Living with Ambiguity

The quantum mechanics conundrum of Schrödinger’s Cat¹ is not an actual physics experiment but a famous thought experiment about the state of human knowledge and observation. Basically, it says that the universe goes on about its business and doesn’t reveal itself unless human beings, our active intelligence at work, actually stop and look. And sometimes, at least in the subatomic realm, the mere act of observing interferes with the outcome—as when the detection of a subatomic particle in flight by an instrument using a beam of photons interferes with either that particle’s position or its direction.² So some things, at the most remote scales, are truly unknowable.

I would posit that the ambiguity of quantum mechanics has a lot more to do with everyday life than we normally admit. We are always faced with situations where what’s going on and what we know about it are separated. For example, did I get the promotion? Somewhere on one of the upper floors someone, or a group of someones, knows who got the nod for the job, but there’s no way—at least, no ethical way—of finding out until they announce it. And if you find out before it’s announced, that will likely change the decision. Does she love me? She knows, or maybe she doesn’t know yet, but there no way for you to know until she declares herself by word or action. And your pestering her for an answer would change the relationship. Will the jury find me guilty or not? Again, the twelve members of the jury know, or soon will know, but you won’t find out until the verdict is read in court. And if you learned the verdict ahead of time, it would cause a mistrial.

In each of these instances, from the time the question arises until you open the lid and observe the cat, the question remains both “yes” and “no” at the same time. Both choices are in a state of superposition—at least as far as you are concerned—until you learn the answer and the two states are resolved into one. This is not a question of probability, although you can take odds or make bets with yourself about how you think the question will be resolved. But all of your weighing of factors and listing of pros and cons will not make a bit of difference when the question itself lies in the hands of others, of the management team, the girl, the jury … or the Geiger counter attached to the vial of poison.

This is the sort of ambiguity we have to live with all the time. In most cases, the superposition will resolve itself eventually. But sometimes the company’s fortunes change and the job is never awarded or announced. Sometimes the girl moves away or dies before she can accept or reject you. (And sometimes she says “yes” when what she means is “maybe” or “wait and see.”) Sometimes you get a hung jury, no verdict, or a mistrial. Some issues may never be resolved in your lifetime.

For example, I’ve always wondered about the true story of the Kennedy assassination. Did Oswald act alone out of disaffection, or was he a plant by the KGB after the embarrassments of the Cuban missile crisis and Bay of Pigs invasion? Did Jack Ruby kill Oswald out of patriotic sentiment, or was he sent in by the CIA to keep the lid on a foreign decapitation action that might have led to Congress declaring World War III? The entire Warren Commission report has been unsealed by now, years ahead of the actual date, due largely to the Freedom of Information Act. The commission’s findings suggest that Oswald and Ruby both acted alone, and supposedly there was no evidence of a coverup or international involvement. Still, I wonder. Since that’s as far as the investigation went, despite 552 witness depositions, 888 pages of documentation, and 3,100 exhibits, we will never know who outside of persons in the immediate U.S. might have been involved. So, in my mind, “Russian plot” and “angry gunman” remain in superposition, as do “CIA coverup” and “angry patriot.” At this point we will probably never know.

Another example of ambiguity is the mystery of the universe’s origin. When you rewind the expansion of the galaxies that we observe back over the 13 billion years of the universe’s calculated existence, you end up with a putative point, a tiny dense particle that exploded in the Big Bang. That is supposedly our cosmological creation story. But if you expand the observable universe from a single point to its current size, even allowing for everything to move at light speed, the calculated radius is smaller than the universe in which we find actually ourselves. This problem was supposedly corrected by the “inflationary period,” proposed by cosmologist Alan Guth in 1980, in which the whole shebang accelerated instantly a few microseconds after the Big Bang, so that it went from something with a radius of less than a subatomic particle to—and here various calculations give different answers—a cloud of matter somewhere between the size of a grain of sand to something on the order of nine meters in diameter. And then it all continued to expand normally from there.

A third example of the currently unknowable—although not for lack of trying to detect it—is the relationship of matter and energy in the observable universe. From the way that the stars in spiral galaxies spin around their center—as if they were painted on a disk, rather than freely orbiting in the void—it would seem that these galaxies have more gravitationally bound material in them than the matter that shines brightly as stars. A lot more, as in several times as much. This is the “dark matter” that plagues cosmology. Either galaxies contain much more dust, gas, and both central and primordial black holes than our observations account for, or the universe is permeated by particles that affect gravity but are otherwise invisible and undetectable in every other way. And then, the universe itself is not only expanding, as if still impelled by that initial Big Bang explosion, but also its speed of expansion is accelerating at an alarming rate. So either the vacuum of space contains a mysterious force that increases with space and distance—a “dark energy” that is otherwise undetectable in our immediate neighborhood—or we don’t understand the basic structure of the universe and the real nature of the effects we observe as “space,” “time,” and “gravity.”

We can theorize about these things, but until we create better instruments and take better measurements, I think we have to live with the ambiguity of not actually understanding the universe. Many possibilities are in superposition, and not all of them can be true.

And finally, on the human scale, is the matter of human life, spirit, and what may lie on the other side of death. Is there a God or not? Do we vanish at death, like a candle flame when it’s blown out, or does some part of us—soul? ghost? brain wave? personality? memory?—exist for a time or perhaps for eternity? And there you can theorize, rationalize, believe, or doubt all you want, but only the actual experience of death will reveal the answer. And by then it may be too late to do anything about it.

Given all of this, and the example of Erwin Schrödinger’s cat to begin with, I must remain comfortable with ambiguity. I must accept that some things cannot be known until they are revealed, that others may not be revealed in my lifetime, and that some may never be revealed to any of us, no matter how long we live.

1. For those who do not know it, you imagine putting a cat into a box with a vial of cyanide and a striking mechanism that will break the vial and kill the cat when triggered by a random event, such as the decay of a radioactive element. Then you close the lid. You have no way of knowing whether the particle has decayed and the cat was killed until you actually open the lid again. So, from your perspective, the cat is simultaneously in two different states—called a “superposition”—of being both alive and dead. This composite state is not resolved until you open the lid, and then the cat is either alive or dead. But all of this pertains only to you, as the observer; for the cat, the effects are more immediate.

2. However, this question of observational interference is not part of the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment.