Still in the Labyrinth after Fifty Hours of Youtube Videos on Quantum Physics

“Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.” 

--Galileo Galilei

Perhaps some of my blog correspondents will recognize the equation in the illustration to the left.  It is a very famous equation, almost as famous as Einstein's e=mc2, and it appears on tee-shirts available in college book stores.  Recognize it?  It's Schrodinger's equation.  You may recognize the name even if you didn't recognize his equation since he is famous for his thought experiment involving a cat in a box which, we are told, illustrates that, on a quantum level, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time.  Really.  Alive.  Dead.
      Although Schrodinger may be a bit esoteric, everyone has by now heard of the Big Bang Theory--even if only as the title of a TV sit-com.  (I will defer to another time the task of deconstructing that show for what it tells us about how the usual American stereotypes about science and scientists have "evolved" in the homeland.)   Ever since Einstein became science's first media star, it has become impossible to keep certain phrases from entering the vernacular.  Terms like black holes, inflation, the standard model, the uncertainty principle, entanglement, even, of late, Higgs bosons, CERN and particle colliders appear almost daily in the media.  Thanks to PBS's Brian Greene, we may add to the list talk of string theory, multi-verses, eleven possible dimensions and so on.  Millions have not only heard of Stephen Hawking and recognize the man in the wheel chair with the robotic voice; his book, A Brief History of Time sold 10 million copies.  (A remarkable publishing phenomenon, since just about everyone who has read the book admits to not being able to follow it at all.  More of this later.)  I guess it was inevitable that even Oprah managed to get into the act.  She invited physics professor Leonard Susskind onto her show a few years back to discuss the until then esoteric view that, contrary to Hawking's theory, all that seems "real" to us is actually a holographic projection of a two-dimensional matrix surrounding a black hole.  Which brings to mind movies like The Matrix, just one of a host of movies that, in a long film tradition, borrows freely from science and science-fiction alike.
      Now, let's get to Youtube.  There is no doubt that it is a wonderful resource.  A little patience circumventing a lot of clutter can reward you with a valuable companion to Google for the kind of learning one can achieve outside of, let's say, a university classroom.  In fact, both of these internet resources often allow one a kind of access to what is available inside our most prestigious universities.   Yale comes to mind, for example, as an institution that has placed on the web lectures by some of its most acclaimed faculty.  (The lectures on history are particularly good, often serving as a reminder of the limitations of lectures many of us attended as under-graduates.) Youtube allows you to watch everything from very short video material to full-fledged lectures lasting over an hour on a wide variety of subjects.  Given the luxury of free time, we are free to follow our own unique learning curve, surfing from one site to another, rejecting some material, lingering on others for hours.
     I have always been fascinated by cosmology and the knowledge claims of twentieth century physics.  Here, then, I hoped, was my opportunity to see if I could actually understand concepts like relativity, space-time, the wave/particle dichotomy.   I mean really understand, not just on the surface level that, for all their virtues, PBS and the BBC present, but with real insight.  And herein lies the rub.  What did I learn after fifty hours or so watching those Youtube lectures?   Not a heck of a lot.
     I am not ready to blame Youtube for my frustration.  Perhaps there are sites that would allow me to prepare better by spending time acquiring the necessary background in advanced algebra and calculus that would open more doors for me.  Because herein lies the rub.  There is simply no way that one can understand what it is these talking heads from the physics community are talking about without--to borrow the popular phrase--doing the math.   It has become a fixture of talks designed to explain science to the lay public that, undeterred, presenters will bend over backwards to assure their audiences that they will not be called upon to understand any of the math, any of the equations that are intrinsic to really understanding the subject.

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? 
 

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

--from Wikipedia entry on C.P. Snow
 

      The above quotation is from a lecture delivered in 1959 by C.P. Snow which he titled, "The Two Cultures." I would argue that in the ensuing six decades since Snow gave his lecture very little has changed.  If anything, science has become more esoteric and thus even less accessible to the vast majority who are--dare we admit?--mathematically illiterate.  While, on the one hand, the only remedy to this problem seems to be the obvious, which is to say that, if you really care, you have no choice but to take the painstaking steps to acquiring the language of science, yet, and this is the real point in my writing this piece, I believe that more can be done, a great deal more.
     While Snow was presenting his thesis in 1959, I was a student at Brooklyn Technical High School where we were told by our English teachers that, (on the assumption that we were destined for careers in science and engineering), as future scientists and engineers, we had an obligation to learn how to express ourselves clearly.  While it was true that most Tech students would go with the program, stubborn recalcitrants like myself were placed in what they called the College Prep Program, a track that accomodated boys (only boys attended in those days) whose aptitiudes were more in the humanities.  We were bluntly told that scientists and engineers were notorious for their poor writing skills and their inability to communicate with anyone outside of the fold.  We were going to be different.  No one had to twist my arm to make me believe that this was not just a malicious stereotype since I found that both in the way math and science were typically taught as well as in the way math and science text books were written rote learning ruled.  All of my childhood curiosity soon dulled.  I was one of those boys who always took things apart to see how they worked, whined until I got a Gilbert chemistry set for Christmas, looked at the night sky with wonder, read science-fiction and loved dinosaurs.  At Tech, my grades in math and science nose-dived.  Rebellious and resistant to authority even as a child, I felt that my science texts were more catechisms than guides to true understanding and discovery. There is one bit of business in science texts which, though seemingly trifling, always left me frustrated and angry.

     ...I will discuss this and conclude this post in a blog to follow.

      

2001: Where's Stanley?

In 1968, and for several years earlier during the period in which Stanley Kubrick was working on 2001: A Space Odyssey, the time, many believed, was ripe to take a stand on the war in Vietnam.  This seemed particularly to be expected from an auteur who had made two earlier films (Paths of Glory and Strangelove) which, if they were not exactly pacifist statements, certainly seemed anti-war.  (Wikipedia's notes on Paths of Glory, in fact, reveal that the film so tweaked the noses of the military hierarchy in France and Germany that it was banned in those countries for years.)  Fans of the director just knew that if he set his mind to it, Kubrick was capable of making a devastating statement on the war.  Yet it took Kubrick another two decades before he got around to making a cinematic statement on the war in Southeast Asia (Full Metal Jacket, 1987).   In the first throes of absorbing 2001, it seemed that Stanley had decided instead to go cosmic on us, to take the decidedly longer view.   Kubrick, in fairness, was never a "topical" film maker; his work was literary, not journalistic.  He had, in fact, often turned to the novel for his source material.
     When, years later, it was reported that Kubrick's magnum opus was chosen to be ranked first among the Vatican's selection of the forty-five most influential films of the twentieth century, and that Pope John Paul II had hosted a private screening of the film, the news was greeted among many Kubrick fans with a reaction somewhat akin to the reaction that an earlier generation had greeted the Hitler-Stalin pact.  (Or, if that comparison seems a bit overblown for you, think Bob Dylan turning to Jesus.)  By that point, however, we were not entirely surprised; we had had time enough to digest the fact that, great as the man was, grateful as we were to him for so much that was unforgettable in his work, the Stanley of our youth had proven to be a fiction.

     As I alluded to in an earlier post, these musings were triggered anew for me when I attended a screening of The Shining hosted by the New York Times.   I had some time ago come to the conclusion that essentially all of Kubrick's work played out on the level of dream rather than reality, and, of course, once one is prepared to view a film as a dream sequence, there are very few rules with regard to verisimilitude.  Certainly,  Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Kubrick's last work, was far from cinema verite.   But there is a scene in The Shining that brought home for me Kubrick's essentially supernatural vision.  After attacking his wife, Jack Torrance is subdued by her with a swing from a Louisville Slugger and then dragged to a food locker for safe keeping.  Now, most of this film can be viewed as a psychological drama, the scenes being played out for us taking place in the fevered imaginations of the main characters.   Jack's escape is pure magic.  Almost as if out of embarrassment at using the plot device he descends upon to get Jack out of the locker, Kubrick does not show the bolt on the lock miraculously ascending; instead we only hear it jolting out of place.  Ghostly twins and rapids of blood may exist in characters' minds, but locks don't get unlocked by themselves.  We have left the realm of psychological drama and entered a metaphysical realm.  Or at least it was a metaphysical realm until Heisenberg and quantum mechanics asked us to accept that anything is possible.  While you are calculating the probability of a lock opening by itself, let us turn back to 2001.

I put out my cigarette, and went back into the theater to see just where Kubrick would take us on that memorable night in April of 1968.  You may recall my having turned to my wife and saying during the film's intermission, "If the second half of this movie is anything like the first..."  Well, by the movie's end, (yes, I know, I'm calling it a movie), Keir Dullea's fetus was spinning and filling the amniotic fluid of the cosmos, mankind reborn.  My head was spinning, too.  What hath Stanley wrought here?  Was this poetic metaphor or were we being asked to believe in divine intervention?
     And then reality overtook poetry.  We crowded out into the night air of Times Square, and I saw a passing pedestrian, his head buried in a copy of The Daily News bearing the bold headline, KING DEAD.   It took me a moment, unbelievably, to figure out which King the headline referred to, but any doubt about who had died could not have survived the subway journey on the A train back to Brooklyn Heights in a subway car filled with silent Black men and women barely able to contain their rage.  We rushed home to turn on our television set, our first Sony Trinitron, newly capable of showing--in living color--television newsmen reporting from one American city after another against a backdrop of red/orange flames reminiscent of one of Hieronymus Bosch's visions of hell.  Just a typical twenty-four hours in 1968.  Life had become more vivid than art, had overcome art to the point where even Kubrick's call for attention would have to wait.  There were still eight more months of 1968 to live through.  1969 would bring the abyss--Nixon, Chappaquiddick, Woodstock, the bombing of Cambodia, and, of course, the landing on the moon.  Rumor had it that Kubrick had helped stage the event on a Hollywood sound stage.  Who knows?  Post-modernism had begun and in the closing days of that year, it was announced that Valium was the most prescribed drug in America.  And so it goes.

Existential Nausea Comes to the Movies

In the instant that tall, slate gray monolith miraculously appears for the first time in 2001: A Space Odyssey, I learned what it meant to be overcome by the chill recognition of lost love and betrayal.
     By 1968, events in the real world had begun to catch up with Kubrick's prophetic cinematic visions of where we were going.  In a real sense, we had been prepared for the insanity of the war in Vietnam and the military industrial complex first in Paths of Glory and later in Strangelove, and the streets of cities around the world were now filled with Hobsbawm's "primitive rebels."  Young, bright-eyed Kirk Douglases were everywhere leading their cohorts out of (at least mental) slavery from Prague to Mexico City to Paris and New York, playing out their own version of Spartacus.  The cataclysmic events that shook the world in 1968 were only beginning in April of that year--far, far too many to list here, but just as a reminder: we witnessed the assassinations of both M. L. King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy (among others), the Tet offensive, the Democratic National Convention, the Prague Spring, the massacre of students in Mexico City, the Cultural Revolution in China in full swing, the Paris Riots, the police attack on Columbia University.  One came to fear calls in the night for what they might report.  The year came to fully earn its label, "the year the world ended."
      It is difficult to recreate the excitement and anticipation with which many of my generation looked forward to the release of 2001.  It had the promise of being Kubrick's masterwork.  Rumor had it that it was so long that Kubrick was still editing the film up to the very eve of its release.  It would have its New York premiere in one of the large movie houses in Times Square that still dotted the area.  At the time, my wife was working for Cambridge University Press, and I was teaching in what was then called a ghetto junior high school.  We planned the evening carefully.  I would meet her in front of Carnegie Hall, just outside of the 57th Street subway station, timed to get a bite to eat before the movie and then walk over to Times Square.  The events of that evening came to forever encapsulate for me the experience of the sixties.



 Left: President's Daily Diary for April 4, 1968 indicating that at 5:09 p.m. he would board the presidential helicopter in Central Park's Sheep Meadow.  He was in town for the installation of Cardinal Cooke, who succeeded Cardinal Spellman.





    When I emerged out of the train station and took a seat on the steps of Carnegie Hall, New York Times' article on Kubrick in hand, I found that 57th Street was lined with police barricades.  A by-stander told me that the president was in town and his motorcade would soon be passing by.  Within a very short time, black limousines began to appear, red lights flashing.   Someone pointed out the presidential helicopter hovering above and then descending into nearby Central Park.  The air was electric.  By this time in his administration, Lyndon Johnson was everywhere being greeted by mobs of young people chanting, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"  On this occasion there were no crowds in evidence.  Soon, a long entourage of dazzling police motorcycles signaled the approach of the presidential limousine, and, colorful flags waving, lights shining, it suddenly appeared.  LBJ and Lady Bird must have had the limo's interior lights on because one could clearly make out the president and his wife, smiling and waving at curbside onlookers.  (Whenever I saw the president at a demonstration in New York, I always marveled at how handsome he appeared, his tan skin set off by an almost blindingly white shirt.)  One young man standing at my side made a move that seemed intended to throw himself at the president's car, but he was instantly pushed back by a cop.  For a split second, it seemed the president reacted.  And then the show was over.
     When my young bride arrived just a few minutes later from her office, she found me in an excited state that seemed excessive even for a Kubrick aficionado about to see one of his movies.  We walked across Seventh Avenue to a small restaurant, and, over a hastily consumed meal, I told her what I had witnessed just moments before.  My hands were shaking.  I ordered a scotch.
     In the event, 2001: A Space Odyssey turned out to be at least as prophetic as Kubrick's earlier work.  The problem, as we shall see, is that he would himself be party to those events, events which would eventually prove to leave the "Left" everywhere besieged and cast into disarray.  2001 was, in effect, a shot across the bow of an entire intellectual construct that, in 1968, the smoke of rebellion everywhere in the air, seemed to promise revolutionary change.  We would come to look back and realize that Paths of Glory ends in the death of innocents, Spartacus ends up crucified on a Roman road, and Slim Pickens' misguided (no pun intended) patriotism triggers our Mutually Assured Destruction.  Humanity seemed incapable of altering its condition--at least without divine intervention.
     If we turn to one of the fractals of American culture in the years leading up to this sea change, we might find in another science-fiction work popular with the young of the time, television's Star Trek, a swan song for classical Marxism and materialism.  Star Trek, at least in its earliest manifestations, was almost pure science, almost always drawing writers for its various episodes from the Old Left.  Aside from occasional lapses into silly plots designed to keep up ratings, what happened on the show, strange as those events may have seemed, at least had some roots in material possibility.   After 2001, however, the floodgates of Hollywood opened to a deluge of barely disguised mysticism.  George Lucas's Star Wars was warmed-over Christian myth pretending to be science fiction.   From that point on, until this very day, American culture has been drowning in vampires, ghosts, angels and superheros with superhuman powers.  But it was not in the United States alone that the phenomenon occurred.
      Science, until this period, was a construct at least popularly held to be in rational opposition to virgin births, resurrections and other such products of fevered human imagination.  In the world of physics, it would turn out, only Albert Einstein (who would come to be somewhat pejoratively--if not pathetically, labeled a "neo-realist") would attempt to hold the fort against a quantum world in which we are told that anything is possible.   With Einstein spiritually at their side, some left theoreticians would struggle to point out that historical materialism was never purely deterministic, that Marx's materialism was dialectic rather than some simple-minded linear cause and effect.  They proved to be voices in the wilderness, lost in one of the alternate universes that the sages at MIT and the Planck Institute had theorized.  Heisenberg, already hated by the left for his cozy relationship with Hitler and the Nazi's minister of armaments, Albert Speer, replaced the long arc of history steering toward justice in one blow with his Uncertainty Principle.

     The movie was spectacular.  Shown on a vast wide-screen in a huge theater, it overwhelmed the viewer with its images, its music, its view of the future both playful and deeply profound.  Because it was so long, there was an intermission.  The first half of 2001 was already like no "movie" anyone had ever seen.  As we watched an animal bone ascend--now thanks to the intervention of the monolith having morphed into its inevitable function as tool (or, more accurately, weapon)--we saw summed up for us 2,000,000 years of human evolution.  And oh, that spinning wheel of a space station on a screen so large and wide it seemed to engulf the viewer, luminescent against the blackest space, being approached by a space vehicle to the strains of a Strauss' Blue Danube waltz, further summing up all human accomplishment.  On to Jupiter!  I turned to my wife, reaching for a much needed cigarette and said, "Honey, if the second half of this movie is anywhere near as good as the first half, we are going to be blown away!"  And, as we shall see, we were indeed.

Here's Stanley!

       In 1996, to commemorate the first centenary of motion pictures, the Vatican published a list of 
                45 films that it considered of special merit.  Heading the list was Kubrick's 2001.  Indeed, Pope 
                John Paul II hosted a screening of 2001 at the Vatican on the occasion of the movie's worldwide
                release during the year 2001. 
                                                                     
                                                                          -- Gene D. Phillips of Loyola University, in his introduction 
                                               to The Encyclopedia of Stanley Kubrick, written by Phillips and Rodney Hill.



The New York Times Theater gave a special showing of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining last night, and I found that my patience with one of my old heroes had finally reached the breaking point.   The honeymoon, or perhaps more accurately, the artistic marriage was finally over.  Nevertheless, I will always owe Kubrick a great deal for the changes his work wrought within me as far back as my early adolescence.  What had gone wrong?

     For many teenagers growing up in the 1950s, "going to the movies" was a Friday night ritual.  Loew's Premier (pronounced pree-mee-er by the locals) was located on Sutter Avenue in the East New York section of Brooklyn.  Not the most baroque movie house, not nearly as elaborate as, for example, the nearby Loew's Pitkin in Brownsville, the Premier was nevertheless an archetypal movie palace replete with baroque trappings and an unforgettable Italian renaissance pool of goldfish in the center of the lobby.  Each Friday night saw the place filled with teenagers present as much to scope one another as the latest reels from Hollywood.  Everyone dressed for the occasion, doused themselves in perfume or cologne (Chanel on the girls; Canoe on the boys) and puffed away on Kent cigarettes looking, we trusted, every bit as cool as the movie stars who were our models.  Today, a white teenager would stand out on that corner of Sutter Avenue about as much as a giraffe in Antarctica, but in those days the street was a lower middle class version of the Miracle Mile, resplendent with ungated shop windows lit through most of the night for the perusal of strollers.  (I was recently rewarded for my trip back to the old theater to find the vista of an empty, rubble-strewn lot amid the surrounding ruins of what was once a vital thoroughfare.  An idle group of black men looked on curiously as I got out of my car to take a picture.)  To no small extent, Kubrick's genius lay in the fact that the virtually cataclysmic events that would, among other things, spell the end of American cities as we had known them, come to resonate in one after another of his films.

      And film is the key word here.  I no doubt missed the distinction between movies and film through many earlier trips to the Premier, but for me and many others of my generation,  at least those of us who read books, Kubrick's Paths of Glory was a breakthrough event.  Although our jaws dropped merely by virtue of its cinematography, its screenplay played out more like literature than a movie.  We had seen Kirk Douglas many times before, as a cowboy, a boxer, even a Viking, but we had never before seen him in a role that made him more the protagonist of serious novel than a mere leading man or movie icon.  The scenes of battle resembled newsreels more than staged events--grainy, jumping about in a manner that suggested a hand held camera even before we were aware of its possibility as a technique.   More than anything else, though, the poignancy of the injustice it portrayed excited our newly emerged, raw, adolescent awareness of the evils of which authority was capable.   For us, Kubrick was a man who dared to tell the truth, the eternal holy grail of adolescent seekers.
    Paths of Glory (1957) was released when I was in my first year in high school.  Eisenhower was in the White House and the young Elvis was debuting on the Ed Sullivan Show.  Kubrick's next major film, Spartacus (1960), came out just as I was starting college and a fairy tale prince was entering the White House.  If there was a ticking time bomb barely audible beneath the surface of events during those much vaunted "happy days," (nightmarish echoes of The Great Depression and World War II that--in spite of every effort to deny, repress and sublimate--clearly lingered alongside, within a very short period of time, the real bomb, Korea, the Cold War, McCarthyism, the Rosenberg executions, growing racial tension and the "Beats," just to cite the most obvious),  that bomb would finally explode with, to switch metaphors, young Jack's brains bursting forth like the newborn Athena out of Zeus's head, shouting a call for violence and war.

      Like all works of genius, Kubrick's pre-1963 films came to seem prophetic, at least well ahead of their time.  My generation, later to be labeled "the New Left," during that time had yet to be tutored by the Old Left of the 1930s to more fully understand the politics of Spartacus; we had not yet heard of Rosa Luxemburg or read E.J. Hobsbawm's Primitive Rebels or the essential Marx and Lenin.  Nor should one overlook the fact that it was during this same period that students and college educated Americans were being exposed, in the then still extant abundance of small "art houses" complete with complimentary espresso and cookies served in their lobbies, the emergent post-war products of the Italian, French and, outstandingly (even if somewhat surprisingly) one particular Swedish director.   The work of such as Fellini and Antonioni, Truffaut and Bergman clearly consisted of films rather than movies and were treated with the appropriate reverence.  Yet, for American film lovers, Kubrick had a special status.  He was an American; he was ours; he came to speak for us.

     Kubrick's first post-Kennedy assassination film was Dr. Strangelove (1964).    By 1964, a mere seven years after the release of Paths of Glory, enough admirers of Kubrick had gathered to create an atmosphere of great anticipation when word got out that another of his films was to be released.  Even before Strangelove, a good part of the excitement about Kubrick that had begun to form was that he was, in a word, a child of the left, at least if being a leftist was synonymous with being anti-war, anti-establishment and anti-Hollywood commercialism.  His films seemed to be in a symbiotic relationship with the young left who were still honing their ideological mind-set, at the same time influencing our thinking and giving us, shall we say, moral support.  By the time, at the conclusion of Strangelove, Slim Pickens rides a nuclear ICBM waving his cowboy hat on his descent to oblivion, we were convinced that Kubrick spoke for us.  Embedded in the trappings of a dark comedy, Kubrick had exposed the military industrial complex and subjected it to a kind of derisive laughter that not even Chaplin had achieved in his pre-war satire of fascism, The Great Dictator.  And, though satire, Kubrick had also embedded in this latest work, once again in black and white, chilling, jarringly realistic scenes of battle (as U.S. troops attempt to take back one of their own bases from a paranoid general determined to take out the Soviet Union) that prefigured the television footage from the jungles of Vietnam that would soon be seen every night on the news for the greater part of a decade.
     Four years later, in 1968, Kubrick would release the film that would later be cited by the Vatican as first among the forty-five most outstanding films of the twentieth century.  2001 was released in a large movie house in Times Square.  On that very same night, crowds left the movie, still somewhat dazed by its impact, to receive yet another shock. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated,shot to death on the balcony of  a motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
     The year 1968 would come to be called "the year the world ended."  One thing that certainly ended for my generation, as we shall see in the next post, was our adolescent fantasy of a marriage, even a marriage to art, that was free of complications.