Knocking on Heaven's Door - Lisa Randall [10]
Exotic phenomena might indeed occur. But such phenomena will happen only at difficult-to-observe scales that are increasingly far from our intuitive understanding and our usual perceptions. If they will always remain inaccessible, they are not so interesting to scientists. And they are less interesting to fiction writers too if they won’t have any observable impact on our daily lives.
Weird things are possible, but the ones non-physicists are understandably most interested in are the ones we can observe. As Steven Spielberg pointed out in a discussion about a science fiction movie he was considering, a strange world that can’t be presented on a movie screen—and which the characters in a film would never experience—is not so interesting to a viewer. (Figure 1 shows amusing evidence.) Only a new world that we can access and be aware of could be. Even though both require imagination, abstract ideas and fiction are different and have different goals. Scientific ideas might apply to regimes that are too remote to be of interest to a film, or to our daily observations, but they are nonetheless essential to our description of the physical world.
[ FIGURE 1 ] An XKCD comic that captures the hidden nature of tiny rolled-up dimensions.
WRONG TURNS
Despite this neat separation by distances, people too often take shortcuts when trying to understand difficult science and the world. And that can easily lead to an overzealous application of theories. Such misapplication of science is not a new phenomenon. In the eighteenth century, when scientists were busy studying magnetism in laboratories, others conjured up the notion of “animal magnetism”—a hypothesized magnetic “vital fluid” in animate beings. It took a French royal commission set up by Louis XVI in 1784, which included Benjamin Franklin among others, to formally debunk the hypothesis.
Today such misguided extrapolations are more likely to be made about quantum mechanics—as people try to apply it on macroscopic scales where its consequences usually average away and leave no measurable signatures.5 It’s disturbing how many people trust ideas such as those in Rhonda Byrne’s bestselling book The Secret, about how positive thoughts attract wealth, health, and happiness. Equally disquieting is Byrne’s claim that “I never studied science or physics at school, and yet when I read complex books on quantum physics I understood them perfectly because I wanted to understand them. The study of quantum physics helped me to have a deeper understanding of The Secret, on an energetic level.”
As even the Nobel Prize—winning pioneer of quantum mechanics Niels Bohr noted, “If you are not completely confused by quantum mechanics, you do not understand it.” Here’s another secret (at least as well protected as those in a bestselling book): quantum mechanics is notoriously misunderstood. Our language and intuition derive from classical reasoning, which doesn’t take quantum mechanics into account. But this doesn’t mean that any bizarre phenomenon is possible with quantum logic. Even without a more fundamental, deeper understanding, we know how to use quantum mechanics to make predictions. Quantum mechanics will certainly never account for Byrne’s “secret” about the so-called principle of attraction between people and distant things or phenomena. At those large distances, quantum mechanics doesn’t play this kind of role. Quantum mechanics has nothing to do with many of the tantalizing ideas people often attribute to it. I cannot affect an experiment by staring at it, quantum mechanics does not mean there are no reliable predictions, and most measurements are constrained by practical limitations and not by the uncertainty principle.
Such fallacies were the chief topic in a surprising conversation I had with Mark Vicente, the director