Matrix Mechanics and the Faces of God

I’ve been thinking, or perhaps obsessing, over the quantum mechanics of the image of God for the past two days. I was thinking this would likely make its way into my next daily swim report but I may not be swimming for the next couple of days and this has to come out now so I can hopefully move on and think about other things.

I am reading this book, Hegoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution by Carlo Rovelli. I had listened to it on Audible a couple weeks ago and wrote about it briefly but felt like I needed to actually read it because it was too easy to zone out while listening and miss some seemingly foundational concept and then lose the deeper meaning or impact of a particular point. I have long been fascinated by quantum physics. I am not a physicist or even a proper science “nerd” and am certainly not well versed in math. Quantum physics is built on a foundation of, and expressed in its most basic form as, math. So I do my best to grasp what is being said. What fascinates me about quantum physics is how it turns the foundations of reality on its head. It forces us to look around us and then look again to wonder how our first observation was so fundamentally wrong.

Anyways let me get right to the point of what I can’t stop thinking about. When I listened to the book before reading it (I’m only a third of the way through reading), I spaced out when Carlo was talking about the birth of Matrix Mechanics developed by Werner Heisenberg way back in 1925. I felt like I missed something totally important. Basically Heisenberg was trying to understand the orbits of electrons around the nucleus of an atom. According to observations, an electron’s trajectory seems utterly bizarre. It appears to not travel in a continuous orbit but jump from one orbit to another.

Heisenberg had this epiphany on the Island of Hegoland. Rather than try to account for a single variable or number representing this orbit that no one has been able to observe, instead he will focus and work with data “founded exclusively upon relationships between quantities which in principle are observable.” Instead of a single variable, he comes up with a matrix or table or values representing precise observations of an electron’s possible states. By basing calculations on this table of observable values he was able to accurately model the behavior of electrons. And guess what, they don’t have orbits. This was incredibly controversial at the time and remained so for a while but its widely accepted today.

The is my totally simplified summary which I can only hope does some justice to Heisenberg. After reading about this in the Hegoland book, I still was not clear and I went on the web and read over several wikipedia articles and scientific papers. I still don’t fully understand it because basically it is totally based on advanced math that captures data on photons and hydrogen and amplitudes and so on and so forth that is totally outside of my field of knowledge and I don’t have the discipline or time to learn all of that right now. However I think I get the basic gist. Maybe? Or maybe not but something about this grabs me.

The idea that he gave up on trying to explain something that no one has observed (electron orbits) and stick to what can be observed and capture those observables in the form of a matrix of values.

I’m thinking of how humans try to explain the divine. Some say God is a male warrior, others a loving Father, others a force or field that all things are woven into, others see him as an executor of justice, others give God a more merciful or graceful face, others see the divine as an emptiness from which form arises, others have a more polytheistic view where God is given many faces that include creator and destroyer. There are many particularly of fundamentalist ilk trying to contend that only one of these images can be correct. God is a certain way and has certain and distinct properties that make him God. It begins to feel like the fudamentalist camp is trying to defend the unobservable orbits of an electron. But when the electron jumps from one orbit to another, we can no longer make sense of this. It seems we are constantly taking the data of what we observe in our lives and pushing it into a theological model that can’t hold it all cohesively.

Maybe instead we need to hold the matrix of divine images constructed throughout our cultures and let our experiences be informed by this matrix of the various possible states of divinity. Many of these states directly contradict one another but these states represent an observable quality of the innumerable moments that can be witnessed across time and culture and even across our individual experiences.

One of the images I love in Christianity is the trinity. The idea of God being represented in the three forms of the father, Jesus (son) and holy spirit. Outsiders may think this is polytheistic but Christians believe that these three personalities are in fact one God. There is no logical explanation for this. It is similar to the incarnation of Christ and the idea of Jesus being fully God and fully human. That is totally illogical and makes no rational sense. Many try to come up with rational explanations but maybe it is best not to because maybe these ideas were intended to help us to transcend rational thought.

I think of the trinity when I think of the concept of quantum superposition. This is the idea that a quantum system can be in multiple states at the same time. Perhaps the most popular description or teaching tool of this concept is the fictitious story of physicist Erwin Schrodinger’s cat. Imagine you place Erwin’s cat in a box with a lethal substance that has a 50% chance of killing the cat within an hour. At the end of the hour, inside the box, the cat could be said to have both a dead and alive state. This is the superposition of quantum states. Only after opening the box will the act of observation randomly determine the actual state of the cat. Schrodinger uses this sort of ridiculous thought experiment to demonstrate the absurdity that physicists observe at the quantum level with electrons and atoms.

I think of the trinity being the superposition of three possible states. It is not until we have an experience of the divine that it collapses into an individual form of father, son or holy spirit. I see that which we perceive to be divine as having a matrix of faces and forms each utterly and paradoxically contradicting the other and one presents itself to us in any moment. Is it the external quality of that moment that chooses the individual form? The “thing” that is happening to us? Or is it our internal faith and belief structures? Or both?

Does the very fact that the divine can have self opposing forms invalidate its validity? If there is no unifying, continuous and integral quality of God that exists along a repeating orbit, does that God cease to be true? What even is this quality of trueness? Is Van Gogh’s Starry Night painting true? Well I have never seen stars look like the ones in that painting. Most of what Van Gogh painted does not look like an accurate representation of what I see with my own eyes. But these paintings touch something that I think is very true. And I have no idea why and no great way to communicate it. These paintings use images that I have never seen and connect me with the seen in a deep and moving way.

I’m wondering if any of this is making any sense. In the end our experience of moving through this world is all that we have and all that we can know for sure. Regardless of math, physics, art and myth, our experience is palpable and demands action from which the next experience will arise. Boy the lengths to which we will go (maybe I should just speak for myself) to create fictitious abstractions to help us make sense of our concrete interactions with the world. Yet the more I contemplate all of this, these interactions seem less and less concrete and the abstractions more and more real.