Quantum Meltdown

I picked up a new (used) book on quantum mechanics today. Every time, I forget how stressful it is to read such things. It's such fantastic stuff, and I'm so far from being able to understand it... For me, everything is a mystery—and the more I learn the more I realize I don't understand.

A couple of weeks ago it struck me that I don't even understand the mathematics I learned in grade school. I read Adam Cadre's article about trying to teach math to inner-city school kids, where he remarks on how they just don't seem to 'get it', even with such supposedly simple things as negative numbers. And then I thought, but I don't understand negative numbers either! I may be better equipped to get through life than those kids because at some point I memorized a whole list of rules to use when dealing with numbers: a negative times a negative is a positive, a positive plus a negative is the same as a positive minus the absolute value of the negative, etc. But I never learned—and this is what frustrates me the most, that nobody ever pointed out to me that I didn't know, or that there was even a question to be asked on the matter—just what a negative number was.

Positive numbers I feel I have some grasp of, through reading Bertrand Russell; they are sets of sets which have certain properties. One of those properties is their adherence to Peano's postulates, which govern progressions of symbols—but so far it's arbitrary just which symbols you use for the progression. It could be "0, 1, 2, 3 , ..." or "#, %, ^, ..."; it doesn't matter. Negatives, it seems, are a whole different story. It's not just a matter of sticking the little symbol on a number like a Post-It note. (After all, a Peano progression could be "-2, -5, 7, -&, *, -#, ...")

So I tried to find out what was going on, and it turns out (quite naturally, I suppose) that all the simple explanations are more or less just restatements of the same rules I learned in grade school. They aren't explanations in the sense that I was looking for. And the complicated ones, which may contain what I want to know, are far too complicated for me to even begin to understand. I never learned the complicated ways of thinking required to conceptualize the problem, because no one ever told me it was a problem, or taught me how to look for a solution.

The same is true for so many supposedly "simple" aspects of the universe: what is time? What does it mean to say that something happens "after" or "before" something else? How can something "cause" something else, over time (since cause is supposedly, although I don't know how to understand that either, "before" effect)? What is it about time that makes it able to transmit (if that's what it does) causes?

*Wham!* Here we are at quantum mechanics. Energy moving in four-dimentional space-time, the quantized structure of the universe. Particles having integer or half-integer spins, those integer values themselves determined by the nature of what it is to be a number in this universe. All this directly connected, without even a stretch of the imagination, to the basics of multiplying negative numbers and all those other "simple" concepts I was supposed to learn years ago.

(And lets not even get into geometry, which *wham!* becomes advanced topology—the triangle equation "a^2 = b^2+c^2", which I learned in grade school, can only be understood in the context of the fundamental topological properties of space and the way distributed values in space-time can and cannot be related given a certain mathematical model of the universe.)


And at this point my brain goes into meltdown and I end up terribly depressed and on the verge of tears.

I want to know. I want to understand things. But it's all so connected; how can you understand any little bit of it without understanding the whole? And how can you understand the whole when you are in fact part of that whole, immersed in it and affecting it even by thinking about understanding?

This must be the insight that the Buddhists cherish: you can't, so don't try. The best you can do is recognize your ultimate limitations and try not to hold too dearly to the sense of yourself as an isolated phenomenon trying to make sense of a universe that is external and distinct from your efforts. Become One, and know that you won't understand but at least you might be content; and not so often be brought to tears by a book on quantum mechanics.

I'm right there with them, baby. I grok. But it's not so easy to bring these instincts under control. At times, I think I can almost do it. I can see a light go on and think the affirmation "yes, it has gone on" or see a bird flying and merely note its passing, being pleased if light or bird expresses a particular beauty or harmony of form and timing. But far more often comes the sudden pain behind the eyes of not knowing—of failing to understand the essential nature of light and electricity, or of being too limited to see how the pattern traced by the bird's wings is dictated by the formula of the universe (from the kinetics of it physiology to the fundamental laws governing mass and acceleration).

It's so hard to make that crucial step away from wanting to possess the laws of reality towards a joyful embrace and acceptance of that Law. To stop knowing and start being. To be as the moon reflected in the pool of water; to realize that the path I have been running wildly to follow can in fact be found merely by standing still.