Like the Hegelian Dialectic, quantum physics does justice to the reality of in-betweens, the construction of reality by its participants, the limits and incompleteness of binarism, the wholism that comes from living in multiple worlds with fuzzy lines. As Peter Thompson, the Director of the Centre for Enrst Bloch Studies at the University of Sheffield writes, "The Real is not an inaccessible pre-existing Real, but rather is the product of the ongoing process of its own realisation."
In the midst of uncertainty comes strings of contingent events that pop out from quantum processes. This allows for things that seem mind-blowing to those of us still trapped in a Newtonian, Aristotelian, either/or mindset: Things can travel backwards or forwards in time. Things can be in more than one place at once. Sometimes it seems like the state of matter some thing is in (like light) is a result, not just a feature, of how we look at it. This is all covered with, occurs within, language. As Thompson puts it, "[w]hen quantum physicists try to explain the collapse of the wave function, they resort again and again to the metaphor of language: this collapse occurs when a quantum event 'leaves a trace' in the observation apparatus, when it is 'registered' in some way. Reality, among other things, is in the quantum universe a series of statements, inscriptions, declarations.
We know the oft-repeated examples of this: "a quantum object arriving at a fork in its path does not have to choose between veering left or right but travels both routes simultaneously instead—an action that is impossible for classical objects, like baseballs and humans." The problem is precisely putting into language what, in its composition, is itself so similar to language. How can we describe quantum reality when our language is underwritten by classical reality? One person with an answer to that question, or at least a proposal, is poet Amy Catanzano, whose poem “World Lines: A Quantum Supercomputer Poem” incorporates the physics of a quantum computer.
Catanzano writes her quantum poem to reflect the intersecting lines of alternate realities and loops, so that several words function as connectors for more than one sentence and several sentences are tied together fluidly. You need to see the photos of how her poetry is inscribed as part of a computer program; just reading the textual lines here won't do it justice. So look here and here. In the meantime, the lines are memorable even if they are not part of an actual quantum entanglement:
When we think as far as our world lines, our thoughts become movements,
in space, motions, time, threads curved as thoughts recording the mind writing relative,
tangled motions, knotting intricate paths like strands of DNA intertwined.
The mind of a knot is a continuous curve through space, writing woven,
locations of particles traveling as their orbits in spacetime knot particles,
of indefinite location. The world mind is a record that orbits its knotted history.
The poem, an indefinite knot threaded in a continuous curve of mind's space,
computes qubits, its world lines the braided motions of mind's memory.
The funny thing, of course, is that there's nothing completely new (or completely old or fixed) under the sun. Many poetic traditions, such as the German Romantics immediately below, are "quantum" in that they talk about how everything is connected together, including what is and what is not, and how even the most simple lines are complex journeys. From Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, written in 1790, we read:
In truth the subtle web of thought
Is like the weaver’s fabric wrought:
One treadle moves a thousand lines,
Swift dart the shuttles to and fro,
Unseen the threads together flow,
A thousand knots one stroke combines.
And from Goethe's contemporary Friedrich Holderlin, in his 1803 poem "Mnemosyne":
The fruits are ripe, dipped in fire,
Cooked and sampled on earth. And there's a law,
That things crawl off in the manner of snakes,
Prophetically, dreaming on the hills of heaven.
And there is much that needs to be retained,
Like a load of wood on the shoulders.
But the pathways are dangerous.
The captured elements and ancient laws of earth
Run astray like horses. There is a constant yearning
For all that is unconfined. But much needs
To be retained. And loyalty is required.
Yet we mustn't look forwards or backwards.
We should let ourselves be cradled
As if on a boat rocking on a lake.
The message? Thompson again: "Not everything that has happened had to happen, but now that it has it did. There is no reason for it, no Telos towards which it is heading, only a Telos of the finite moment in which we exist and from which we can look back." As a breaker of genre boundaries, Catanzano writes, quantum poetics thins the boundaries between literary and scientific, creative and critical, descriptive and normative.
In technology, particularly AI, encryption, and other computer tech, quantum physics is the gateway to being able to synthesize and analyze massive amounts of data at speeds that once would have seemed miraculous, because it turns out that binaries slow us down. A lot of technologies such as phone appending may feel instantaneous to us but across the distance of space, we will appreciate the ability to move through data at quantum speeds. Philosophically, though, and lyrically, quantum thinking also speeds us up--it speeds up the transitions our brains make from classical binaristic or raw empirical thinking into a consciousness that acknowledges ambiguities and interconnectivity as parts of our ever-changing, never complete realities.
