Tag: Embassytown

• The gap between language and quantum mechanics

  Physics World has a fantastic article about the problem with using a language invented, in Terry Pratchett’s words, “to tell other monkeys where the ripe fruit is”, to describe the peculiar but very much real possibilities created by the rules of quantum mechanics. Excerpt:

  … despite the burgeoning growth of quantum technology, one thing that hasn’t changed is the cumbersome and counterintuitive language we use to talk about all things quantum. While the reality of entanglement and superposition is beyond all reasonable doubt, it is as maddening as ever to describe them in words. Quantum phenomena are strange, but that does not mean we should be satisfied with strange language to describe them.

  From the very early days of quantum mechanics, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and others strove to understand this new-fangled non-classical physics of quantum 1.0. Their struggle concerned a gap between how we talk about phenomena and how we encounter them in the laboratory. That gap was created by the imperfect metaphorical language still largely used to characterize non-classical phenomena.

  The authors have written that the terms that writers, journalists, and scientists reach for when describing quantum phenomena to people who don’t have the mathematical awareness (for want of a better description) are probably adding to the confusion instead of clarifying quantum mechanics, and diminishing its realness. ‘Superposition’ is a good example: it’s a word that captures a particular phenomenon, but when you try to spell it out, in toto with no exceptions, to someone who doesn’t understand the math of it, you use some metaphors and approximations that either create an incomplete picture or an obscured one. And both add to quantum physics’s mystery and spookiness, which are counterproductive.

  This has been a familiar challenge in my experience covering high-energy physics as well, were the protagonists are often particles and forces that are best described using mathematical grammar (amplitudes, matrices, groups, etc.) rather than the language that facilitates everyday life. This is why I think the molasses metaphor (and minor variations of it) may well have been the most used of its kind in 2012, when the Higgs boson, and its corresponding energy field, dominated physics news: in the New York Times‘s words, “What is the Higgs field? … It has been described as a kind of cosmic molasses, dragging on particles as they move through it”. In an instructive 2013 paper, Stewart Alsop and Steven Beale wrote (emphasis in the original) about the problems with such metaphors:

  At some point, of course, all analogical thinking breaks down—the Higgs phenomena is not a crowd or molasses. Perhaps a weakness with these analogies is their reliance on a ‘medium’ as the object node mapped to the Higgs field. This is probably unavoidable, but it results in a number of points of potential confusion. The concept of a medium is generally understood to be a volume filled with a physical substance that can be manipulated and controlled. This is not the case in the standard model of the Higgs field, which is understood to be uniform and constant. The familiar conception of a medium is insufficient to fully understand the Higgs field in this respect. A medium can be entered and exited because it is localized, it can be concentrated in one location and minimized in another, and it is composed of matter and has its own mass and energy. Mapping these attributes onto the Higgs field leads to a line of reasoning reminiscent of 19th century aether theories.

  Obviously metaphors aren’t going to be perfect. That’s almost always the case. Instead, they’re handy because they capture a particularly interesting subset of something larger, more complicated, and get that across by drawing on things a person is already familiar with, like, of course, molasses. Through history, this has progressively become harder to do, and scientists themselves have taken note of it from time to time. For example, Werner Heisenberg delivered a speech in 1932, while receiving the Nobel Prize for physics, in which he pointed out the need to discard visualisation or, more accurately, visualisability as a means to unravelling the pending mysteries of atomic physics. He said it quite eloquently, so let me quote him:

  … the path so far traced by the quantum theory indicates that an understanding of those still unclarified features of atomic physics can only be acquired by foregoing visualization and objectification to an extent greater than that customary hitherto. We have probably no reason to regret this, because the thought of the great epistemological difficulties with which the visual atom concept of earlier physics had to contend gives us the hope that the abstracter atomic physics developing at present will one day fit more harmoniously into the great edifice of Science.

  This said, metaphors and analogies vis-à-vis quantum mechanics (getting quantum computing right took considerable effort, for a famous example) have become particularly problematic because this field of study has created technologies that are beginning to enter the public consciousness at large. There is now a greater price to pay by misunderstanding, for example, that quantum teleportation refers to bulk matter, as in Star Trek, rather than to information or, in fact, that entanglement is in Albert Einstein’s words “spooky action at a distance”. But it’s not spooky; it’s just something we don’t have the language for.

  But quantum mechanics and its consequent technologies don’t have a monopoly on being shortchanged by imprecise communication. Climate change is in the same boat. There is also another kind of price that has already been paid across the vast majority of science: a widespread belief among certain (sadly prevalent) groups of people that they understand science when they really don’t, leading to an inflated belief in the abilities and importance of science while overlooking our tendency to confuse faith for truly knowing something. (I have written about this before here, here, and here, among other instances.)

  Finally, the question of the gaps between language as we use it and quantum mechanics is reminiscent of a plot point in China Miéville’s Embassytown, where people designated “ambassadors” can only speak in pairs, simultaneously: each ambassador utters a different word-meaning, and their alien interlocutors combine the duo’s words-meanings to understand what they’re saying. In the book, these two word-meanings are written like a fraction – one word on top, a line in the middle, and the other at the bottom. But thanks to Miéville’s prose, we know that that’s only a partial representation of what’s really going on in the story. We come upon a relatable sensation in the film Arrival.

  Embassytown was a gratifying read that delved into the relationships between language and storytelling as much as between a language, its grammar, and its symbols. Like good fantasy fiction, it steadily yet gently dismantles the cognitive dissonance that reality sometimes foists on us – in this case, that would be cognising why English or for that matter any linear human language will always fall short of describing true simultaneity.

  One workaround, according to the Physics World article above, is that rather than trying to bend our language around the barely tractable and math-laden processes of quantum mechanics, we should describe the field in terms of its outcomes. To know more, do read the article.

  2023.04.27

• Writing itself is fantasy

  The symbols may have been laid down on paper or the screen in whatever order but when we read, we read the words one at a time, one after another – linearly. Writing, especially of fiction, is an act of using the linear construction of meaning to tell a story whose message will be assimilated bit by bit into a larger whole that isn’t necessarily linear at all, and manages to evade cognitive biases (like the recency effect) that could trick the reader into paying more attention to parts of the story instead of the intangible yet very-much-there whole. Stories in fact come in many shapes. One of my favourites, Dune, is so good because it’s entirely spherical in the spacetime of this metaphor, each of its concepts like a three-dimensional ouroboros, connected end to end yet improbably layered over, under and around each other. The first four Harry Potter books are my least favourite pieces of good fantasy for their staunch linearity, even despite the use of time travel.

  The plot of Embassytown struggles with this idea a little bit, with its fraction-like representation of meaning using pairs of words. Even then, China Miéville has a bit of a climb on his hands: his (human) readers consume the paired words one at a time, first the one on the top then the one on the bottom. So a bit of translation becomes necessary, an exercise in projecting a higher dimensional world in which words are semantically bipolar, like bar magnets each with two ends, onto the linguistic surface of one in which the words are less chimerical. Miéville is forced to be didactic (which he musters with some reluctance), expending a few dozen pages constructing rituals of similes the reader can employ to sync with the Ariekei, the story’s strange alien characters, but always only asymptotically so. We can after all never comprehend a reality that exists in six – or six-thousand – dimensions, much the same way the Higgs boson’s existence is a question of faith if you’re unfamiliar with the underlying mathematics and the same way a human mind and an alien mind can never truly, as they say, connect.

  Arrival elevates this challenge, presenting us with alien creatures – the ‘heptapods’ – the symbols of whose communication are circular, each small segment of the circumference standing for one human word and the whole assemblage for meaning composed by a non-linear combination of words. I’m yet to read the book by Ted Chiang on which the film is based; notwithstanding the possibility that Chiang has discussed their provenance, I wonder if the heptapods think a complex thought that is translated into a clump of biochemical signals that then encode meaning in a stochastic process: not fully predictably, since we know through the simpler human experience that a complicated idea can be communicated using more than one combination of simpler ideas. One heptapod’s choice could easily differ from that of another.

  The one human invention, and experience if you will, that recreates the narrative anxiety encoded in the Ariekei’s and heptapods’ attempts (through their respective authors’ skills, imagination, patience and whatever else) to communicate with humans is writing insofar as the same anxiety manifests in the use of a lower order form – linearity – to construct a higher order image. Thus from the reader’s perspective the writer inhabits an inferior totality, and the latter performs a construction, an assimilation, by synthesising the sphericity and wholeness of a story using fundamentally linear strands, an exercise in building a circle using lines, and using circles to build a sphere, and so forth.

  Writing a story is in effect like convincing someone that an object exists but having no way other than storytelling to realise the object’s existence. Our human eyes will always see the Sun as a circle but we know it’s a sphere because there are some indirect ways to ascertain its sphericity, more broadly to ascertain the universe exists in three dimensions at least locally; the ‘simplest’ of these ways would be to entirely assume the Sun is spherical because that seems to simplify problem-solving. However, say one writer’s conceit is that the Sun really exists in eight dimensions and goes on to construct an elaborate story of adventure, discovery and contemplation to convince the reader that they’re right.

  In this sense, the writer would draw upon our innate knowledge of the universe in three dimensions, and our knowledge and experience of the ways in which it and isn’t truthful, to build an emergent higher-order Thing. While this may seem like a work of science and/or fantasy fiction, the language humans use to build all of their stories, even the nonfiction, renders every act of story-telling a similarly architecturally constructive endeavour. No writer commences narration with the privilege of words meaning more than they stand for in the cosmos of three dimensions and perpetually forward-moving time nor sentences being parsed in any way other than through the straightforward progression of a single stream of words. Everything more complicated than whatever can be assembled with two-dimensional relationships requires a voyage through the fantastic to communicate.

  2020.03.03