Sam Rye: 'A Philosophy of Looking'

I am looking at a photograph of my brother. His arms are outstretched, like a philosopher’s. He is wearing a white shirt with red sleeves and on the shirt are clowns with crosses where their eyes should be. He is not quite two years old.

There is a tear. I look outside. Nowhere for the sky to go except my eyes.

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At the heart of quantum mechanics is this principle: what we see when we look at the world is fundamentally different from the nature of reality.

For over 200 years, the model of classical mechanics held sway over our understanding of the world. In 1687, Isaac Newton published Principia Mathematica, where he laid out the foundations for classical mechanics, describing how objects exist in the universe.

Take an object, say a stone or a body. The object has a location in space, and this location changes with time. At any instant, observes Newton, the object will have both a position and a velocity in space. If no force acts on the stone or body, it will continue to move in a straight line at the same velocity, forever. But if the stone or body is met with a force, its velocity will change, causing it to either accelerate, slow, or change direction over time, depending on the force applied.

Newton believed in his theory of the world because he could measure it; he observed it with his own eyes. And when he wrote his equations, they gave back to him the reality of what he saw.

But quantum mechanics says this model fails to describe what is really happening in our world. Quantum mechanics does not raise questions about the accuracy of Newton’s observations—it raises questions about observation itself, what it really means to look and see.

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I am looking at a photograph of my brother. He is lost within a breathing sea of wires and tubes; his eyes are closed. My dad, mam, grandma and grandad are gathered at his bedside. They each look with downcast eyes towards my brother, except my grandad, who can be seen looking towards my mam. I feel three things about this scene are simultaneously true, each figure leaning and teetering on the edge of an abyss: my grandad cannot look towards my brother; my grandad must look towards my mam because he must feel her pain and his necessity towards her; and finally my grandad does not want to acknowledge the presence of the camera—which perhaps gives more direction to his looking than any other force.

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Quantum mechanics is concerned with the fabric of reality, the behaviour of which only becomes more evident the closer you look at the world. Constituting the stone or body at the quantum level are particles. Electrons are particles, the electron orbits the nucleus of an atom. When observed, it appears to have a location and a velocity. As time elapses, the electron passes in a circle or ellipsis around the atom.

Or so the eyes make out. According to quantum mechanics, the observed location and velocity taken together do not describe its actual state. Rather than being at a fixed location and velocity, the electron actually exists within a ‘cloud of probability.’[i] Here, we are faced with the great scientific leap of the 20th century—from the certainty of classical mechanics to the probability of quantum mechanics.

Inside an atom, the probability of seeing the electron with an observable location and velocity is spread out over an area, the cloud, with the centre of the cloud being the nucleus. The closer you get to the centre of the cloud, the denser the cloud becomes, and the higher the probability of seeing the electron.

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It’s January as I write this, the month named after the Roman god Janus, whose two faces turn simultaneously towards the future and the past, snow falls outside my window. I watch people disappear beneath layers and scatter across the streets. On my desk light falls across the photo. I look at the sky, then again at those who remain there, fixed, forever looking.

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Imagine the planet Saturn. This celestial body is spherical, just like the electron in its observable state. Now imagine the planet’s rings. This floating disk of accretion is closer to the actual state of the electron (imagine the empty space where Saturn should be as the denser zone of probability). I use Saturn as an example because a toy model of the planet used to hang above my childhood bed. I remember faces in the half-dark, peering down at me to see if I was sound asleep. Sometimes I’d remember turning to watch my bedroom door close, swallowing the last of the light, and then looking up in the darkness to see the model gently wobbling where one of my parents had brushed the rings on the way out.

The electron exists as an ungraspable cloud. This cloud of probability is described as the wave function, because its nature oscillates like a wave. The wave-like motion of particles such as electrons was outlined in 1926 in Erwin Schrödinger’s wave equation, which gives the probability of finding a particle at a specific location in space at the time of observation.

Upon observation, the electron snaps into a fixed position, a process that has come to be referred to as wave collapse. In this way, reality appears to behave like a wave that collapses dramatically in the instant of being observed. Reality becomes a point that pierces us, with our own eyes.

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Roland Barthes was interested in photography not as a question but as a wound.

To describe this wound, Barthes developed his theory of the punctum. Etymologically, the Latin term means ‘a point’.[ii] Barthes uses the word to refer to the small detail in a photograph that leaps out and pricks us. It is, he says, ‘a sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice.’[iii] It’s a cast of the dice because it’s a random, subjective, and unique effect that occurs when the viewer interacts with the photograph, determined by the sum of the individual’s past. As the photograph has an effect on us, so our subjectivity causes the nature of the photograph to alter.

Camera Lucida was published in 1980, two months before Barthes died from chest injuries sustained after being hit by a laundry van as he stepped off a sidewalk in Paris. The driver had not seen him in time. A body, or bodies, peering over the wounded philosopher, crying out for help. A hand lightly on his sleeve. The blue lights of the ambulance, coming and going around the cobbled streets. A feeling of gravity amongst those left behind after the wailing sirens fade, and then the slow, affected filtering of each body back to its home. The wound discerned being how the world shunts.

•

I am looking at a photograph of my brother. He is held in both hands by my dad, who sits him on his left knee. He is wearing a red cardigan vest over a white shirt. It’s one of those professional photoshoots, so no clowns. They are both sitting on the smoothly hewn stump of a tree in the Priory Gardens of Guisborough.

My brother’s eyebrows are raised, either in delight or discomfort, staring into the light of the sky, his head turned awkwardly behind him as he cranes up to seek the face of his dad. The trees in the background are out of focus, the edges of the frame darkened with shadow. The garden holds. I have to imagine the sky.

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In Norse mythology, there are nine worlds or realms connected by the cosmic ash tree Yggdrasil. The tree stands for the universe itself, acting as a conduit between the different realms. Poetry, fantasy. Our acts of creation are nothing but a dreaming between worlds. And yet the dream always falls short of the shadow it casts. In reality, the existence of many worlds may not just be the weaving invention of our mythologies.

The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics was born in the mind of Hugh Everett in 1957 as part of his doctoral thesis. Everett did not believe that the wave function collapsed when an observation took place. Instead, he proposed that the wave function branches into a vast number of worlds, with each representing a different possible outcome to the observation.

I pause, spread my hands flat across the surface of the desk. My watch ticks somewhere beneath the skin. How do we get to this branching, one which uproots our basic understanding of existence?

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In the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there is a key phenomenon: entanglement. Electrons and everything else in the universe, including you and I, exist in a quantum state. The quantum state of the entire universe is described by one universal wave function. Between an observer and the observed, a wave function also exists, a connection between the two seemingly independent systems.

Before I observe it, the electron is in an unentangled state and exists in a superposition of various possible locations within this oscillating wave. Schrödinger knew that the electron could exist in two positions simultaneously before observation.[iv]

Upon observation, however, I enter into an entangled situation with the electron. The entangled situation is this: a superposition of each location the electron could have been seen in, and I, in that moment, having seen the electron in one specific location. When I observe the electron, each possible location in which I could have seen it in along the wave function no longer interacts in our world, and I see the position of the electron as fixed and indicative of my reality.

This interaction aligns with Werner Heisenberg’s view that the observer uncontrollably influences the system they are observing. Yet emphasis should not be placed entirely on the observer here.

Quantum mechanics illustrates that reality is intrinsically relational. We and our environment are entangled, the electrons that compose the fabric of these systems are entangled. If you were to somehow separate two entangled electrons by a distance of light years, they would still share and instantly influence each other’s state faster than the speed of light.[v] Electrons, according to Carlo Rovelli, only exist when they interact. When nothing disturbs it, he says, the electron exists nowhere;[vi] or, to put it another way, it is yet to exist in all possible somewheres.

But if the electron actually exists in a superposition of various possible locations then, by the laws of quantum mechanics, so does the observer. I and the object I’ve interacted with exist in a superposition, and within each part of this superposition, I see the electron in a slightly different location. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn’t suppose there exists one person with multiple notions of where the electron was seen, but rather that multiple worlds exist, each with one person who has a definitive notion of where the electron is.

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I am looking at a photograph of my brother. The same scene: he is being held on the tree stump. This time, however, it’s my mam who holds him in both hands. They grasp tightly around my brother’s chest, and though there is no motion, I can see he is trying to squirm out of her hold to go towards the world. She is smiling. They are both acknowledging the camera. My dad is seated to the right of them. At the moment when the shutter of the camera snaps, his eyes close.

I place the photo back in the drawer. The garden flutters featureless in the darkness.

•

I think of the passage in The First Epistle to the Corinthians: ‘For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.’[vii] So with the universe: just as the electron and the observer can be in a superposition of different locations, we can scale these local effects up to the general state of our universe, meaning its entirety also exists in a superposition. Any observer – you, I, a camera – branches into multiple versions along with the universe itself.

In the Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics, the existence of many worlds is defined by a process called decoherence. What decoherence ultimately means is the creation of many worlds that are unable to interact with each other. A siren goes past my window, the sentence trails. The wave function splits and branches into either a finite or infinite number of independent, possible worlds. But who has eyes so vast?

In looking we are condemned to our world, then. The garden is not made for holding. The tree splits under my eyes. Looking is a splitting.

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What does it mean to exist in this world? I don’t know. And I know that I do not know. Would I know in any other world?

Once, when I was young, I dangled from the low-hanging branch of a large weeping tree. My parents shouted for me to stop, but it was too late: the lower part of the branch snapped, and I tumbled to the ground. Maybe there’s a world where the branch never snapped, I didn’t fall.

And perhaps there is another, one in which my brother is looking at me and the voice you are hearing now is his. I am looking at a photograph of my brother. Look again.

And from this world, there is another where our eyes fail to see, sealed over with skin, and the closest thing we have is touching, touching in a sea of hands forever, collapsing and holding.

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[i] Sean Carroll, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, p. 19.

[ii] In its anatomical sense, the term means ‘the opening of a tear duct’.

[iii] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 27.

[iv] Schrödinger’s thought experiment, where the cat is both dead and alive inside the box until an observation is made and one reality becomes apparent for the observer, demonstrates the philosophy of quantum superposition.

[v] Albert Einstein famously referred to this quantum behaviour of particles as ‘spooky action at a distance.’

[vi] Carlo Rovelli, Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, p. 101.

[vii] 1 Cor. 12:12-27.

Sam Rye is a poet and editor who is originally from the North East of England and is now based in Manchester. He is the co-editor of scant, a poetry and photography print magazine that explores ideas of transience and sparseness in our current moment. His poetry has been published in Anthropocene, Propel Magazine, and Butcher's Dog. His debut poetry pamphlet Skeleton Reservoir Function is forthcoming from death of workers whilst building skyscrapers.