Quantum, Quantum Everywhere...

Bullet points from an interdisciplinary experience

As noted earlier, I spent a week in Oslo at the start of the month in order to speak at the Entangled Visions workshop put on by the Quantum Hub at Oslo Metropolitan University. They had an exceptionally wide range of speakers, ranging from physicists and physics educators to philosophers and historians of science to artists and musicians, all talking about visualizations of quantum physics, construed extremely broadly. It was an interesting experience, but one that’s difficult to summarize, which largely accounts for the long delay between writing about the touristy bits and this post, but I figured I would try to say a few things at least before it fades too much; there is a plan to eventually make slides from the speakers available, but probably not for a while yet. So I’ll just give some very general bullet points:

Some public art in Oslo that probably isn’t quantum, but maybe…

— My talk was titled “Many Worlds, Many Stories,” and is based pretty heavily on the second section of this old talk in Waterloo. I tried to make it a little more rigorous and detailed, though, laying out more of the qualitative argument for decoherence through interactions with an unmeasured environment as the key to (my understanding of) the Everett Interpretation. I’m not sure I fully pulled it off; I was running low on time because (as I tend to do), I ad-libbbed some jokes and weird asides in the early stages. I’ll maybe do another pass at this as a blog post in the future; in the meantime, here are my slides, for what little sense they’re likely to make¹.

— I was expecting Many-Worlds to figure more prominently than it did, because I tend to think of it as the most fruitful of the interpretations at least when it comes to fiction. The notion of parallel worlds is everywhere in pop culture, so I figured it would turn up a bunch in the other talks.

To my mild surprise, though, the other presentations were very heavily skewed in a Copenhagen-ish direction², at least as much as that Nature poll from back in the summer. The first speaker, Anders Kvellestad, gave a pitch for QBism (aka “Quantum Bayesianism,” which one of my colleagues has described as “Copenhagen with a better understanding of probability”), and David Young discussed some series of artworks inspired by the idea of branching universes, but pretty much everyone else was all in on observation creating reality as The Thing. They listened politely to my dollar-store Sean Carroll pitch for the Everettian approach, but that was about it.

— As a result, a lot of the discussion leaned very heavily on quantum as a metaphor, rather than getting into any real details of the science. A number of the artworks presented used quantum computers in some fashion, but to my experimentalist-by-nature mind, these generally seemed like just highly elaborate procedures for generating strings of random numbers. It’s not super clear to me that there was all that much of a distinction between the output of these and what you could get by literally rolling dice, in terms of the art generated. The quantum content comes in only at a step or two remove, if the viewer cares enough to dig into how it was made.

— This is not to say that the high-concept stuff doesn’t produce some good bits. David Young spoke about a series of works where he used a quantum algorithm to generate random images that were printed and sealed into envelopes without anybody seeing them. Which, in a conceptual sense, leaves it up to the buyer whether to open the envelope and thus “collapse” it into a particular work³. I also enjoyed the conceit of Paul Thomas reading Feynman’s quantum computing paper to a spin qubit and looking at the pattern it makes on the Bloch sphere.

— My one attempt to really speak in high-concept art terms fell pretty flat. One of the works discussed was a piece by Alberto Valverde that talks about using fluctuations from background radiation to “escape causality” by generating a random yes/no answer to guide a decision. I noted that this would be highly affected by the environment, since a lot of the random photodetector flashes the piece uses as input come from cosmic rays, and the flux of those varies with altitude. Which I intended as a comment on the inescapability of the environment— despite the elaborate attempt to escape historical contingency, the device will still operate very differently at sea level than on a mountaintop.

I asked about this, and after the question was translated, the answer (translated back) was “It’s just a metaphor.” This is why I don’t talk to artists more.

— The most practically useful talk for me was from a couple of Physics Education Research folks talking about efforts to get more quantum concepts into Norwegian school curricula. My camera roll has a bunch of pictures of slides with citations that I definitely mean to look up at some point.

— My flight out was at 1pm on Friday, so I needed to leave for the airport mid-morning and thus missed the final sessions. Which is a shame, because those talks sounded really interesting, particularly Michael Cuffaro’s (based on discussions with him at lunch). I’m curious to see the slides from those.

Anyway, as I said initially, it was an interesting experience. I’m not sure I converted anyone to Everettianism⁴, and I’m not 100% sold on a lot of the art presented, but it was fun to see and hear about.

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So, yeah, that’s a quick report on an eclectic meeting. If you want to see whether I try to do a prose version of my talk, here’s a button:

And if you want to make a pitch for more high-concept quantum art, the comments will be open:

1. I put this together in what I think of as the TED Style, with minimal text on the slides, so they don’t stand alone super well for somebody looking at them without me talking. Or, honestly, for me looking at them a few years after giving the talk, because there was a lot of “What the hell are the words that went with this slide?” when I was dusting off the old talk.

2. And not just the guy who literally worked in Copenhagen.

3. See also the short-short story I mentioned in my talk.

4. Obvious joke: In some branch of the wavefunction, it worked…