…I would like to say something about the alienness of quantum-mechanical reality. It is no accident, I would maintain, that quantum mechanics is so wildly counterintuitive. Part of the nature of explanation is that it must eventually hit some point where further probing only increases opacity rather than decreasing it. Consider the problem of understanding the nature of solids. You might wonder where solidity comes from. What if someone said to you, “The ultimate basis of this brick’s solidity is that it is composed of a stupendous number of eensy-weensy brick-like objects that themselves are rock-solid”? You might be interested to learn that bricks are composed of micro-bricks, but the initial question—“What accounts for solidity?”—has been thoroughly begged. What we ultimately want is for solidity to vanish, to dissolve, to disintegrate into some totally different kind of phenomenon with which we have no experience. Only then, when we have reached some completely novel, alien level will we feel that we have really made progress in explaining the top-level phenomenon.

That’s the way it is with quantum-mechanical reality. It is truly alien to our minds. Who can fathom the fact that light—that most familiar of daily phenomena—is composed of incredible numbers of indescribably minuscule “particles” with zero mass, particles that recede from you at the same speed no matter how fast you run after them, particles that produce interference patterns with each other, particles that carry angular momentum and that bend in a gravitational field? And I have barely scratched the surface of the nature of photons! I like to summarize this general phenomenon in the phrase “Greenness disintegrates.” It’s a way of saying that no explanation of macroscopic X-ness can get away with saying that it is a result of microscopic X-ness (“just the same, only smaller”); macroscopic greenness, solidity, elasticity—X-ness, in short—must, at some level, disintegrate into something very, very different.

I first saw this thought expressed in the stimulating book Patterns of Discovery by Norwood Russell Hanson. Hanson attributes it to a number of thinkers, such as Isaac Newton, who wrote, in his famous work Opticks: “The parts of all homogeneal hard Bodies which fully touch one another, stick together very strongly. And for explaining how this may be, some have invented hooked Atoms, which is begging the Question.” Hanson also quotes James Clerk Maxwell (from an article entitled “Atom”): “We may indeed suppose the atom elastic, but this is to endow it with the very property for the explanation of which…the atomic constitution was originally assumed.” Finally, here is a quote Hanson provides from Werner Heisenberg himself: “If atoms are really to explain the origin of color and smell of visible material bodies, then they cannot possess properties like color and smell.” So, although it is not an original thought, it is useful to bear in mind that greenness disintegrates.

See Also: