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How To Not Be Right

Humphrey James


Being right about everything is - I imagine - like buying an expensive car; gratifying at first but eventually a burden, something that requires constant maintenance and depreciates in value with each passing day. Being right also has the unfortunate consequence of making other people wrong, which fosters resentment, again much like a flash set of wheels. Is there a way we can escape from our all-too-human tendency to see things as right or wrong, in black and white, and either-or? A way through our binary thinking which picks sides and causes so much conflict, internally and in the world in general. Is dualism - is 'you're this or that' - really a feature of reality, a truth of nature, or is it just another thing we do to make our brains hurt less? Let's look at something fundamental to nature - light - and see if it can (sorry) illuminate the bigger picture.



Light has many curious properties. The speed at which it travels is the fastest anything can travel. It has no mass. Anything with mass that reached the speed of light would become infinitely heavy, something impossible. Similarly, time slows down for anything approaching light-speed (relative to other observers) to the point where upon reaching the speed of light time would stop altogether. Therefore light has no experience of time. A photon of light may have taken a few thousand light-years to reach us across the galaxy, but for that photon the journey was instantaneous. This thing which bathes everything in the universe, a universe that grows older every second, does not age at all.


Light shows us, amongst other things, the limits of our everyday understanding which is grounded in concepts of space and time. Our everyday appreciation of light in the days when it was provided only by sunlight, starlight and fire, was that it was something life-giving, warm, spiritual and sometimes deadly. With the invention of gaslight - shortly followed by the light-bulb - light became useful, allowing us to work and stay up longer. We discovered that light was an electromagnetic wave, and visible light but a fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. But we were mistaken if we thought that we had answered the question of what light was. The more we looked into it, the more the limits of our understanding broke down and eventually we were forced to develop a whole new way of thinking that defies common sense.


Proceedings got underway with the problem of the ‘ultraviolet catastrophe’. According to the calculations of classical physics, if wavelengths of light could be infinitely small then everything in the universe would be bombarded with ultraviolet radiation of every frequency. We'd all be cooked like a service station apple pie. This was evidently not the case, and led Max Planck - the reluctant founder of quantum physics - to theorise that there must be a limit to how small everything could be, which became known as the Plank length, which is minutely small. This also included the somewhat unnerving discovery that time was also not infinitely small; that there was a minimum length of time, called the Planck interval, an infinitesimally small amount of time only marginally shorter than the interval of time between the traffic lights going green and the taxi behind you beeping its horn. In summary, in the early 20th century we worked out that the physical world - including phenomena such as light and matter - could not be broken down indefinitely. In other words, reality was not continuous, but at some point became granular.

 

Around this time it was hypothesised that light must also come in tiny packets - in quanta. Einstein called these photons and subsequent experiments proved their existence. But here is a problem: We also know that light behaves as a wave - it curves around obstacles and, if passed through two slits, it forms an interference pattern on a screen placed opposite to the source. Interference patterns only happen with waves. Or do they? Because when the technology was invented to fire a single photon at a time through the two slits, and capture their impression on a photographic plate, these photons, after many thousands were fired, would also form an interference pattern, as if they were somehow separating and communicating with each other as they travelled through the gaps. And this applied not only to light, but also matter, as it was found that electrons fired through slits also formed an interference pattern, as if they too were waves.


Scientists seemed to be losing their certainty, or at least the belief that science could be certain. To add to the ambiguity it was also discovered that one could not accurately determine the position of a particle (or wave) such as an electron and measure its speed at the same time. If we were to make an incredibly tiny slit to the point that we could accurately tell where a particle was as it flew through it, then it would end up more spread out on the screen, translating into a poorer impression of its velocity. On the other hand a wide slit which tells us little about the position of the particle/wave at least lets us see exactly where it lands on the screen (for a crude analogy, imagine a pin-prick in a house-pipe spraying a fine indeterminate mist compared with the more accurate stream from a nozzle). In other words, measuring its position would change its velocity and vice versa. We would never be able to observe the universe without somehow changing it.  


This problem turned out to be insurmountable, and scientists realised that at its most fundamental level, we would never be able to predict both. But of course they had to keep going, so Heisenberg formulated the uncertainty principle and around the same time Schrodinger produced his equation which calculated the probability of the wave-function (the '?particle/wave/force-field') collapsing here or there and everyone could get back to work. The fundamental problem had not gone away, but it had been redefined and reformulated until it became a solution, and even though we were now working with uncertainty, at least we weren’t lost in it. 

 

It was to this approach that Nobel prize-winner Niels Bohr gave the name complementarity as part of the much celebrated Copenhagen interpretation. This essentially says that it is senseless to talk about particles versus waves, or position versus speed, until we observe it. Before this we have to accept that reality is both-and; They are complementary features of the same thing. The idea of complementarity tells us that we don’t have to be stuck when faced with an insoluble problem; there is a way through, but there is a payoff, which is that we mustn't, in the words of Rudy Rucker, 'make the world simpler than it is'. There's a limit to how neatly the universe fits into our mental models, and to work with it we have to put aside our dualistic view of things. It is therefore not so much a question of being right or wrong, but of how usefully we are able to define the problem, and of how skilfully we are able to navigate the uncertainty, to put aside the 'either-this-or-that-ness' and embrace the 'both-this-and-that-ness' of any given situation.


It is common here to talk about the weirdness of physics and fundamental reality, which seems to irritate some scientists, but it is not so much that reality is weird, it is simply that we don’t always have the mental tools to understand it. We humans cannot help but think in terms of this or that. Our everyday language makes it difficult to describe something as both this and that. (In medicine doctors, accustomed to uncertainty, are in the habit of using the symbol +/- to communicate a yet-to-be-established diagnosis or plan of action.) Language provides the structure for our thoughts. We require language-symbols to form trains of thought, but these inevitably leave out a lot of the detail, they are simplifications. Among the first abstract concepts we learn is that of opposing pairs, which the ancient Greeks called duads. These include concepts such as ‘like’ or ‘don’t like’, 'bad' or 'good', and of course ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Even something as fundamental as our concept of self is based on the duad of ‘me’ and ‘not me’. It is hardly surprising that it takes effort to overcome this ingrained tendency to think in binary opposites. 


Bohr understood how language both enables and limits our thinking when he said 'we depend on our words, we are suspended in language'. He had a coat of arms made and in the centre was the yin-yang symbol, in which the opposing light and dark swirl around each other and in each lays the kernel of the other, and this represented the idea of complementarity, the both-and reality that lays beyond our limited dualistic understanding. 



The use of an ancient Chinese symbol to represent the rather unwieldy term 'complementarity' was no coincidence. This was the same tradition from which Taoism would emerge, which would in turn inspire Chan, then Zen Buddhism. One of the central teachings of Zen is the idea of non-duality, of being careful not to fall too readily into black or white thinking. In any given conflict we can’t seem to help ourselves from picking a side. We could blame this on ‘cognitive ease‘. It’s simply easier to think of things as this or that. Maintaining an ambiguous, both-and state of mind, takes mental effort. But actually dualistic thinking is a lot more effortful in the long run because it traps us in a certain position which we then waste hours of mental effort on maintaining. We'll spend hours replaying and winning arguments in our heads, or lose sleep because 'someone is wrong on the internet'. Why should such things take up so much mental energy? We get nothing out of this mental turmoil. Here we make the mistake of thinking that there is some answer, if only we could find it, whereas what is really going on is that the mind is trying to resolve some ambiguity. It is hard to get my mind around the concept that something can be right and wrong at the same time - it must be one or the other, but this is less a reflection of the facts than because that’s what my brain likes. It's easier to chew on, mentally speaking. 


We have to be a bit careful here. I am not saying that facts don’t exist, or can be whatever you want them to be. The facts have to be this or that because you can’t have two things happening in the same space at the same time. Yet interpretations can be both this and that because they are mental, not real, events. They are 'facts of the mind' which can essentially be what you want them to be. The fundamental mistake we make is that we argue, not actually about facts, but our reactions to them, about each other's interpretations of events. Whereas facts can be established to a degree, interpretations cannot. Interpretations have no position, no velocity, they are neither this nor that, here nor there, or up or down. And you can’t change someone’s interpretation, in the same way that you can’t make a sculpture out of smoke, or make someone like the taste of blue cheese if they prefer Swiss.


Perception of course is a different matter and can be manipulated. The media is a vast engine for managing people’s perceptions, and chiefly consists in pushing at the open door of our black and white thinking, telling us what we know and fostering dualistic thinking. Even so, the interpretation is still always down to the person. After all, not everyone believes what they read, and many know rubbish when they see it. They can see that black and white opinions, outrage or righteousness, heroes and villains etc provide empty calories. We crave them, but they don’t provide any nutrition because ultimately they don’t tell us anything new. In the end we turn away from it and seek out the grey areas more, because really that’s the only place where things can happen.


Einstein famously said that god doesn't play dice. Like many, he didn't like the idea that we could never predict or know what is really going on, which was the upshot of the discovery of quantum physics. Personally I don't think he did a bad job of figuring out what's 'going on' but I guess some people are never satisfied, and since then some truly mind-bending theories have been put forward to account for why, for instance, an electron can go through 'two doors at one'; exotic hypothesis that I could in no way do justice to. For the time being I find it reassuring that we can't know everything. Originality and creativity can only really arise from ambiguity and uncertainty, from things being off-balance and in flux. After all, nobody drives to a lookout point to gaze out at the horizon at midday or midnight because nothing changes at that time, whereas at dawn or dusk there’s a lot more going on.



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About The Writer

HC James is from London and worked as a teacher before switching careers to medicine. He currently works as a doctor in a south London Emergency Department and in his spare time visits family in California.   

 

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