For a few years now I’ve told myself and the few others who have had occasion to ask, that at my advanced age I’m simply living into The Mystery. I have faith but no longer have a creed or even a language that offers me understanding beyond what I already know of this life.
I was content with this declaration until quite recently and then, for some reason that’s not clear to me even now, I wanted to probe The Mystery just a bit. Was there more I could know? This led me to Adam Becker’s 2018 book, What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics. Yes, quantum physics. I, who didn’t even know what a quantum was (in this context it refers to atoms and other ultratiny objects). I, who never thought of mathematics as the language of science, as a language of any kind.
And something else: While history, religion and literature are laden with stories, I never thought of story as playing a role in scientific discovery. In Becker’s words, “The stories told by the best scientific theories determine the experiments that scientists choose to perform and influence the way that the outcomes of those experiments are interpreted…story is a crucial part of the science, and of going beyond the existing science to find the next theory.”
But, he writes, even as the calculations of quantum physics have dramatically altered our world over the last century, we still don’t know what they are telling us about the nature of reality: “quantum physics lacked an important component, a story about how it lined up the with the things of the world. How does a phenomenal number of atoms, governed by quantum physics, give rise to the world we see around us?” And thus, the book.
I want to learn as much as I can about the nature of reality and about the fundamental role of quantum physics in advancing science and technology. But along with virtually all physicists, I will continue living into The Mystery during the remainder of my time on this planet.