As I jogged along the Hudson River recently, a few lonely snowflakes fell, and I composed a haiku in my head:
Every snowflake is
special. But so what? They melt
too fast to matter
I’ve been glum lately, and I’m not sure why. My blues are overdetermined, meaning they could stem from lots of things: diminished daylight, or unfavorable comparisons of this holiday season to past ones. The COVID plague and climate change could be factors, plus the refusal of many Americans to recognize these threats.
My futile struggle to comprehend quantum mechanics doesn’t help. I began my quantum experiment 18 months ago as a pandemic project, and what have I accomplished? I’ve read books and articles, interviewed experts, audited a course at my school: PEP553: Quantum Mechanics and Engineering Applications. I’ve filled five notebooks with ruminations.
But my hopes for clarity have been dashed. My goal was to crack open the black box at the heart of physics so that the world would become a little less weird. Instead, the opposite has happened. The black box of quantum mechanics has expanded to encompass the world. Everything, including my own self, baffles me more than ever.
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