On Duality 

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I decided to study physics. I did so because it offered a concrete and dependable model of the world. Or so I thought. Quantum mechanics was an unpleasant surprise, with its suggestion of subjectivity, non-locality, uncertainty and indeterminacy. All of this weirdness was rooted in particle-wave duality: the notion that a subatomic particle, like an electron, could also be a wave. 

I experienced this idea as an almost personal affront. It offered chaos and uncertainty where I insisted there must be stability and predictability. Moreover, it challenged my imagination and I was found wanting – which smarted. For years afterwards, despite occasional desultory dabbling in the theory, I never fully reconciled myself with the idea that a bit of stuff, an irreducible physical thing, a concrete point in space, could also manifest as a diffuse wave of indeterminate location, like a ghostly information matrix.

Somewhere along the line I also became interested, in the shallow sort of way that is my wont, in the problem of consciousness. How could something as ephemeral and evanescent as thought be anchored in the visceral clanking and slopping and sparking that are the earthy workings of the body? Unlike particle-wave duality, the mind-body problem enthralled and enlivened me. Existence is this awesome thing, this wonder to behold, insofar as its sheer vastness, sublime complexity and profound depths allow it to be grasped at all – and consciousness, where the created becomes the creator, is surely its most triumphant manifestation. 

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As a lover of irony, I couldn’t but appreciate the contradictory emotions I felt in response to these two problems, which, now that I came to think about it, appeared superficially similar.

I took to wondering, none too rigorously, whether or not this perceived similitude stood up to any scrutiny. A ray of light can manifest as a stream of particles, or as a seemingly disembodied and contingent wave. Its wave-being and its particle-being are, however, related – each particle is one wavelength large – and they interfere with each other: a photon can interact with itself. 

Imagine a person as a particle of humanity, one wavelength large: each of us contains a unique ‘copy’ of the human genome, a copy of one or more languages, a copy of world history and local culture, and on and on. Assuming Plato was wrong, none of these things exist outside of the individual copies in each unique person. We are the wave-packets that make up the human ray. A human being is a physically extant thing in space, and an abstract, intangible psychology – and, as I’m sure we’re all painfully aware, is more than capable of interfering with itself. 

Why is a player more likely to miss the fifth penalty of a shootout at the World Cup than the fourth one? The physics of the kick are the same. The intangibles, so to speak, are not; the stakes are higher, the responsibility weighs heavily, and hope is tainted with an acrid fear. The player’s state of mind is entangled with what has gone before, with the mood of the nervy crowd, and with the glory, or villainy, that awaits them on the other side of the kick. The player’s wave-self is interacting with its particle-self. 

People can also act as either a particle or a wave. 

If you push a human being, any human being, out of an aeroplane cruising at ten thousand feet, they will fall towards the ground, accelerating at approximately 9.8 metres per second per second, until they eventually splat against the earth’s crust. They will have behaved like a particle.

If you were to ask two random Glaswegians about their thoughts on Scottish independence, their responses would have everything to do with their respective social and cultural identities, and nothing to do with their individual physical properties. You will have measured them as waves. 

One of the consequences of particle-wave duality in quantum physics is formulated in Hesienberg’s uncertainty principle, which states that for certain pairs of properties, measuring one will necessarily inhibit precise measurement of the other: these properties cannot be measured simultaneously. The exemplary pair of properties for this phenomenon in quantum mechanics is momentum and position. The mechanisms behind this uncertainty may not be obvious to you or me, but in this context that doesn’t matter; our question is: can similar pairs of properties be found for people? 

Well, it’s obvious that you cannot measure, for instance, a human being’s physical expression of an orgasm and their aptitude for mathematics at the same time. 

Thus was A Quantum Metaphor for Human Being seeded.

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A Quantum Metaphor for Human Being by Ciarán Ó Néill is available to preorder now