Physicist: Take Quantum Physics Personally to Navigate
Get the Health newsletter
Daily health & science — research, biotech, public health, the studies worth knowing. Free.
- 'Entangled States: A life according to quantum physics' is built around roughly a dozen examples where quantum concepts informed personal decisions on queerness, immigration, relationships, and teaching high school students
- A dental infection in December 2019 escalated into the author's biggest health crisis, resulting in a week-long ICU stay and triggering an existential search for cause and effect
- The 'quantum switch' is a procedure that lets a system exhibit indefinite causality, with conflicting cause-and-effect sequences coexisting simultaneously through quantum superposition, and experiments with particles of light have added credence to the idea
- Some researchers have proposed building the quantum switch into quantum computers and batteries to improve their performance, though the concept is not without critics
- Learning that multiple causal sequences can hold simultaneously helped the author reconcile competing feelings of self-blame and structural unfairness about the dental crisis, and they now go to the dentist more regularly
- The author reports for New Scientist and argues that complementing the objective rigour of physics with idiosyncratic, emotional engagement has made them 'a better person'
Why it matters: The essay reframes quantum physics from an abstract discipline into a tool for personal meaning-making, using the quantum switch's indefinite causality to argue that contradictory truths about a life event can coexist. For general readers and educators, the author models how counterintuitive physics ideas can provide emotional scaffolding for messy real-world tradeoffs rather than answers.
