It will surely sound weird when I tell you that the difference between classical physics and quantum physics overlaps with the difference between Christianity and Islam. Let me explain.

The religious model that gives symbolic substance to any fundamental particle is the holy water that is used to baptise the Christian believer [1]. In classical psychoanalysis this part-object is either oral (milk from the breast) or anal (excrement).

The notion of “information” abstracts the holiness of the water by a certain “quantization” but does not abolish its substantiality. The religious model of any natural or experimental medium that transfers either particles or “information” from one place to another is either the Holy Spirit as the carrier of sacred meaning, or the Holy Grail as the container of immortality, or Virgin Mary as the “lossless transmitter” of the Father’s sacred seed to his Son.

The paradox of quantum physics is that the fundamental particle is desubstantialized by the introduction of the “measurement problem” regarding the collapse of the wave function. When physical objectivity becomes absolutely dependent on the measurement, the object is literally summoned into existence by the one who witnesses it; the holiness can no longer be sustained by the substance as dictated by the Christian model of baptism.

This desubstantialization evokes the Muslim way of initiation (called “shahada”) in which the believer merely declares “I bear witness that there is no God but God and that Muhammad is his messenger” without the mediation of any supposedly “holy substance”. This bearing witness brings about a symbolic aura that can’t be embodied by any Earthly object; it can only inhere in the statement of the witness. This also reminds Schrödinger’s objection to the Bohrian “quantum jump”:

This ‘being-shared-by-everybody’, this community is the one and only hall-mark of physical reality. Not unfrequently do we resort to this criterion in daily life: I hear a humming; do you hear it too? Is it perhaps the stove or something out in the street or is it only in my ear? Well it seems to me that the Kopenhagen epistemology does not acknowledge this criterion, pays no attention to it. (Erwin Schrödinger, 1958, Might perhaps energy be a merely statistical concept?)

This recalls the difference between the Christian exclamation “My God!” to express a personal surprise at some particular emergence and the Muslim exclamation “God God!” (Allah allah!) to express rather an impersonal sense of awkwardness or weirdness about the present situation. This second sensation is called the uncanny (Unheimlich, literally unhomely) in psychoanalysis.

The same desubstantialization can be observed in the shift from classical Freudianism to Lacanian psychoanalysis, in the latter’s introduction of two new part-objects: the voice and the gaze, two elements that make up the witness. Colloquially, this shift simply means that beauty is on the eye of the beholder.

Witnessing owes to wits: The witty is the better witness than the witless. Isn’t it stupid how scientists taunt the dark matter by calling it “WIMP!” because it never shows up in the experiments where it was expected to have appeared long ago? Isn’t it absurd that there is an inflation of theories (hundreds of untestable models) about the “inflation” of the universe? Isn’t the true “inflaton” the ongoing witless baptism of countless fictional (p)articles that live in inexistent “multiverses”? Isn’t it silly how a mathematical object (E8 shown in the image) named after someone called Sophus Lie (“wisdom lies!”) would become the basis of a questionable “theory of everything”?

This is the topic of the book Lost in Math (2018) which is a true Deflaton of particle physics [2]. The author’s mission is to carefully demarcate physics and science from philosophy and religion by detecting the aspects in the scientific field that has become too philosophical or too religious. She concludes that her colleagues “spent thirty years trying the same thing over and over again, expecting different results”. She is kind enough to leave it to the reader’s wit to notice that this was how Albert Einstein (supposedly) defined insanity.

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “Dine Geçiş Formülleri: Sütur ve Südur”, “Dinler ve Ötekinin Ötekisi”

[2] Sabine Hossenfelder (2018) Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray. Also check her videos.