The Kiln and the Quantum of Relationships
By Maria Popova
Anything you give your time to and polish with attention will become a lens on your search for meaning, will lavish you with metaphors that become backdoors into the locked room of your most urgent reckonings.
In my nascent adventures in pottery, I have observed with great fascination how two different glazes, when combined, produce an entirely unpredictable result — something not greater than the sum of its parts but of a wholly different order. In the extreme conditions of the kiln, which can reach the temperature of a red star, chemistry and chance converge to make a third glaze that may turn out to be infinitely more beautiful than either of the two, or disastrous, discolored, hideously cracked with exposed impurities and cratered with burst bubbles.
This, of course, is what happens in our most intimate relationships, themselves the product of chemistry and chance. Under the extreme pressures of expectation and the high heat of need, something reacts with something, impurities are exposed and bubbles burst, each person activating dormant potencies in the other, so that a distinct third entity comes alive — the dynamic reality of the relationship — incinerating the notion of the individual self as a set of inherent properties, hinting at the relational nature of reality itself.
A century after the Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore observed that “relationship is the fundamental truth of this world of appearance,” physicist Carlo Rovelli traces the scientific path to that same truth in his excellent quantum primer Helgoland (public library), titled after the windswept North Sea island on which the twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg arrived at the idea that became the mathematical blueprint for the staggering cathedral of quantum field theory: that revolutionary description of how one aspect of reality — one object, one entity, one part of nature — manifests itself to any other. Because every description of a thing is a claim about its nature, at the heart of the theory is the claim that interaction is the fundamental reality of the universe, that there are no entities as such — only dynamic manifestations of which we catch an evanescent glimpse and call that flashing image entity.
Rovelli writes:
The world that we know, that relates to us, that interests us, what we call “reality,” is the vast web of interacting entities, of which we are a part, that manifest themselves by interacting with each other.
[…]
The properties of an object are the way in which it acts upon other objects; reality is this web of interactions.
This is why objectifying — the impulse to reduce something or someone to a set of properties — always misses the point of the objectified, and why we always draw closer to reality when we instead “subjectify” the universe, as Ursula K. Le Guin put it in her magnificent meditation on the interplay of poetry and science. The intersubjective — the dynamic reality that arises from the interactions between objects with seemingly fixed properties — is the essence of the quantum world, and it is also the essence of human relationships. Who you become in a particular relationship is not any more you or less you than who you are in your deepest solitude, because there is no you — the self is not the container of your interactions with the rest of the world but the contents.
Observing that the “phantasmal world of quanta is our world,” Rovelli writes:
The world fractures into a play of points of view that do not admit of a univocal, global vision. It is a world of perspectives, of manifestations, not of entities with definite properties or unique facts. Properties do not reside in objects, they are bridges between objects. Objects are such only with respect to other objects, they are nodes where bridges meet. The world is a perspectival game, a play of mirrors that exist only as reflections of and in each other.
With an eye to quantum entanglement, he articulates what I learned at the kiln:
Even if we know all that can be predicted about one object and another object, we still cannot predict everything about the two objects together. The relationship between two objects is not something contained in one or the other of them: it is something more besides.
The great paradox of this subject-object approach to modeling reality is that all of our descriptive models are inherently claims of an outside perspective on it, and yet they all arise from our mental activity, which is inherently interior. In a passage that calls to mind quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger’s koan-like insistence that “this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole,” Rovelli writes:
If the world consists of relations, then no description is from outside it. The descriptions of the world are, in the ultimate analysis, all from inside. They are all in the first person. Our perspective on the world, our point of view, being situated inside the world… is not special: it rests on the same logic on which quantum physics, hence all of physics, is based. If we imagine the totality of things, we are imagining being outside the universe, looking at it from out there. But there is no “outside” to the totality of things. The external point of view is a point of view that does not exist. Every description of the world is from inside it. The externally observed world does not exist; what exists are only internal perspectives on the world which are partial and reflect one another. The world is this reciprocal reflection of perspectives.
This fundamental axiom of being is, to me, the first and final proof that the measure of our lives is the light between us.
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