I’ve been watching videos. I have been learning about quantum mechanics. I’ve been slowing the videos down, re-watching. I’ve been reading. This is quite uncharacteristic of the person I imagined I was, the high school student who cried about algebra and avoided many-tentacled calculus as if it would swallow me alive. With that attitude, it probably would have.
My newfound interest came to me unbidden and unexplained, so I will try to explain it. It seems to me that when you spend years writing poems, sometimes you find the words breaking through to what can’t be said or even fully understood. Like a black hole, If you circle it long enough, it’s likely to suck you in. Likewise, if you meditate, if you train your mind long enough, you are likely to see what otherwise might be lost on you. Point being, I’ve been a scientist already, in different languages. All of it exploring the vastness, in some iteration of that meaning.
The old Newtonian world was pretty easy to see how it works. It had a mechanical model. If you only looked carefully, you could discover the mechanisms. Quantum mechanics utterly replaces Newton. The world, the universe isn’t what we thought. Poor us, we couldn’t help it because we are mere three-dimensional beings, with limited eyesight, hearing, and so on. When we finally invented microscopes subtle enough, and telescopes powerful enough, we could see, good lord, what we thought was solid, wasn’t. What we thought were discrete objects, weren’t. What we thought were separate worlds, weren’t.
The best poems stand us on the precipice of not-knowing. We never knew much anyway. Good for us, knowing all we can, but the universe is breathlessly strange.
You might say, who cares? Let us just tend our garden. However, it seems to me there is great advantage in having the knowledge, if not the understanding, that everything is truly, truly connected, that a wave is a point and a point is a wave, and actually there is no such thing as a point. It is all motion in time.
Get used to it. People had to get used to the idea that the earth rotated around the sun, not vice versa. And, you might say, it’s necessary to get used to the idea that white people don’t rule the country anymore, that climate change is going to require massive re-thinking of how we live, that we need vaccinations and masks, for that matter.
Why else have I been interested in quantum mechanics? Because my mind is bigger and more agile than I used to give it credit for. Not just me. Don’t we shut ourselves down, for all sorts of reasons? I was made to take piano lessons when I was 10. I hated it. I hated having to keep my mind on notes, like arithmetic. I was anxious, troubled in all sorts of ways. I couldn’t bear to steady my mind that much.
I am excited to turn my mind in this direction for a while. To watch videos about string theory and black holes. To offer the deadened portion of my cerebral cortex a few new sparks of life.
Maybe it’s the isolation. I’m curious if you’ve made any radical turns of mind or action in the last little while.