MAGIC IN THE AIR?

Dick Pountain /Idealog 341/ 07 Dec 2022 01:08

I’ve been writing columns for a slightly scary 50+ years now, and while 40 of those were for impeccably rational technical magazines like this one, 10 of them weren’t. I started off writing in 1970 for the ‘underground’ newspaper Frendz, which like its contemporaries Oz and IT was devoted to the hippy counterculture: its content comprised sex, drugs, rock&roll and anarchism, liberally embellished with a welter of the newly fashionable paranormal, the wacky, the ‘spiritual’, the Indian gurus, flying saucers, telepathy and teleportation. Having only recently left my Imperial College chemistry course (in those days equivalent to 4-years-hard-labour) I was unsympathetic to such piffle, and still am. I vividly remember arguing with a colleague who claimed that the Russians had perfected teleportation, and asking him whether they still manufactured fork-lift trucks…

I mention all this now because I’m detecting a disturbing renaissance of Magical Thinking, this time from the most improbable directions of Cosmology and Particle Physics rather than Eastern religion. Magical Thinking, the belief that pure thought can directly change things in the material world, has of course been around for as long as Homo sapiens (and probably longer) because it fulfils two important psychological needs: it can relieve anxiety and also satisfy a desire to avoid effort. If you’re scared of thunder, invent Angry Gods to explain it, then invent rituals to placate them and make them stop it. Invent spells to do hard stuff like keeping tigers at bay.

The current resurgence of Magical Thinking has two main sources, sci-fi movies – upon which the current generation of science nerds were all raised – and the spookiness of nature revealed by quantum mechanics. Even back during those hippy days, some of my better-read opponents could point to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and say “even your science admits it doesn’t know everything”. That same impulse now emerges as the argument that quantum entanglement, which Einstein disliked and labelled “spooky action at a distance”, might provide an explanation for telepathy. Another similar impulse baulks at the cosmic speed-limit of 3x108m/sec and wants to travel like the Starship Enterprise to far off galaxies by using wormholes in space/time. Such ideas may be precariously based on real science, but then get carelessly abstracted, exaggerated and sensationalised by social media’s insatiable need for exciting content. YouTube brims over with lavishly animated videos that supposedly illustrate them.

What triggered this particular column was a headline that scientists have “created a wormhole inside a quantum computer” that even made the mainstream newspapers. Wikipedia’s entry on wormholes is a masterpiece of tiptoeing. They are “speculative structures [...] consistent with the general theory of relativity, but whether wormholes actually exist remains to be seen”. Less charitably, they’re sci-fi-leaning mathematicians playing with the equations. My view of simulating the universe on a quantum computer with 53 qubits is barely more charitable.

Richard Feynman was a great hero to me (over a recent weekend I watched all 8 hours

of his QCD lectures for fun) and even he admitted that entanglement, though true, embarrassed him. Recent work on quantum gravity may be relieving some of that embarrassment. It appears that entangled particles can’t exchange information, hence preserving the speed limit, and the expansion of the universe may refute the notion that quantum events are time-reversible – there is progression from past to future, as required by thermodynamics, even at quantum level.

Quantum weirdness does affect our everyday world in an immensely significant way. The electrons that form the chemical bonds between atoms in the proteins we’re made of are quantum particles, and they must obey Pauli’s Exclusion Principle – they can’t be forced into atoms where they don’t belong, which is what makes matter solid. It’s what stops me walking right through this wall out into the street. Without it the universe would be populated entirely by ghosts that can pass right through each other, which is of course what the Magical Thinkers would like to be true. So blame Pauli for disenchanting the world.

However unpalatable it may be, we live in the macro-world which obeys the rules of thermodynamics and gravity. We need to eat, if we trip we fall, get over it. If you need to move that palette with a ton of breeze blocks on it, no amount of wishing or spell-casting is going to get it done. A fork-lift truck will get it done. That doesn’t end the matter though: is that going to be a petrol or an electric fork-lift truck? That’s the sort of decision we need to start making without any further delay to avoid catastrophe, and Magical Thinking is just one of the many ways we have to avoid making these decisions (decamping to Mars is another).  

[Dick Pountain quite liked the sex, drugs and rock&roll part]