A Quantum Year of Turmoil

We are in the International Year of Quantum (IYQ). Can the conceptual turmoil in physics one hundred years ago tell us anything about doing science amidst the political turmoil we experience today?

The International Year of Quantum (IYQ)

How exciting! The United Nations has designated 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ). The aim of IYQ is “to help raise public awareness of the importance and impact of quantum science and applications on all aspects of life.”

This month’s Opening Ceremony for IYQ included discussions on how quantum science can be used to address global challenges and align with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. It’s a nice start for an initiative that aims “to continue fostering conversations, collaborations, and initiatives that ensure quantum science benefits society in meaningful and lasting ways.”

Well, timing is everything. Just when we are enthusiastically invited to engage with the wonders of cutting-edge science and to consider what it means for all aspects of our lives, the new U.S. administration has taken a giant wrecking ball to research and education.

Political Turmoil

Scientists are in the middle of a disorienting moment. It’s hard to grasp the systemic and institutional attack on research that is currently taking place in the United States. This includes, but is not limited to, the targeting of climate change research.

As Sudip Parikh, the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said at the opening of their annual meeting last week, “We are gathered in a moment of turmoil. It’s turmoil.”

This turmoil has consequences. It is part of a larger political agenda that is amplifying the underlying causes of biodiversity loss and nature’s decline — exactly when we should be reducing them. The three underlying causes that we identified in the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment are:

1. Disconnection from and domination over nature and people;

2. Concentration of power and wealth;

3. Prioritization of short-term, individual, and material gains.

But this is not all! The current regime is also undermining three of the four principles of transformative change: 1) equity and justice; 2) pluralism and inclusion; and 3) respectful and reciprocal human-nature relationships. It is doing this by erasing this language from research and education and removing protections.

The current political turmoil is not generating transformative change for a just and sustainable world. On the contrary, it is enabling a small and elite group to destroy nature and widen the path of plunder. Cuts in research funding, along with the termination of federal jobs related to education, national parks, environmental protection, and energy transitions, is pure folly. It has consequences for all of us.

The Threat

What is going on? History shows that authoritarian regimes are threatened by knowledge production based on independent, critical thinking. Unless research is dictated, controlled, and aligned with the objectives of the regime, it is likely to be viewed as dangerous. Why? Here are a just few reasons:

• Research involves asking questions. Authoritarian regimes suppress questions.

• Research focuses on solving problems. Authoritarian regimes thrive on creating problems.

• Research is creative. Authoritarian regimes are destructive.

• Research develops through collaboration. Authoritarian regimes develop through obedience.

• Research seeks truth. Authoritarian regimes survive through lies.

• Research thrives on discussion and debate. Authoritarian regimes depend on controlling information.

• Research expands knowledge. Authoritarian regimes limit or restrict it.

• Research empowers people. Authoritarian regimes oppress people.

• Research explores the uncertain and the unknown. Authoritarian regimes keep people in the dark.

In these unsettling times, how do we ask the right questions, expand knowledge, empower people, work collaboratively, creatively solve problems, and embrace the uncertain and unknown?

To answer this question, I’m looking to quantum physics for insights, analogies and metaphors that can help us generate transformative change that is equitable, ethical, and sustainable.

Back in Time

Let’s travel back in time to a pivotal quantum year. One hundred years ago, scientific understandings of the nature of reality were unravelling. New discoveries revealed that natural phenomena could not be accurately described by classical physics. Still, no one knew how to approach emerging and competing interpretations of quantum mechanics. Sean Carroll sums up the problem: “The failure of the classical paradigm can be traced to a single, provocative concept: measurement.”

Quantum physics created turmoil for research that was based on measurement. Many scientists knew that basic assumptions about reality were being challenged. A Nature editorial about the importance of this quantum year considers the implications:

[The revolution] did require its initiators to abandon dearly held common-sense ideas — for example, the expectation that subatomic objects such as particles have a well-defined position and momentum at any given time. Instead, the physicists found that natural phenomena had an inherently unknowable nature.

Physicists recognized that they’d need a new set of concepts to describe a quantum view of reality. However, they didn’t know what this would mean and where it would lead. In an recent article in Nature, science historian Kristian Camilleri describes how a bold paper published by Werner Heisenberg in 1925 upended our understanding of reality:

Pragmatic considerations lay at the heart of Heisenberg’s physics. He often played with all sorts of ideas until he found one that worked — an approach well suited to a period of such conceptual turmoil.

What does conceptual turmoil have to do with today’s political turmoil? A pragmatic “let’s play with ideas and see what works best” approach may not be the best response when the stakes are so high. Maybe the real lesson is that our responses should be adaptive, creative, and open-minded — and based on science, including social science.

Quantum social science

This year’s celebration of quantum science and technology is exciting, but where is the quantum social science? I ask this because the quantum breakthroughs we need now are not just technical; they are social.

Yes, quantum computing and quantum encryption sound promising. But for whom? Values and principles underpin every technology. Quantum breakthroughs have led to the development of lasers, cell phones, computers, and weapons, and these have not always been used to promote a peaceful and equitable world where nature and people can thrive. As discussed in a Forbes article on the risks of quantum computing: “The power of quantum computing can be leveraged for bad purposes as well as good, and even when organizations have the best intentions.”

It’s great that IYQ is focusing on quantum conversations, and I appreciate their call to action: “those who have insights into the beauty, power, and importance of quantum science and technology should use IYQ as a moment to share these insights with people who are less familiar with quantum.” However, I believe we need a radically different approach to social change — one that addresses the underlying causes of nature’s decline and recognizes the metaphorical and meaningful significance of entanglement, complementarity, superpositions, potentiality, and wholeness. As in oneness.

In a period of political turmoil, it’s critical that our responses draw on insights from quantum social science. For example, I would like to see conversations with Alexander Wendt about his work on Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology. It would be timely to hear from Laura Zanotti about her work on Ontological Entanglements, Agency and Ethics in International Relations. I also want to engage with Laura’s more recent work on “Cosmologies, coloniality and quantum critique,” which links quantum thinking with Indigenous knowledge. And shouldn’t we be paying close attention to insights from James Der Derian’s Project Q on peace and security in a quantum age? I can think of many other social scientists, artists, and activists with important quantum insights to share during this “International Year of Quantum.”

Action

In a climate of repression and oppression, what strategies can we use to maintain a clear and strong voice for critical and independent thinking and collaborative research?

If quantum physics is telling us that we live in a participatory universe, and that our actions matter more than we think, then those of us who care about a just and sustainable world need to take action now. Just as researchers got through their conceptual turmoil in 1925 and started a quantum revolution, I believe we have the potential to get through the political turmoil in 2025 by engaging with quantum social change for a just and sustainable world.

Rather than waiting for the organizers of IYQ to start a dialogue on quantum social change, I am going to initiate conversations through this newsletter. Stay tuned, and please share with me the names of quantum social science researchers you would like to hear from!

Let us be quantum,
entangled across spacetime,
hearts and minds as one.

— Shohini Ghose

Postscript: Writing this has been challenging at a time when many of things that matter for social justice and global sustainability are being torn apart in a frenzy of reckless destruction. Yet writing helps me think more clearly. I appreciate the subscribers who read this newsletter, as you motivate me to keep thinking and writing. I’m also grateful to all the writers in the world, past, present, and future, who share their inspiring thoughts. Word matter more than you think! One subscriber sent me this wonderful Ursula Le Guin quote:

"Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality. . . ."

Ursula K. Le Guin, from Words Are My Matter, 2016.

Image: Resource Database / Unsplash
The poem titled Connections is written by physicist Shohini Ghose