Wolfgang Smith "The Quantum Enigma"

[Jamie123]

I've recently finished reading a very interesting book called "The Quantum Enigma" by Wolfgang Smith. I bought it at Easter, from the bookshop at Quarr Abbey. (Quarr Abbey BTW is a Benedictine monastery on the Isle of Wight - suppressed by Henry VIII but reestablished in the 1900s by French monks fleeing persecution.) I certainly wasn't expecting to find any physics books there, but there were several by this guy Wolfgang Smith whom I'd never heard of before, but who apparently taught mathematics at UCLA and MIT before he retired, and also worked as an aerospace engineer. He is also a very devout Catholic - which doubtless explains why his books are on sale at an Abbey.

The book definitely deserves a second (and probably a third) reading - there's a lot I didn't really understand  - but here's my attempt to condense what I think I gained first time around. (BTW, some of this could be interpolations/extrapolations of my own - I often put things my own way to understand them better, and sometimes I get it wrong.)

• The medieval Scholastics (influenced by Aristotle) taught that the "corporeal world" (the world we experience with our senses) is the genuine reality. In other words, things really are as they seem: roses have a genuine quality of "redness",  water has "wetness", ice is "cold".
• In the 17th Century Rene Descartes put a stop to all that, saying that such things are "phantasms" which only exist in our perception. Roses, for example, are only red in a sense that they create a sensation of redness when a person looks at them. The reality is in what Smith calls the "physical world", the world as a physicist sees it. He uses the example of a billiard ball: this is a "corporeal object" - you can hold it, feel its weight and texture and otherwise experience its behaviour with your senses. But that "object" is actually a phantasm which only exists to you. In reality the billiard ball is a "physical object" consisting of its mass, diameter, elasticity etc. Smith calls this idea "cartesian bifurcation". 
• Furthermore, physical objects always behave in a predictable manner. If you know the mass, diameter, elasticity etc. of a billiard ball, then you can (in principle at least) predict how it will behave under any given conditions - and thus what "corporeal phantasms" it might produce in those who observe it. The billiard ball is not "free" to do anything else.
• This "cartesian bifurcation" idea worked fine through the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras, but ran into problems in the 20th Century due to the discovery of quantum effects. Theory showed - and experiment suggested - that on a very small scale events are not predetermined by causality. The decay of atomic nuclei - and the corresponding clicks of the Geiger counter - cannot be predicted, but only described in terms of probability. Moreover all possibilities exist in a "superposition" until we observe which of them has actually occurred - the so-called "collapse" of the wave function. (This is illustrated by the famous Schrodinger Cat paradox: since we do not know whether an atom has decayed, it is in a superposition of decayed+not decayed, and thus the cat is in a superposition of alive+dead.)
• Smith rejects that we can "explain" all this with the non-explanation of "quantum strangeness". He argues instead that we are looking at it the wrong way: through the eyes of Descartes, and that the Scholastics who preceded him would not have been confused by it. He thus reintroduces the idea that corporeal objects are the "reality" and that physical objects are secondary to them.
• He also introduces two new ideas: the "subcorporeal" and the "transcorporeal":
  • A "subcorporial object" is a physical object "behind" a corporeal object: for example the "physical billiard-ball (consisting of its mass, diameter etc.) is "subcorporeal" to the actual corporeal billiard ball.
  • A "transcorporeal object" is a physical object with no corresponding corporeal object; for example an atomic nucleus cannot be described as "corporeal" because we cannot (usually) experience it directly with our senses. We can only describe it in terms of a physical model.
• Now suppose an atomic nucleus decays (or does not decay) creating (or not creating) a click on the Geiger counter, causing the poison to be released (or not released) and the cat to die (remain alive). Now the Geiger counter, the poison vial and the cat are all corporeal objects, and in disintegrating the nucleus has become part of that corporeal system. It has in fact been "instantiated" (if only temporarily) as a corporeal object, having previously only being a potential corporeal object.
• This is an action of what Smith calls "Vertical Causality"; that God standing outside space-time causes events to happen - in this case a potential corporeal object becoming - if only for an instant - an actual corporeal object. He has a lot to say about vertical causality - in fact he's written another whole book on the topic. In this book though he invites the reader to think of space-time as a kind of loop or circle (four dimensions reduced to one for the illustration) with temporal ("horizontal") causation operating clockwise around it. God sits in the middle operating along the "spokes" of the wheel, His mode of causation (working miracles and making quantum-level events happen) being at right-angles to the causation we normally experience. This is in fact what divine creation actually is; it is not something which happened in the distant past - it is something going on continuously throughout history!

Well that's my ultra-crass first-reading impression of the book, and I'm sure I've done poor Wolfgang a terrible injustice with it. But I thought maybe some of you might be interested. I'm definitely going to re-read the book - but I think I first need to get better informed about Descartes and Scholasticism first, which are not things I know a great deal about. It's going to take time but I think it may be worth it!

 

Edited May 17, 2019 by Jamie123

[Jamie123]

As a shameless excuse to "bump" this message, I've drawn a diagram of what I think Carl Benj...er...I mean Wolfgang Smith is talking about:

We move clockwise (could just as easily be anticlockwise) around the circle* as past progresses to future. (Well, actually the circle represents space-time, so "past" and "future" are actually the four dimensional past and future light cones, but those are impossible to draw.) Clockwise is the direction of "horizontal" causality: events influence other events clockwise of them, and are influenced by earlier events anticlockwise of them - if you see what I mean.

God is in the middle of the circle, influencing the perimeter of the circle - our space-time - via the "spokes" of the wheel. His causality - "vertical" causality - is at 90 degrees to ours, so it doesn't interfere with the natural progression of cause to effect. (Just as an object's horizontal movement is not affected by vertical forces - and vice-versa - vertical causality has no effect on horizontal causality.)

OK - time to go home now before my wife starts fretting...

*For what it's worth, I'm bothered about the future wrapping around to become the past - a point Smith doesn't much dwell upon - but let's put that aside.

[Vort]

Forgive me if I'm oversimplifying or misunderstanding, but it sounds like Smith's ideas are an application of the "God-acts-in-the-quantum-realm" idea that arose in the mid-20th century. I have no problem at all with that idea, but as a Latter-day Saint, I believe in a God who could literally come stand before me, shake my hand, and speak to me out of his own mouth, complete with tongue and teeth, words that I would understand by hearing them with my ears (and probably my spirit). So application-wise, I'm not sure what to make of it. I need to think about it a little more.

[NeuroTypical]

I am a person of little brain.  I was so glad when I finally wrapped my head around Einstein's relativity, I literally shouted for joy, because I thought I wouldn't have to think that hard ever again.  So now I've been working through Feynman's "Six Easy Pieces" book for a few months, and watching every "quantum stuff made simple" youtube video I can find.  It is slow going.  I still can't grasp the cat.  Wouldn't the cat know if it was alive or dead?  I can't even see why it's a thing to think about.  (Can't understand yet - I have hope maybe someday in the future.)

[Vort]

11 minutes ago, NeuroTypical said:

I still can't grasp the cat.  Wouldn't the cat know if it was alive or dead?

That's sort of the point. Schrödinger's cat example is a paradox he devised to point out what he saw as the problems with the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (QM): That QM can be thought of as a set of probabilities that something might happen, rather than any deterministic property, and that this can be understood as a superposition of the various possible outcomes.

This is the most common interpretation used today, and clearly doesn't jibe with our actual experience of reality; an electron is either on this side of the gap or it has tunneled over to the other side, but does not simultaneously exist 89% on this side and 11% on the other. Schrödinger's cat example dramatizes this in a humorous way, where a cat's state of being alive is considered a superposition of the probability that some quantum event did or did not trigger the shattering of a flask of poisonous gas.

[Jamie123]

On 5/17/2019 at 7:40 PM, Vort said:

Forgive me if I'm oversimplifying or misunderstanding, but it sounds like Smith's ideas are an application of the "God-acts-in-the-quantum-realm" idea that arose in the mid-20th century.

It certainly sounds like it to me too - I expect there are nuances to what Wolfgang Smith is saying that I'm missing at the moment. There's a lot in the book that I haven't referenced in my short summary, because I don't at the moment get it. Also, he speaks as if the "hidden variables" theory were still a going concern, while I thought that had been refuted back in the 1980s. (This edition of the book is copyright 2005.)

On 5/17/2019 at 7:40 PM, Vort said:

I have no problem at all with that idea, but as a Latter-day Saint, I believe in a God who could literally come stand before me, shake my hand, and speak to me out of his own mouth, complete with tongue and teeth, words that I would understand by hearing them with my ears (and probably my spirit). So application-wise, I'm not sure what to make of it. I need to think about it a little more.

I totally agree with you, but for me the God who could come and stand before me and shake my hand etc. would be Jesus Christ: "God in man made manifest" as the hymn goes. But of course I'm a Trinitarian Christian, and I know Latter Day Saints have a different view on the matter.