Lecture Notes in Quantum Mechanics
In these dark and frustrating times, with corrupt international politics and nihilistic global business practices, a looming mass ecocide, and rulers desperate to launch another world war, I find it personally reassuring to reflect upon and learn about some of the more wonderful aspects of the human experience. There are the small things, the everyday, the existentially poignant, and they do make barbarisms from On High seem foolish and absurd. But I find a retreat into the intensity of the moment insufficient on its own. Though there is a deeper truth and power to the intensity of the immediate encounter and the lived opening up of the world, I need reassurance that groups of people, human systems, can create wonderful things, and can access a larger truth collectively.
And I want some reassurance that this can be accessed from within the Western tradition, not because I presume its inherent superiority, but simply because it is mine, it is what I come from, it conditions who I am, how I live and how I think.* Folks tend to just try and escape from the legacy of their own past and their culture's past, and often this is a necessary liberation. But at a certain level we can never really escape what created us until we realize the hidden and unseen trajectories that flow even through our own culture and our own history. We can't escape the monolithic oppressiveness of the past until we learn to see the edges where the world created and maintained by Power begins to fray. We can take those unravelings and explore them, tease them out, create with them, maybe even rebuild the world a little with them.**
On that note, one of the great accomplishments of Western civilization: quantum mechanics. Wherein we learn that the world in its most basic components can be in two places at once, action occurs at a distance, and quite probably every particle in the world is informed and influenced by every other particle, mutually and instantaneously.
Check it out, learn a little. There are few achievements of western culture that match this science, and we should treasure it while we can.
*I'm not arguing or assuming that any culture is a coherent, enclosed thing. They aren't. I would say though that given the human world is a vast series of interpenetrating encounters and exchanges, with the development of semi-coherent structures of varying scope and duration (like for instance institutionalized scientific research and education or scientific practices themselves), it makes sense to note that there is a loose statistical semi-coherence to large sets of those human encounters. These have been based on geographic and linguistic proximity, on the machinations of political bodies and forces, on ideology and discourse. But they have some meat to them, even if it's just statistical meat, a set of central nodes.
**I'm an anarchist and this is the way anarchist tactics for remaking the world sort of work. You don't fight or take over the structures of Power, you reinvent them, create experimental forms in the weak points of Empire, and replace Power with them. You can do this gradually and hope for an evolutionary approach, you can try it quickly and hope for a reconstruction of the world by worker takeovers or mass exodus to ecovillages. Regardless, resistance is only secondarily oppositional. It is primarily creative.
Honestly, my interest in quantum mechanics lies in the fact that it seems to embed freedom in the very fabric of matter. Freedom may be too fuzzy a word- indeterminacy, a generative creativity perhaps. I can't think of a really good way to express it, but there is something liberating in learning that the heart of matter evades the Gaze so to speak...