In which I ask many foolish questions about the New Testament and quantum mechanics
as two separate topics, obvs
If you follow me on Twitter, you might remember that L and I set out to read the four Gospels over Christmas break.
We also (coincidentally) began a study of quantum mechanics. This is mostly because I just finished reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and the corresponding Sequences and Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and I really wanted to know how we got from “bouncing protons off a half-silvered mirror” to “the many-worlds theory.”
So we have a copy of Feynman’s lectures coming to us through inter-library loan, but we don’t know which book to read to help us understand the Gospels — and it’s worth noting that both of us are up-to-date on the content, we could tell the story of Christ and the story of Schrodinger's Cat off by heart, but that doesn’t mean we understand how either of these ideologies came to be.
With that in mind, here are my many many many foolish questions.
New Testament
Okay. So there are four authors (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John), except maybe they aren’t four authors, maybe they’re a bunch of other writers telling the story of Christ from the perspective of those four men, e.g. “I would like to present you the story of Jesus as if I were Matthew, the tax collector turned apostle”? Who came up with the second idea, and how did it gain prominence?
These gospels were written as documents meant to be transmitted to people (and in Luke’s case, a letter written to a single individual), so… like… how did mail work, in the early AD years? How did these documents get created and dispersed and, ultimately, preserved?
I’m not too worried about the fact that the Gospels differ — if there’s one thing we know about storytelling, it’s that people tend to focus on the parts of the story that are most interesting to them (and/or most compelling to their intended audience) and leave out the rest. That said, are there other accounts of Christ’s life that corroborate these narratives? Shepherds talk, after all, and kings write letters — and if these four documents could be preserved over centuries, so could others.
(THIS IS WHY THESE ARE FOOLISH QUESTIONS, BTW. THEY’RE THE OBVIOUS RESPONSES, THE QUESTIONS THAT WERE PROBABLY ASKED AND ANSWERED A LONG TIME AGO, IT’S JUST THAT I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO FIND THE ANSWERS.)
What book should we read to understand all of this a little better?
Quantum mechanics
I do not understand superposition. How can a thing be two (or more) different things simultaneously? I get that the percentage-based probability of a thing being in each of its potential multiple states should add up to 100 percent, that’s basic math, but then to say “and until you check, the thing is in all of its potential states at once” and “once you check, you create a new world” does not in any way make sense.
I saw the video where Dr. Ben Miles tried to explain it by saying “you see a man walking towards you, and you can’t remember his name, but there’s a 50% percent possibility it’s John, a 10% possibility it’s Paul, a 20% possibility it’s George, and a 20% possibility it’s Ringo.” Fine fine fine fine fine except the man had a name before you forgot it (that is how names work), and the coin was either heads or tails before you looked at it (that is how coins work), and why doesn’t the radioactive atom either decay or not decay before you look at it? Why is it BOTH?
I understand very very much that if something is waving around in the universe, you probably won’t know where it is until you look at it. I also understand that if you find the position of thing A, you can calculate the position of thing B if those two things are entangled, that’s basic math again (but the formulas are longer). I do not understand why thing A is literally in infinite places all the time until you look for it. I am not in infinite places all the time until you look for me, after all. Why are particles?
Once the physicists figured out that looking at a proton (or a cat or a coin) theoretically creates an entire new universe, why didn’t they say “UMMMM MAYBE WE SHOULD STOP LOOKING AT THESE PROTONS”? It seems like they got around the moral obligations of being accidental universe-creators by saying “actually, infinite worlds are always being infinitely created whether we look at the protons or not” but THERE IS NO REASON FOR THAT TO BE TRUE unless it’s in a book I haven’t read yet.
What book would that be? If it’s Feynman’s physics lectures, we’ve got that coming to us in the next few days. If it’s another book, let me know so I can add it to our library hold list… ❤️