Last night I had a telephone conversation with a lady who was visiting one of my artistic friends. My friend, an American, is married to a Parsi gentleman from India and her visitor was also from India, a Hindu lady whom she had known ever since their college days. She was in the USA to visit her son who worked in my general urban region. Somehow their conversation got around to me, my art, and my study of physics. The Indian visitor was most keen on meeting me but since she would be leaving the next day, I had no time to plan a journey over to her place so we had to talk on the phone. What did she want to talk about? She wanted to know about quantum physics, and thought that perhaps I could explain it to her.

Now this is a highly educated Indian lady who had been working in industry until her retirement, and her command of English was perfect, so it wasn't like I was going to have to struggle with language. But I had never before spoken with her, and she had been given the impression that I knew far more about physics than I actually do.
"But Mrs. N.," I pleaded, "I don't know anything about quantum physics. I may be studying physics, but I'm only at a high school level. And even Richard Feynman couldn't explain quantum physics. Why would I be able to?"
It turned out that our mutual friend had told her that I went to Harvard. That meant that I was smart enough to explain quantum physics. Never mind that in my days at Harvard I studied Greek and Latin Classics, not physics. Mrs. N. insisted. Could I possibly explain quantum physics to her?

Well, I decided to try, fool that I was. I have read plenty of non-mathematical books that try to explain it, with varying degrees of success. So I'm not totally unaware of the subject. For all that follows, I beg my Friendly Scientists' forgiveness.

"Well, Mrs. N., the first thing you have to be aware of is that things which look like they are continuous and unbroken, really are not. Water, for instance, looks like it flows like one continuous thing, but it's really made of zillions of little molecules of hydrogen atoms joined with oxygen atoms."
So far, so good. "So the entire material world is made of these tiny things. Not just molecules, but atoms, which are made of subatomic particles like electrons and neutrons and protons and some of these in turn are made up of quarks." (All of which Mrs. N. knew about.)
I continued: "Physicists in the early twentieth century discovered that things behaved very differently in the ultra-small world of subatomic particles, than they do in our ordinary world of larger mass and weight. In fact, quantum physics really only shows up in the world that is tinier than the atom, the subatomic particle world. Any other situation is too big to show it. Things with bigger scale conform to quantum mechanics too, but you can't see them because the effects are far too small, so things with bigger scale work the way our ordinary world does with momentum and weight and inertia and acceleration." (That's the stuff I am currently studying, that is, classical mechanics.)

She wasn't protesting, so I continued. "When these guys in the early twentieth century experimented with subatomic particles, they discovered weird effects. They discovered that the very act of observing something in the subatomic world, changed their results. How come? Because energy, like water, also looks continuous, but isn't. Radiant energy such as light is made up of untold zillions of little things called photons. We, or our instruments, can only see things because photons bounce off things and reach us. And they do it in discrete events, not a continuous stream."
Things were getting complicated for me, but I continued.

"Every time they did an experiment on something subatomic, they had to send photons to bounce off it, otherwise they wouldn't see anything. But every time the photon bounced off whatever they were trying to measure, it was so tiny that the photon changed it, either by making it "brighter," or by shoving it out of its track, or something else like that. So they were stuck. They could only measure something by throwing photons at it, and the photons changed what they bounced into, which is what you would see. So you could only get one measurement out of it, the one that you got when the photon hit, but anything else was changed. You could tell how fast some particle was going, but not where it was at the same time, 'cause your photon knocked it out of its track." (Where is Werner Heisenberg when I need him? Dead, and well beyond the reach of photons.)

Mrs. N. was listening patiently, as if I were actually making sense. "So everything we see," I continued, "is because photons reach our eyes, we can't see without light, and those photons are all little units, not a continuous stream. Now can we change things in our larger world just by observing them, the way they do in the subatomic world? No, 'cause everything in our world is just too big. Light won't push your car off course, the car is just too big. All it will do is light up your car so you can see it. (I neglected the fact that my own car is an Electron and is always stopped by the light of red traffic photons, as well as going on a curved path when it encounters a strong magnetic field such as a Starbucks Coffee shop or Borders Bookstore.) No matter how much philosophers or religious people try to make some sort of universal statement about human freedom and quantum uncertainty or the observer changing the system and thus "creating our own reality," this only works for really weentsy scale. It doesn't work for our size scale."
"Oh," she said.
"Did this make any sense to you? I told you I didn't know much about quantum physics. I'm not a physicist. I am just a beginning student."
"Well," said Mrs. N., "I didn't follow all of it, but thanks very much for explaining it to me."
I guess that was OK then. I asked her, "But how come you asked me about quantum physics? What got you interested in it?"
"I've been reading some books about science," she said, "and they talk about it."
"Which books?" I asked. "I was reading something by Deepak Chopra," she said, "and he talks about quantum physics."

Oh, gosh. I should have shut up right there, but I didn't. Deepak Chopra is a popular Indian personality who went from being a conventional doctor to promoting ancient Indian medical philosophy and Hindu teachings to the Western world, using the terminology of science to make it more palatable to us modern types. The trouble is that Chopra uses the theories of quantum physics in an inappropriate and even misleading way, for instance telling people that since the observer affects reality, you can, too, and you can create "miracles." And he calls his system "Quantum Healing" which doesn't mean much but sounds "scientific." It makes me mad, even though as a non-official scientist I don't really have the intellectual right to be mad.

"Mrs. N," I said, "getting information about quantum physics from Deepak Chopra is like getting information about evolution from a creationist. Just because he calls something "quantum" doesn't mean it has anything real to do with quantum physics. He consistently misuses physics to make his points. There are plenty other books or sites on the Internet which will honestly explain quantum physics and other modern science to you. I just don't trust Deepak Chopra at all."

Fortunately her friend intervened at that point so that I wouldn't go on with my rant. I really don't want to insult a nice Hindu lady I have never met. One of the things I have noticed about Indian religion in our era is that it is completely permeated with pseudo-science. Most of this happens in Hinduism but I have also seen it in some sectors of Zoroastrianism and Sufism. It is an amazing mixture that emerges from the modernization of a very, very ancient country that retains its traditions. Hindu philosophy, yoga, and world-systems are explained in terms of modern physics and chemistry, astrology is merged with cosmology, and Chopra's millennia-old Ayurvedic medicine is connected with biochemistry and neuroscience. Does any of it make sense? It does if you are Indian, but if you are an American like me, steeped in skepticism and the strict separation of religion and science, it makes my brain steam.

I must not have gotten too nasty, because Mrs. N. still wanted to talk to me, and she wanted to correspond, but she didn't have internet where she was in India. Could we correspond by mail? Post isn't too fast in India, she said, but with luck it would get there. I could send her references on modern physics. Any chance I would ever travel to India? She probably wouldn't be coming back to the USA because it is so expensive and such a long trip. I suppose I might get to India someday, but not anytime soon. I just hope I didn't cause a Quantum International Incident by my response to Mrs. N.

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