SUPERPOSITIONS, QUANTUM AND HISTORIC

David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, 1986

In his On the Origin of Time,[1] Thomas Hertog’s memoir of his collaboration with Stephen Hawking, he forcefully asserts the quantum nature of nature, inclusive of its “eternal” laws: the laws of physics are not set in stone but are born and co-evolve as the universe they govern takes shape. At the beginning they were multiple, caught in a Darwinian struggle for survival, and our laws are the laws which won. Is this not a supreme case of how a general law of nature contingently emerges out of a contingent singular situation. To understand this, we should make a step further into the weird ontology implied by quantum physics and conceive observation as integral to understanding reality:

“If you had a conventional Western education like mine, then science is taught as the discovery of laws of nature that are always exact, regardless of whether anyone or anything is watching. In the quantum world, a particle is in a superposition of possible positions and velocities, described by a wave function, until one of these is fixed by an observation (the other one then, necessarily, becoming unknowable).”

Hawking and Hertog here avoid the trap of getting lost in the debate on what really counts as observation – they endorse the broadest view: “The observer doesn’t have to be human or sentient. Any record of quantum events is a form of observation, so when a quartz crystal preserves the path of a subatomic particle that passed through it, the crystal acts as an observer.” This is also why we should reject the reading of quantum mechanics which proposes a supreme Observer (sometimes god is directly evoked) which fully constitutes reality. The basic quantum mechanics’ claim that only through observation a wave function “collapses” into an actual route (prior to that moment, it was travelling through all possible routes) explains what Hawking and Hertog mean by top-down cosmology:

“Taking a top-down, observer inclusive, approach to the conundrum of the Anthropic Principle makes it a non-paradox. From a classical perspective it seems extraordinary that the laws of physics should have, at every choice, taken the path that resulted in a life-compatible universe. But if we are only now switching on the telescope and observing the fragment of the wave function that we live in, then it necessarily has to be one that supports life. We might be fixing a fragment that was very unlikely, statistically, to have arisen from repeated rolls of the dice. But then all the options are more or less unlikely.”

This brings us to the third crucial notion, that of hologram: the image of an object which catches not only its actual state but also its interference pattern with other options that were lost when the actual state imposed itself. While I am, of course, not qualified to pass a judgment on these notions from quantum mechanics, I find it irresistible to apply them to human history. Perhaps the supreme example of holographic history is provided none other than by Marx. Marx is not an evolutionist, he writes history “top-down,” i.e., his starting point is the contemporary global capitalist order, and from this point he reads the entire history as a gradual approximation to capitalism. This is not teleology: history is not guided by capitalism as its telos, but once capitalism emerges, it provides the key to the entire (pre)history – here enters Marx’s well-known story (in Grundrisse) of linear development from prehistorical societies through Asiatic despotism, Antique slavery, and feudalism to capitalism. But, again, there is no teleological necessity in this development, it results from a series of contingent collapses of superpositions.