Opinion | No absolutes, no certainty: welcome to life in a quantum world (aka Trump’s world)
- Andrew Sheng says the US leader’s erratic behaviour in fact illustrates some of the principles of quantum physics that more accurately describe the physical world and human behaviour. When old rules don’t apply, new thinking is required
Most of us use the term quantum to mean anything we cannot understand. The reason we find quantum concepts weird is that they do not conform to normal logic. As Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli explains it, “Reality is not what it seems.”
Human beings live at the macroscopic scale, which we observe from daily life. We like stability and order. But at the beginning of the 20th century, Einstein and Niels Bohr changed the way physicists thought about how nature behaved.
Quantum physics evolved from the study of the behaviour of atoms at the microscopic scale. Order is only one phase in the process of evolution. And, since the 1980s, quantum science has expanded beyond physics to neuroscience, information computing, cryptography and causal modelling, with great practical success.