Quantum of doubt

When I was a teenager, I hated physics. And I sucked at it too. I remember one time having to calculate the amount of air pressure within a sealed water bottle. Triumphantly I quickly wrote down: 0. Because, I reckoned, since there is a cap on the bottle, that prevents the pressure from the outside air getting into the bottle. Of course, I was wrong. But I remember sharply - yes, with all the sharpness you can expect from a 14-year-old boy who was publicly laughed at by his alcoholic physics teacher for that answer - that no one bothered to explain why I was wrong. I just sucked at physics (like I sucked at geography or musical education) and that was that.

Today I know that I didn’t hate physics because I sucked at it, but because nothing we were ever taught in high school physics was interesting enough for me to want to try and be better at it. Indeed, for our class (that got only one hour of physics a week) the most interesting chapters were dropped with the message ‘You guys won’t understand this anyway’. And so physics became a kind of applied mathematics. All I remember us doing was calculating things like how quickly a drop of water falling from a cloud would hit the ground (remember F_z?). For someone like me, who was basically only interested in stories and therefore forever looking for the why behind everything, it was torture. Because no one ever talked about the whys. Physics, from the Greek word for ‘the things of nature’, should be about explaining how and why our physical world behaves the way it does. But we never heard anything about that. I guess if you asked our teachers they would have said that that was way too difficult for us.

Yet one year ago, probably almost to the day in fact, I was waiting with Fred for a Japanese train to arrive (Japanese trains are never late, so we must have been early) and I was listening to him explaining Einstein’s relativity theory and I realised that, when properly explained, even the most fundamental physics are not difficult at all. With ever growing eyes and ears and even brain, it seemed, I suddenly understood why distance and time are ultimately relative. I still rank that very moment firmly within the top five of interesting insights I’ve ever had. For one, because Einstein’s discovery is mind-blowing, but also because I realised then and there that physics can be interesting. In fact, it’s probably the most interesting thing there is.

Now yesterday evening I had another ‘physical’ experience, so to say, while watching the BBC documentary ‘A Night with the Stars’ (watch it here on YouTube). In the program, Manchester University physics professor Brian Cox explained the rudimentary elements of quantum theory which accounts for just about everything, so it seems. It answers questions like why it is that even though atoms consist of more than 99,9% empty space, you don’t fall through your chair while reading this. Or why it is when I rub my hands, every atom in the universe instantly changes ever so slightly (something to do with energy levels of electrons). Or why you can put something in a box, preferably a rather small one, wait a while (okay, a rather long while) and have a reasonable chance that whatever you put in the box will not be there anymore when you open it. Fascinating stuff, really, discovered by mostly young researchers who must have had a brain running on kerosene.

In fact, the longer I watched the documentary, the more I started thinking about these geniuses of quantum theory, people like Max Planck, Wolfgang Pauli or Werner Heisenberg, and the amazing discoveries they made. And I must confess that suddenly I was insanely jealous of them.

Indeed, being in academic research myself (but about literature for God’s sake!) I suddenly felt like an imposter. Really, I asked myself, has any scholar in the humanities ever produced anything as staggeringly true as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (pun not intended)?

I mean, just look at it. Even if you don’t understand it (like me), you have to realise one thing. This is a mathematical formula, which means that it is universally true: always and everywhere, for every fucking particle in the whole Goddamn universe!

Indeed, nothing we scholars in the humanities will ever put down about anything, no matter how hard we research it and how much we think about it, will be able to boast a fraction of the value Heisenberg’s discovery. And that’s a bit of a blow. Especially since no one in humanities and particularly in my small field seems to care very much about this.

Sure, we can’t all be Nobel Prize winners and research in the humanities is fundamentally different to physics, but what annoys me is that lately it seems no one around me is truly trying to push the boundaries of what we know anymore. Academic research should be about formulating, testing and refining hypotheses in an open, but ever critical environment. Yet lately, it seems that a lot of what I see in my small field boils down to formulating clichés, testing the limits of everyone’s patience, refining the art of looking smart in a self-important, but ever empty environment.

After all, we might have been the people who invented the names ‘alpha’ and ‘beta sciences’, but after yesterday, I’m having real doubts about the value judgement seemingly implied in this alphabetical order. Because I seriously ask myself: is what I’m doing as good (for lack of a better term) as what a physicist does?

Truth be told: I’m not so sure anymore…