Quantum Physics: The End of the Linear World

“An elementary particle is not an independently existing unanalyzable entity.
It is, in essence, a set of relationships that reach outward to other things.”
Henry Stapp

It must have been a general shock for physicists in the 1920s, and it is still today, to witness in quantum physics experiments how each seemingly solid material object dissolves into wavelike patterns at the subatomic level. These patterns are not solid or stable; they do not refer to elements, but to probabilities. Moreover, these patterns do not exhibit probabilities of things, but probabilities of interconnections (9). The world changed into a multiplicity of virtual worlds of possibilities, reinforcing Leibniz’s philosophical ideas: a universe in which divergent series create and explore endlessly bifurcating paths – Deleuze’s Chaosmos.

The Newtonian world was sole and linear: it was based on a hope rather than a proof that all that happens has one definite cause and gives rise to one definite effect, and the future of any part of the system can be predicted with absolute certainty if its state at any time was known in all details. The metaphor of the world and its parts as machines failed the exam of the subatomic world; quantum physics claimed no hope in exact calculations, as the position of the particle and the moment when the particle is on that position cannot be both known.

Quantum physics introduced the notion of approximative instead of exact knowledge. Physics and philosophy introduced the world of multiple causes and effects, of nonlinear chains of loosely connected events, and multiple realities, which unfold as possibilities from the patterns of connection. Time and space, and existence in general, lost the secure basis of linearity, predictability and stability.

(9) Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum theory, wrote: “The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.”(quoted in Kapra, The Web of Life, 30) Physicist Geoffrey Chew in 1970s introduced the so-called “bootstrap philosophy”, where the material universe is seen as a dynamic web of interrelated events.

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