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CLARA:              This is Story Behind the Story. I'm Clara Sherley-Appel and my guest today is Adam Becker. His new book, WHAT IS REAL?, tells the story of the century-long fight over the meaning of quantum physics -- what this enormously successful theory, which as given us so much of the technology we use today, is actually saying about the world. The New York Times called WHAT IS REAL? "a thorough, illuminating exploration of the most consequential controversy raging in modern science," and the Wall Street Journal called it "an excellent, accessible account of the fascinating, yet complex story of quantum dissidents." Though Adam has written about science for a slew of other publications, including The New York Times, the BBC, NPR, Scientific American, and The Scientist, it is his book that's the topic of our conversation toady. Adam Becker, welcome to Story Behind the Story.

ADAM:               Oh, thanks for having me Clara.

CLARA:              Your book is about the fight over the meaning of quantum physics, but I imagine a lot of people are completely aware that there even is such a thing. Can you start by giving a brief overview of the debate? What's the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics and how does it bear on the question of what is real?

ADAM:               Basically, as you said, quantum physics is this phenomenally successful theory about the world. We can use it to predict and explain all kinds of natural phenomena, everything from why the sun shines to why the sky is blue, to why gold is the color that it is. And, we can use it to build incredible technologies including most of the technology that we're using to record this interview, and also pretty sure the technology ... well, those look like halogen lights so not so much, but like LEDs and stuff like that. Definitely need-

CLARA:              There's some LEDs in the ...

ADAM:               Yeah, exactly-

CLARA:              In the soundboard.

ADAM:               ... in the soundboard and whatnot, yeah. You'd think that a phenomenally successful theory like that would also come with a picture of what's in the world. If a theory works, then that means that it's latching onto something in the world, right?

CLARA:              Yeah.

ADAM:               If a theory just made really accurate predictions, but somehow didn't bear any resemblance to the world around us, that would be a phenomenal miracle. It would just mean it was working by accident. We don't think that that's how quantum physics works. It must be latching onto something in the world, but if you ask, "Okay, what is quantum physics saying about the world? What is the world like such that quantum physics makes accurate predictions?" The answer that you traditionally get is something like, "Shut up, that's a stupid question." That's not a satisfying answer.

ADAM:               The slightly more sophisticated versions of, "Shut up," that you get are things like, "Well, the job of physics is just to explain the ... " or sorry, not to explain to predict the outcomes of experiments, or "We don't ask questions like 'What's real in the world?' We just ask questions like, 'How do we calculate what's going to happen to system X when we do Y thing to it."

CLARA:              Shut up and calculate.

ADAM:               Yeah, shut up and calculate. Exactly. This sort of assemblage of claims is usually called the Copenhagen interpretation, named after the home of the physicist Niels Bohr, who was one of the founders of quantum mechanics. We want an answer to this question. There doesn't seem to be a satisfying one traditionally available, for many physicists that's sort of the end of the story. It's, "Oh, okay. I guess I'll just use quantum physics without really understanding what it tells us about the world," but there are some people who thought that that was not sufficient. Einstein being the most famous one, but my book is the story of the people who didn't think that that was a satisfactory answer.

CLARA:              One thing that I find interesting about this, part of the way that the Copenhagen interpretation has maintained its foothold as you tell it is by treating its failure to describe reality as a feature instead of a bug.

ADAM:               Yeah.

CLARA:              So, alternatives are scorned not just for the specific ways that they get around, say the measurement problem, but for trying at all, and that's had an enormous impact on how physics is taught. How do you and other physicists learn about this controversy to begin with?

ADAM:               First I'm going to have to back up and talk a little bit about the measurement problem, right?

CLARA:              Fair enough.

ADAM:               The measurement problem, the idea here is that there are basically two different rules for how the world works that show up in quantum physics. One of these things is called the Schrödinger equation. The Schrödinger equation basically looks like a law of nature. It's a differential equation, which like Newton's Laws and a whole bunch of other laws in physics, Maxwell's Laws and whatnot. We like differential equations. It's sort of nice and smooth, and it says that things proceed in a very deterministic and simple way.

ADAM:               Then, sometimes that rule is suspended and instead this other thing takes over called the Born rule or the collapse rule, which says that forget this sort of smooth evolution into the future that the Schrödinger equation predicts. All of a sudden something random happens, and with a certain probability you'll get a certain outcome for a measurement or an experiment. That's strange. We're not used to thinking of there being two contradictory laws of nature to describe the same thing.

ADAM:               But, the other thing about it is the rule for when to use one of these things and when to use the other one is you use the Schrödinger equation when you're not making a measurement, and you use the Born rule when you are making a measurement, which means that we need to have a really good definition for what a measurement is. And, that's exactly what we don't have. Yeah, the idea is a measurement is, "Oh, that's when you try to measure a certain value." "Okay, is it when I do it? Is it when a physicist does it? Can it be anybody? Can a dog do it? Do you have to be a human? Do you have to have a PhD in physics? Does this mean that the world was waiting for billions and billions of years for humans to show up, or like the first bacterium to show up? How-"

CLARA:              It starts to sound like the sun revolving around the earth all over again.

ADAM:               Yeah, exactly. No, it doesn't sound good. It's just a really, really vague term to have show up in these fundamental laws of physics. The answer ... and, this leads us to the question that you just asked, which is how do we find out about these things if this is not something that we're encouraged to go after in the classroom? The answer for me, and for most of the other physicist and philosophers, and people who I know who are interested in these things is I showed up in college thinking, "Oh, I've read all of these weird pop science books about physics, and they said these strange things about quantum physics that I don't understand, but I'm sure it'll all make sense once I actually learn the subject in the classroom, and actually get a handle on the math."

ADAM:               Then, I did that and that made things worse. I asked one of my professors something like, this is 15 plus years ago so I don't remember exactly what I said, but I said something like, "But, what's happening when we're not looking?" Or, "What defines a measurement? Why are things different when we make measurements versus when we don't make measurements?" And really started pushing him on this and I don't remember exactly what went down. I remember that we both got a little upset and then I do remember exactly what he said to shut the conversation down. He said, "If that's the kind of question that you're interested in, why don't you go to the philosophy department?"

CLARA:              Which, you sort of also did.

ADAM:               Which I did, yeah. I sort of said, "Okay, cool." One way that people find out about this is they keep digging, and sometimes end up in philosophy departments.

CLARA:              I was kind of wondering because you and I are roughly the same age, which means in the '90s when there was this proliferation of popular science books about quantum physics we were teenagers, essentially. Did that inform, at all, your interest in this topic, your interest in physics?

ADAM:               I mean, I was interested in physics from a pretty young age. I mean, basically my progression, and I feel like this is pretty normal too is when I was really little I was interested in dinosaurs. Then, that switched over to astronomy sometime in elementary school. Then, from astronomy it was sort of this slow slide down to physics. Yeah, I definitely read a bunch of pop science books and watched Cosmos and Nova specials, and stuff like that, The Creation of the Universe starring ... what's his name? Timothy Ferris, not the motivational speaker, the science writer.

ADAM:               Those things definitely informed how I look at this stuff and definitely motivated me to understand this stuff. I mean, I said I wanted to understand quantum physics. These books also said strange things about relativity like, "Oh, what time it is depends on how fast you're going," and things like that. That all sounded really strange. Then, it turns out the math for special relativity is high school math. It's not even, you don't need calculus. You can do it pretty easily. I learned relativity in high school and sat down, looked at the math and whatnot, and realized, "Oh, these strange things that people are saying, that makes total sense once I look at the math." I'm sure the same thing will happen when I look at the math for quantum physics. That is not how that story ended.

CLARA:              Well, quantum physics is young compared to classical physics or compared to some problems in biology. And chemistry, its still close to a century old at this point, the debate is also close to a century old at this point, Niels Bohr and Einstein had their first set of arguments over it in what? The '20s or '30s?

ADAM:               Yep.

CLARA:              So, why is the story relevant now?

ADAM:               Because, we still don't have an answer. The story of the world that comes with our best theories of physics and science matters. It matters for the science because the story of the world, the picture of the world that comes with the theory informs a lot about how you're going to practice your work as a scientist. It informs what experiments you're going to choose to do. It informs how you're going to think about the next theory, what you're going to look at this theory and try to change. But, it also matters beyond the science because the pictures of the world that we have from science inform the wider sphere of human activities aside from science.

ADAM:               I mean, science is a human activity, and like all human activities it's influenced by the rest of human activities, and influences them in turn. Yeah, science and the pictures of the world that we get from the science influence art, history, politics, culture, everything. I mean, if Copernicus and company had not made the argument and proved that the earth is not at the center of the universe, that the earth is just one planet among many. Then, by extension the sun is one star among many. Then, I think it's hard to imagine that Darwin and Wallace would have had the audacity to suggest that humans are not at the center of biological creation, that we are just another kind of monkey, well, monkey, ape, animal. That we are just another kind of animal. And, if Copernicus and Darwin, and company had not done all of that then Stanley Kubrick wouldn't have made 2001, right?

CLARA:              Do you think it's especially relevant at this present moment or is it just a matter for you of this was when I got the grant and this is when I can write it?

ADAM:               It's a little of both. I mean, I think it's important that we have an accurate view of how science actually functions. I think that that is especially important right now, because yeah, there's a lot of people denying scientific fact and doing so by making false claims about the scientific process.

CLARA:              I think that raises another question, because as I was reading the book, from the very beginning a part of me, while fascinated by this story kept worrying about the effect that it might have on people who already don't trust science, especially now when we so desperately need social buy-in to fix really big problems like climate change that we know about through science. Was that something that you thought about as you were writing the book at all?

ADAM:               It certainly was after 2016. Yeah, I mean, that's why I tried to address this a little more directly toward the end of the book. Yeah, maybe this is naïve, but I really think that the best policy, if we want people to have confidence in science, is to accurately represent how science functions-

CLARA:              Not hide the mistakes.

ADAM:               Exactly, yeah. We want to give a picture of science, warts and all. Because, the fact is that those blemishes are there. Science makes mistake. Science is not a body of facts. Science is a process. The facts that it produces or the results that it produces are part of that process, and a result of that process. It's certainly true that facts that we learn from science have a special status, and we are very, very confident in them and rightly so. Climate change is happening, and humans are causing it. And, if we don't stop that then terrible things are going to continue to happen and get much worse, but I really think that we need to present science to the public as a process rather than a monolithic, inviolable body of facts handed down from on high.

ADAM:               Because, that's exactly how science doesn't work. I think that if people have this impression of science as this monolithic, unassailable process, and then they catch wind that there's something human about it after all. Then, all of a sudden they're going to swing to the other extreme and say, "Oh, well then it's all bull." Whereas if we're honest upfront and say, "Look, we are just apes trying to understand a world we never made, and we are doing the best that we can. This process has a really good track record, even though it also has made some serious mistakes, but it's the best that we've got. And, we have a lot of good reasons to believe a lot of the things that come out of it."

ADAM:               I think that's important, because the other thing ... and this is going to start by sounding like me bragging, but it's only a little bit that. When The New York Times said that my book was about the most consequential controversy in modern science, I definitely had a couple of my friends say, "But, isn't that climate change?" I said, "Oh, absolutely not because that's not a controversy in modern science. That's a manufactured controversy coming in from outside of science. This is a real scientific controversy within science." One of the things that I like to think that my book does is it shows what an actual scientific controversy looks like as opposed to the fake bull that comes out of the climate denial movement.

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CLARA:              If you're just joining me, my guest today is Adam Becker whose book What is Real? tells the story of the search for meaning in quantum physics. One of the other things I'm interested in, that's, I think, maybe the flip side of that is that one of the legacies of Copenhagen's suppression of debate combined with the practical success of quantum physics and military and industrial applications, is this, "Shut up and calculate," mentality that we were talking about before ... and, you talk in the book about the influence of that approach on the way that physics is taught. You just explained your personal experience with that. Do you think that it's had an effect on education more broadly?

ADAM:               I think so, but maybe not in as direct a way. I talk about this in the book a little bit. World War 2 had a lot to do with this, because World War 2 with the Manhattan Project you see the rise of big science, you see the rise of huge investments in science from the military, from industry, from governments. That just changes the way that science is taught, and physics was the first and most radically transformed initially of all the sciences. But, there are other things that come out of World War 2 as well like the GI Bill. The combination of government money and the GI Bill and what not means that suddenly you get many more institutions of higher education, a lot more research being done, a lot more researchers, just more scientists and academics.

ADAM:               This, in turn, leads to an explosion in the volume of academic literature, both scientific and in the humanities and what not. You also get lots of really interesting and innovative work showing up, but this also leads to a kind of siloing. I think something that we forget a lot in academia is that these disciplinary boundaries that are in the course catalog and that are on the campus map are not written in the sky. They're not actual features of the world. There are things in the world and enterprises, and projects that we do as humans and questions that we want to pursue, and features of the world that we're interested in that mostly cannot be pursued in a single discipline.

ADAM:               I think that that kind of siloing that happened unavoidably as a result of just the number of people involved exploding, and so the relevant literature also exploding. It became much, much harder to have a deep knowledge in anything beyond your own subdiscipline. That makes it harder to look at these questions that don't fit neatly into one subdiscipline, and that makes it harder to even acknowledge that some of those problems are there.

CLARA:              Well, one of the things in some ways that I find most fascinating about your book is something that you talk about throughout, but I don't think you try to make explicit in any way, we tend to think of philosophy and physics as opposite ends of the spectrum, in terms of, in everything from employability with that degree to the way that they're conducted, but one of the interesting threads through this book is the porousness of those two disciplines. And, right, you have degrees in both?

ADAM:               Yes. My undergrad's in both. Yeah, my bachelor's is in philosophy and in physics. Yeah, but my PhD's in physics.

CLARA:              Yeah, so I think that speaks to the sort of artificiality of that siloing.

ADAM:               Yeah, absolutely. I mean, because there are questions that people go after in philosophy departments that are definitely physics questions like, "What do we do about the measurement problem?" And there are questions that people go after in physics departments that are kind of philosophy questions like things about the nature of probability that show up. Even putting quantum physics and the measurement problem aside, some of these things just show up when you do things like cosmology.

ADAM:               There are legitimate questions in cosmology that cosmologists that pursue, that don't have any of this sort of historical and cultural baggage that the measurement problem does, that are definitely questions that you would see in philosophy departments as well, and that philosophical work is very relevant to it. So, yeah the boundary is porous. I think there is a tendency in physics and many other disciplines to dismiss certain questions by saying, "Oh, that's a philosophy question," the same way that that professor did with me in college.

ADAM:               That's not to besmirch every physics professor I ever had in undergrad, many of them were much more understanding than that. It was just that one guy. But, yeah I mean, there's a tendency to dismiss these things, but the fact is we all come to the table with our philosophical presuppositions. That's unavoidable, and the best that we can do is be explicit about them and examine them. That's a lot of what of philosophy is about, and that's something that's relevant to physics. And, they used to be much more closely related fields.

CLARA:              Well, and I think also we tend to think of humanities and sciences as more generally being distinct, but of course you're not the first physicist to write a popular science book that is very accessible and very easy to read. I guess, talk to me a little bit about the process of writing it. What was it like to sit down, especially you have done some science writing before, but all short form, right?

ADAM:               Yeah.

CLARA:              This is the first huge scale narrative that covers such a large cast of characters. What was that like for you?

ADAM:               Scary. It was really, really scary. I mean, I had wanted to write this book since well before I became a professional science writer. It's part of why I went into the field. I wanted to write this book, because I'd seen that there were ... not only that there was set of problems related to the foundations of quantum physics that weren't really being addressed well in the physics community, but also that there was some sort of strange history that I didn't fully understand. I wanted to know what had happened there. When I went looking for a book on it, I couldn't find a good one.

ADAM:               I talked with a couple of friends who'd written books. Anil Ananthaswamy, in particular, was incredibly helpful. He explained to me how the book writing process worked. I sat down and I wrote a sample chapter. Anil helped me get an agent, and so on and so forth. In terms of actually doing it, I realized, "Okay, I need to find a way to make this compelling. And, these ideas are pretty abstract. I mean, yes quantum physics explains a wide variety of features about our everyday lives, like why I'm not falling through the chair right now."

CLARA:              Or the floor.

ADAM:               Or the floor, or like why my skin and bones are solid at all. Yeah, quantum physics explains a lot of things, but it's not something most people are used to thinking about. We're not used to seeing the world in that way. Even if you're trained as a physicist, it can be difficult to think about things that way. And, because there's no picture of the world that traditionally comes along with quantum physics, or at least not a coherent, well thought out one, that makes it even harder. I thought, "Okay, if I want to get people to care about ideas, one of the best ways to do that is to wrap those ideas up in stories about people. Because, people care about people more than they care about ideas generally," I thought, "Okay, I need to make this a story about people. I need to put the people in this history front and center, and then use them as a vehicle to explore these ideas and the history of these ideas.

CLARA:              Well, and it is very human. We'll talk more about the characterization of the people in this a little bit later, but I also wanted to ask you the way you present the story is very linear. Is that the way that you wrote it? Were you starting at the beginning and going to the end, or ... ?

ADAM:               Sort of. It's linear in part because the ideas are complex, so I wanted to give it the simplest plot structure that I could. Because, if you're going to be dealing with a book with very complex ideas and a large cast of characters, then at least give it a simple narrative. Also, it keeps, it just makes it easy to organize stuff, and history does tend to be one thing happening after another. I sort of wrote it that way. I was doing research for the second half of the book while writing the first half of the book mostly. I was running around doing lots of interviews for the later parts of the book while writing the parts of the book that involved people who I can't interview, because they're all dead. Yeah, I definitely, I wrote an outline that was fairly linear. Then, I tried to execute that outline, and kind of succeeded. Then, had to go back and fix things out of order, and in some cases do serious revisions or complete rewrites of chapter drafts. That was not linear. It sort of was linear, but it also sort of wasn't. I don't know how satisfying an answer that is.

CLARA:              Well, no it's interesting. I liked what you said at the beginning about how you presented it in a linear way because they're complex ideas. I think that's something that maybe a lot of us don't think about, the sort of trade of between the complexity of the content and the complexity of the form.

ADAM:               Yeah, I mean, I definitely felt strongly about that. It was actually inspired by one of the best questions I've ever seen anyone ask an author at an author reading. I went to see William Gibson on Halloween in 2014, and he was doing a reading from his book that was new at the time called The Peripheral, which I really liked. Somebody asked him, "A lot of your books have the same plot structure with lots of people converging on one object, and this is a fairly traditional plot structure, why do you do that?" He said, "Well, I did it in Neuromancer because I knew I was introducing lots of new ideas for people, and I figured if I'm going to have all of these new ideas floating around, then I should at least give people the simplest plot structure I can think of so they can follow that through this massive block of weird ideas."

ADAM:               Then, he said something and I'm probably misrepresenting him here where he said something like, "And, then it worked. So, I did it again." I thought about it a lot after he said that. I was like, "Huh. I want to write a book with lots of weird, complex ideas that people aren't used to thinking about. If I could just stick a narrative right in there in a simple way, then I can get people to care about this and follow it." Because, yeah there is a trade off between the complexity of the ideas. There's a trade off between how you're going to construct the narrative and how you're going to represent the ideas. There's also a tension between perfect fidelity to the truth and creating a perfectly compelling narrative.

CLARA:              So, tell me more about that.

ADAM:               Okay, yeah. Because that's what makes writing non-fiction hard, right? In some ways.

CLARA:              Uh-huh (affirmative).

ADAM:               You want to be accurate. You want to tell a true story, but you also want to tell a story. You don't just ... you can sort of imagine the spectrum.

CLARA:              It has to be engaging.

ADAM:               Yeah, exactly. At one end of the spectrum is perfectly fidelity to the facts, which is like a spreadsheet that lists positions of objects at different times. That's completely incomprehensible. At the other end of the spectrum is a really well told, completely made up story, which is very easy to follow but also bears no relationship to the truth. You need to find a place where you can tell a compelling narrative, without doing violence to the truth.

CLARA:              Talk to me specifically about how you resolve that tension, or how you approach that tension in this book.

ADAM:               A lot of it had to do with the characters. I figure, "Okay, again, people care about people more than they care about ideas in general." So, if I can follow the paths of individual characters and get people to care about these characters, people's lives especially, not to be morbid, dead people's lives often have various arcs that sort of fit naturally to their lives, narrative arcs. Because, you know with like the, if nothing else, a life has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Which is why it's easier to do this with dead people. You pick those people out and the danger is you don't want to make it look like these people did what they did entirely by themselves, because no one does anything ever entirely by themselves, ever, anywhere.

ADAM:               These are genuinely remarkable people, who did achieve interesting things and come up with really fascinating ideas. If you present those ideas in the context of, "This is what was going on in their lives at the time," David Bohm was on the verge of being exiled for political reasons when he came up with this really interesting idea. Hugh Everett was this prankster who basically got in a drunken fight over the meaning of quantum mechanics and decided to stick it to the man. These are ways to take these abstruse, and really wild ideas like spooky action at a distance and multiple universes, and put them into a compelling human story.

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CLARA:              If you're just joining me, my guest today is Adam Becker whose book What is Real? tells the story of the search for meaning in quantum physics. Now then, I'm going to ask you to read a little bit from the book so that we can get to know a couple of characters who really are characters.

ADAM:               Sure, yeah.

CLARA:              I'm going to ask you to read an excerpt from the chapter on John Bell's 1980 paper in which he immortalizes his colleague Reinhold Bertlmann.

ADAM:               Okay.

CLARA:              Before we start, can you set it up a little?

ADAM:               Sure, so the deal here is John Bell at this point in the story. John Bell has done some really important work in the foundations of quantum mechanics. He's taken important questions that were part of the debate between Einstein and Bohr in the 1920s and '30s. He's shown, actually, these are questions that we can go after experimentally. Einstein was right to be really concerned about these things, but he was wrong about the way to resolve these questions that he was concerned about, and has sort of inspired the beginning of a new crop of people who are concerned about these foundational questions in quantum physics.

ADAM:               But, his day job is being a straightforward, very talented quantum physicist who uses particle physics to design new accelerators and come up with new predictions of quantum field theory, and more standard physics stuff. Because, at the time, and still true, it's very, very hard to find paying work that is in quantum foundations. And, it was even harder back then. He's working, Bell is working at CERN in Switzerland, now the home of the LHC. At the time, the home of other powerful particle accelerators. Bertlmann is this younger guy who shows up at CERN around 1980. Yeah, I think that's the set up we need.

ADAM:               Reinhold Bertlmann starts each day with a tiny act of rebellion. He doesn't look like a rebel at first glance. His impeccably trimmed facial hair and his professorial taste in clothes matched the formal style of his hometown, Vienna, which has never really shed its imperial façade. Bertlmann's sartorial conformities stops just short of his shoes. His socks are always mismatched. "I've worn socks of different colors since my early student days, and I am a student of the so-called 68 generation," Bertlmann says. "And, this was my little protest, my hidden protest, to wear socks of different colors because I realized that whenever somebody sees this, they were either shocked, they said, 'How stupid, how can you do it?' Or they laughed about it and thought I am crazy."

ADAM:               40 years ago, Bertlmann's rebellion was more obvious. With shoulder length hair and an unruly beard, he stuck out when he first arrived at CERN in 1978. "An American would say I was a hippie or something," he recalled. Nonetheless, Bertlmann's open, friendly smile attracted many friends at CERN. Most, eventually, noticed his socks, but John Bell never mentioned them. Bertlmann and Bell worked together for two years on a [inaudible 00:34:20] calculation in particle physics, totally unrelated to Bell's theorem. "He did not say one word about my socks, not one word," Bertlmann recalled.

ADAM:               Bertlmann, in turn, did not ask Bell about the rumor that he had heard in the CERN canteen, that Bell had done some kind of important work in the foundations of quantum physics. "People said, 'Oh, you're collaborating with Bell? He is somehow famous in quantum physics,' and I always asked, 'What did he do?' 'Oh, he did something. You don't have to worry about it, because quantum mechanics works anyhow." Nobody at CERN could explain what the Bell inequalities are. But, one day in the fall of 1980, while Bertlmann was visiting Vienna for several weeks, he was suddenly confronted by Bell's theorem in an unexpectedly personal way.

ADAM:               A colleague of Bertlmann's came running down to his office brandishing a new paper by Bell. "He just came in waving this paper," Bertlmann recalled. "And he said, 'Reinhold, look what I have. Now you are famous." Bertlmann, astonished, read and reread the title of the paper. "Bertlmann's Socks and the Nature of Reality." The paper even came with a small cartoon, drawn by Bell himself. "The philosopher on the street who has not suffered a course in quantum mechanics is quite unimpressed by Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations," Bell wrote. He can point to many examples of similar correlations in everyday life.

ADAM:               The case of Bertlmann's socks is often cited. "Dr. Bertlmann likes to wear two socks of different colors. Which color he will have on a given foot, on a given day is quite unpredictable. But, when you see that the first sock is pink, you can be already sure that the second sock will not be pink. There is no accounting for tastes, but apart from that there is no mystery here, and is not the EPR business just the same?" Bell briefly outlined the Copenhagen interpretation and its history, explaining that, quote, "Influence by positivistic and instrumentalist philosophies, many came to hold, not only that it is difficult to find a coherent picture of the quantum world, but that it is wrong to look for one, if not actually immoral, than certainly unprofessional. Going further still, some asserted that atomic and subatomic particles do not have any definite properties in advance of observation."

ADAM:               Then, Bell brought it back to Bertlmann's socks. "It is in the context of ideas like these, that one must envisage the discussion of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations. Then, it is a little less unintelligible that the EPR paper caused such a fuss, and that the dust has not settled even now. It is as if we had come to deny the reality of Bertlmann's socks, or at least of their colors, when not looked at. And, as if a child has asked, 'How come they always choose different colors when they are looked at? How does the second sock know what the first has done?" Bell himself had answered the question of why entangled particles can't be like Bertlmann's socks.

ADAM:               His theorem and the experiments of Clauser and Aspect show that something much stranger must be going on. "Certain particular correlations realizable according to quantum mechanics are locally inexplicable. They cannot be explained, that is to say, without action at a distance," Bell wrote. You might shrug your shoulders and say, "Coincidences happen all the time," or, "That's life," such an attitude is indeed sometimes advocated by otherwise serious people in the context of quantum philosophy, but outside of that particular context such an attitude would be dismissed as unscientific. The scientific attitude is that correlations cry out for explanation.

ADAM:               Aspect's charm offensive had done wonders for quantum foundations, but indifference to the subject was still widespread among physicists. And, as Clauser knew well, there was little hope of finding a full-time job doing work on quantum foundations. Bell himself spent nearly all of his time at work doing particle physics with relativistic quantum field theory, which he knew worked very well. "For all practical purposes," as he said. Just as he had done with Bertlmann at CERN, but Bell's pressing concern about the foundations of his field were never far from his mind.

ADAM:               "I am a quantum engineer," he once announced at the start of a talk, "But, on Sundays I have principles." Bell, normally soft spoken, could turn on a dime if a visiting speaker said something silly about quantum foundations. "In conferences, he would usually say nothing," recalled another one of his younger colleagues, Nicolas Gisin. "But, if someone would say wrong things, especially on quantum interpretations, he was erupting and then making with his Irish accent very sharp comments and very down to the point. When that started, the speaker could just dissolve and liquefy."

ADAM:               This kind of fire didn't come from anger. It came from Bell's deep moral convictions about the integrity of science. The same kind of moral convictions that had led him to become a vegetarian decades earlier. While the Copenhagen interpretation was unwilling to grapple with the measurement problem, Bell was unwilling not to grapple with it. He had no patience for the vagueness of the Copenhagen interpretation and its willingness to kick the can down the road. Though he was wary of encouraging young physicists to devote their careers to foundations, he was patient and kind with anyone who wanted to talk with him on the subject.

ADAM:               "When I was asking my questions about foundations, he would be extremely nice and take time to answer," Gisin recalled. "And, when he was coming to my lab to talk, he had this red hair and this hat, and this little pom-pom on top. He was not at all looking like, you know, the great John Bell." "Bell was always smiling, and he had a weakness for non-conforming people," Bertlmann said. "We had discussions not only about physics, but also about politics, about art and so on." Yet until Bertlmann saw Bell's paper, they had not discussed Bell's work in foundations.

ADAM:               "When I saw that paper, it kicked me out of my socks," he recalled. "Totally knocked me down, you can imagine, I was so excited. My heart trembled. Then, I remember I went to the telephone and phoned with him. I was excited. He was very calm." Once Bertlmann had recovered, he resolved to learn more about quantum foundations. "I was shocked, and then I had to dig into this field."

CLARA:              One of the things I love about your book in general, which we touched on, is the way the personalities of the physicists you're talking about really come through in the writing.

ADAM:               Thank you.

CLARA:              I think that's a spectacular example of it.

ADAM:               Thank you.

CLARA:              But, Bohr is charismatic and maybe a little dense. Everett is brilliant, pragmatic, drunk and a bit bored.

ADAM:               Yeah, that sounds right.

CLARA:              Bertlmann is quietly rebellious. You build these characterizations in much the same way a novelist would, right? Bertlmann's socks are a major characterizing feature that tell you so much about his rebellious nature and his general non-conformity, the things that would have drawn Bell to him.

ADAM:               Yes.

CLARA:              So, as you're building out the characters and the narrative of this book, were you looking at novels? I mean, you talked about William Gibson who is primarily a novelist. Where did you get your inspiration?

ADAM:               That's a good question. I definitely was looking at novels. I mean, to talk about a more nuts and bolts part of my process that has bearing on this, unless I'm really in the flow of things, I will usually only write for 50 minutes at a time and then take 10 minute breaks, where I forbid myself from looking at anything with a screen. Usually in those 10 minute breaks, I will read, but I also forbid myself from reading anything directly relevant to what I'm writing. It has to be really a break. When I was writing this book, as I got deeper into it, I found that I really could only read fiction. I couldn't read non-fiction.

ADAM:               So, I was reading lots of novels and short stories, and whatnot. I was reading, well I was reading Ursula K. Le Guin because I've always loved her work. I was reading Michael Chabon. I was reading Phillip Roth. I went back and read The Great Gatsby because Michael Chabon talked about it in the introduction to one of his books, and I realized I hadn't read it since high school, and I hated it in high school. Then, I went back and read it again and realized that you really shouldn't read that book when you're in high school. It's much better if you read it after having been a 20-something.

ADAM:               The point is, yes, I was reading a lot of novels. As Annie Dillard says, what you read is what you write. It's fuel for the fire, so in that sense yeah. I'm sure those novels worked their way into this book somehow. In terms of more direct planning and characterization and figuring this out, yeah I definitely thought about this in terms of, "Okay, these are the characters in the book." They happen to have been real people, and I need to portray them as accurately as I can, but I still need to give a sense of who they are, just as much as I need to give a sense of the ideas involved and the places that people were. I mean, if I don't write this in a way that people can understand who the characters are, then it won't matter that I wrapped the ideas up in people, right?

CLARA:              Yeah.

ADAM:               If you can't relate to those people. I did think about it that way. I was lucky enough to be able to interview a lot of the people who show up in the second half of the book. When I was interviewing them, I went to talk with them in person every chance that I could, in part because I knew that I'd be writing about them and I wanted to find out what kinds of people these people were. In terms of how I did the characterizations and how I thought about it, I mean, I thought about them as people who I wanted the character to care about, and that meant giving details about their lives, making them sympathetic. Even the people whose ideas I'm not sympathetic to, I wanted the reader to care about because they're interesting people. Everybody's flawed. I definitely thought about plot structure and whatnot in the same way that we think about it for things like novels and movies.

CLARA:              I think that leads nicely into my next question, because it would be very easy reading this story to see people like Bell or Bohm, who kept hacking away at quantum foundations while the physics world and sometimes the larger world shunned them, as heroes or martyrs. I think Bohm kind of sees himself as a martyr too, which is-

ADAM:               Yeah, Bohm-

CLARA:              ... sort of a fascinating. But, it would also be easy to see Bohr and his defenders as hacks or zealots, but that seems too simple. You have this great H. L. Mencken quote about how every human problem has a solution that is neat, plausible, and wrong.

ADAM:               Yes.

CLARA:              On a human level, why do you think the members of the Copenhagen camp fought so hard to suppress dissent?

ADAM:               Yeah, I don't think that's what they thought they were doing. I mean, I agree ... I was very happy that I find a way to work that Mencken quote in, because that's definitely fundamental to how I see the world. I don't think Niels Bohr was a bad guy. He certainly wasn't a bad physicist, he did incredible work in physics. The Bohr model of the atom alone is one of the great conceptual breakthroughs in one of the biggest puzzles that physics has ever faced. And, I would say that was only the second best thing that Bohr ever did in his life. The greatest achievement of Bohr's life, as far as I'm concerned and I worked to include it in the book even though it's kind of ancillary, Niels Bohr was instrumental in saving the Jews of Denmark in World War 2.

ADAM:               Something like 98% of Jews in Denmark before the war survived to the end of the war, which is just absolutely astonishing and without Niels Bohr, it's not clear that that would have happened. He's certainly wasn't the only one who made it happen, but that's a big deal. Niels Bohr, I have a great deal of admiration for the man, I just think he was wrong about some stuff and I think that he wasn't a very clear writer or speaker. That's okay, like I said, everybody's flawed. I don't think that he thought he was fighting to suppress things. I don't think that his followers and colleagues, and students thought that they were fighting to suppress things. I think that they thought that they were fighting to clear up misunderstandings.

ADAM:               And, also you get things like people trying to protect their legacy against some bad things that they did, like Heisenberg where it's hard to know if that's what his motivation was, but it sure looks like it might have been. Or, you get genuinely evil people who were absolutely trying to protect their legacy and also kill lots of people like Jordan, who was a Nazi.

CLARA:              So, on the other side of things with people like Bell and Bohm, and [inaudible 00:47:33], again it's easy to see them as heroes, but they are of course flawed humans as well ...

ADAM:               Absolutely. Yeah.

CLARA:              I mean, I think it's interesting too ... Bell is one of the most interesting characters to me in this book, and part of that is because he does something, which it would be easy to mistake as a bad choice in that he does kind of ward a lot of young physicist away from quantum foundations. At the same time, I think he is kind of an embodiment of arguments for tenure. Keep the tenure system around.

ADAM:               Yes.

CLARA:              And, he's using tenure in those conversations as well, right?

ADAM:               Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes.

CLARA:              I can't remember who it is who he has a conversation with who he's like, "Are you tenured?" And they say, "Yes," and then he's like, "Yes you can work on this."

ADAM:               Yeah, exactly that was Alain Aspect who has gone on to have a phenomenally successful career precisely because he did what Bell ... he did the thing he was interested in that Bell encouraged him to do, but I also think that Bell was right and that if Aspect had not had a permanent position, it would have been bad for his career to do what he did. I mean, that's what happened to John Clauser. And, I mean Aspect and Clauser are different people with different career paths, and time and chance, and what not happens to all of us, but yeah. I think that's right. It is a pretty good argument for tenure, isn't it?

CLARA:              You talk a little in the book about ... this is a different track, but you talk a bit in the book about philosophy of science and particularly about two core ideas, positivism and falsifiability. I kind of want to tackle the second one, because you touch on it but you don't get in as deep as you do on positivism.

ADAM:               Sure.

CLARA:              I think for most none scientist, and maybe it's most not philosophers, we assume that falsifiability is this core principle of scientific inquiry, that you can't have a hypothesis that can't be falsified. You say it's not that simple, right? That contrary to our beliefs about the way we build and test hypothesis, we're almost never, I mean, probably actually never testing assumptions in isolation. It's always this sort of combination of things. It's the remote control battery example that you have in the book. For me, that leaves me wondering what it means to do science, and in the book you kind of say, "I don't know."

ADAM:               I think in the book I say something like, "It's complicated."

CLARA:              Right, so here you are on the radio-

ADAM:               Oh, yeah.

CLARA:              What's your answer?

ADAM:               This is definitely the right format to lay out a full theory of the answer to the demarcation problem, what is and isn't science. Yeah, I do think it's complicated, and going back to what I said earlier, I think it's a disservice to try to say that it's not complicated. And, also, to be fair to Karl Popper, Mr. Falsifiability, he thought he was complicated too. I think his views are often sort of taken and simplified as happens to everyone whose views get taken up in any number. It's the tragic fate that awaits us all. Yeah. I'm tempted to give a useless and glib answer and say that we can identify science the same way that the Supreme Court identifies pornography, I know it when I see it.

ADAM:               I don't think it's quite that simple, but I do think that it is hard to come up with a rigid set of requirements or specifications, or qualifications for what is or is not science. But, I do think that it's wrong to say that there isn't a distinction between what is and isn't science, and that we do kind of know it when we see it. Yeah, I mean, intelligent design is not science, evolutionary theory is. Can I explain to you exactly why? Well, part of it has to do with motivations. We know where the motivation for the intelligent design movement comes from. It doesn't come from motivation to understand the world.

ADAM:               It comes from a motivation that's religious in nature. It comes from preconceived notions about how the world has to function and trying to get the world to fit those notions. That doesn't work. That's not a good way to go about doing science. Another part of the problem is that that world view that comes with the intelligent design movement doesn't fit in to the rest of science in a good way. That's not in and of itself a problem, but it poses problems that it then doesn't try to solve, because it's not particularly interested in solving those problems, because that's not the point. Here's a really vague and incomplete, and provisional way of distinguishing between science and non-science. Science is a set of honest attempts to actually understand the world around us and that we are a part of. It is a social activity conducted in a community that is engaged in the same enterprise.

CLARA:              We're getting toward the end of our time. There's a lot of sides to the story that you tell in this book, a lot of potential take aways. For you, as a writer and a physicist, what's the most important part of the story, what's it really about?

ADAM:               That's a good question. I think it's a story, and I'm going to steal from John Bell who is probably a better writer than I'll ever be. John Bell talked about the great enterprise, understanding the world. I think that's what this story is about. It's about a set of attempts to understand the world amid adversity and controversy. I still think that's really important. Sure, getting a good picture of the world that comes with quantum physics, understanding what quantum physics is telling us about the world, it may not lead to any breakthrough technology or anything like that, but I think it would almost have to change the way that we look at ourselves, because it would change the story that we tell about the world that we are a part of it. So, it's really about the story of the world, the story that we are in, that are our lives are pieces of. I think understanding that story is one of the fundamental human activities.

CLARA:              Adam Becker, thank you so much for joining me today.

ADAM:               Thank you.

CLARA:              You can find Adam's book, What is Real? at your local library or anywhere books are sold. To learn more about Adam and follow along with his blog, go to freelanceastrophysicist.com. Catch Story Behind the Story the first Saturday of every month from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. right here on KSQD 90.7 FM. To share your thoughts on this or other episodes, drop me a line at clara@ksqd.org. The Story Behind the Story is produced for KSQD 90.7 FM by me, Clara Sherley-Appel. Our sound engineer is Lanier Sammons. He also wrote our theme. This is "Spooky Action at a Distance" by Dear Other. (singing)