Quantum Physics and Photography: A Confession

It’s bleak, rainy Monday in New York, and my shoes are damp from my walk from Grand Central to our office on Broadway. I’ve also got a pile of work to get through. So there is no way I should be attempting to write about quantum physics. But a recent story about the origin of the universe got me thinking about how dangerous it is to know a little about science. Especially when it comes to thinking about photography and writing about photography. Stay with me…this could get ugly.

The story I’m referring to started in the magazine New Scientist, which covered a recent paper written by Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University. The magazine and a Brit newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, both caught onto an observation that Krauss made at the end of his paper, about the Universe’s fate. You can read Kruass’s paper here, or, if you trust a former English major to guide you through the weird realm of quantum physics, you can read on.

The basis for Krauss’s observation begins with the fact that the universe’s birth in the Big Bang originated from a quantum state. I won’t describe that state because I can’t. But in quantum physics the ordinary, day-to-day rules of our world just don’t apply. In a quantum mechanics, for instance, things can exist in several different ways (or states) at once. They can, that is, until they are observed—then all those various states collapse down into the one “reality” that was observed. You may have seen this particularly weird science explained on NOVA, and if so the famous example of Schroedinger’s cat was probably mentioned. Go here to read about that strange feline.

At any rate, Krauss’s point was that our universe, having been born from a quantum state, actually existed as a “probability wave” (a system of various physical states). Thus, it could have several possible life spans. But in 1998 scientists made an observation of light from a supernova, from which they deduced the existence of dark matter and the universe’s possible age. That observation collapsed all the other theoretically possible universes into a single reality. What if that reality—that state of existence that we observed—proved to be a universe with a shorter life span that other possibilities? Could man have in effect shortened the existence of the universe by observing and measuring it?

That sounds pretty scary, which is why the Daily Telegraph’s headline for its story was “Mankind Shortening Universe’s Life.”

In fact, that’s a pretty ridiculous idea, when you consider this issue in cosmological terms. But it has the appeal of providing one more apocalyptic thing for all of us to worry about. For the future of our species, however, it would be better just to turn your computer off at night to save energy.

Now that I’ve explained quantum physics for you, let me tell you what this story has to do with photography. Nothing really, except in my own guilty conscience as a writer. I learned just enough about quantum mechanics in my college years—I took a “physics for poets” course—to enable me to refer to Heisenberg’s Theory of Uncertainty far too frequently. That was bad enough in personal conversations, but it was terrible when I began writing about photography.

As a writer looking at the art of photography, I just couldn’t help but draw analogies to quantum mechanics—the fact that the world exists as something that on its own is essentially undefined, until a photographer comes along with his camera to observe it and, through that observation, to give it meaning. Horribly, I’ve even gone further, wondering whether my observation of the photographic act was in fact changing the nature of the art. It's a really seductive line of thought, and there are times when I thought it  explained everything about how photography has affected the world.

I am not alone in this misuse of science. I have seen other writers use the analogy. That is no excuse for what I have done. We know well what can happen when journalists with a smattering of knowledge and a gift for writing frightening headlines take on complicated science—suddenly we are responsible to ending the entire universe. I feel a responsibility now to stop referring to quantum mechanics when writing about photography. As a writer and an observer of the art of photography, it's always better to stop thinking and instead to talk to the people who take pictures. It's only through their stories, I believe, that we can learn anything worth knowing. From now on, I’ll observe more and think less. By the way, the photo above, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, shows a distant nebula in deep space. No visual analogies will be drawn here.
--David Schonauer

Comments

[Jose]

absolutely wonderful. big problem when a poet starts making this kind of observations. althogh, far less traumatic when politicians do them. wonderful.

[David Schonauer]

Thanks. Now you've got me thinking about Washington, which leads me to black holes, and I'm right back where I started.

[Kelvin Skewes]

Damn clicking through I though this article was going to be about imaging sensors and the photo electric effect, haha

[David Schonauer]

Sadly, I know even less about that stuff than I do about quantum theory.

[cristina]

i just found this article and i loved it! i love quantum theory, even though my interpretation is a little different.
i'd like to know more about how you think photography can change the nature of the art. can you talk a bit more of it?
anyway, great post!

[Sybil Wisdom]

We're fucked! ;-)