expecting elaborate discourse about science, mathematics, and physics, and be disappointed to find about one entirely uninteresting post a month.
Anyway, the actual Feynman quote I was referring to was this one:
“Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you know about, or that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves; they do not behave like particles; they do not behave like clouds, nor like billiard balls, nor like weights on springs, nor like anything that you know anything about.”
But yeah, same idea.
