Did quantum mechanics help create 20th century ethical crisis? – 02/28/2024 – Darwin and God

I spent a good part of the beginning of this year with my face immersed in the books of Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut. I read, almost in one sitting, your new release in Brazil, “Maniac” (reviewed for this Sheet here), and the previous work, “When We Stop Understanding the World”. The guy is good, there’s no doubt about it: they are books that are difficult to put down, with a clear, austere text that skillfully links together disparate themes. But there’s something that bothered me a little about them.

The premise (not directly formulated, but, at least from my point of view, omnipresent) of both works seems to me to be that the scientific advances of the 20th century, especially those of quantum physics, would partly explain the ethical crisis that It has been with us ever since, with the flood of totalitarianism, genocide and the ability to destroy life itself on Earth through the atomic threat.

Trying to explain a little better, and using the title of one of the books: for Labatut, this is what happens “when we stop understanding the world”. Quantum mechanics, with its long list of crazy things (the fact that something like an electron can be a wave and a particle at the same time, say, or that we can never determine the position and speed of a particle at the same time), shattered the illusion that the Universe would obey the rules of what seems logical to human beings.

Given this, we lose confidence in the validity of human reason to understand the Cosmos. And with that, the belief in our ability to differentiate right and wrong, or whatever we can do what we must to do. What remains is chaos, and the power to manipulate it for whatever ends we desire, no matter how bad they may be.

It’s at this point that I began to feel, if you’ll pardon the use of the meme, that “something wasn’t quite right” in the logic of both “nonfiction novels.” (Quick parenthesis: the books are basically romanticized narratives of the history of science, hence the classification.) And here’s what I mean by that.

If the rules of the quantum world do not seem to obey those of our everyday lives, they still represent a type of order underlying the Cosmos. An order, in fact, that has been confirmed countless times experimentally and that is the basis of the technologies we use today.

Given this, it doesn’t seem to make sense to see them as a revelation of the chaos inherent in the supposed cosmic order. On the contrary: the quantum world is counterintuitive but deeply ordered.

Either way, the books deserve to be read.

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