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THINKING QUANTUM
a
DAVID FINKELSTEIN
a
Georgia Institute of Technology , Atlanta, Georgia, 30332, USA
Published online: 21 May 2007.

To cite this article: DAVID FINKELSTEIN (1993) THINKING QUANTUM, Cybernetics and Systems: An International Journal, 24:2,
139-149, DOI: 10.1080/01969729308961704

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 Cybernetics and Systems: An International Journal. 24: 139-149. 1993

THINKING QUANTUM

DAVID FINKELSTEIN
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Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332,

USA

First. I'd like to apologize for presenting the English version of this talk. I
myself hate dubbed films; I much prefer subtitles. But the original version
was in mathematics, and I was assured by the organizer of this meeting that
not all of the audience would be fluent in that language and asked to provide
a running translation. Unfortunately, mathematics is much less redundant
than ordinary language. It resembles poetry much more than prose. in this
respect. And it's even harder to translate. So please take my words with a
certain caution, and recognize that someone else might use rather different
words for the same ideas.
I want to talk about where the idea of endophysics came from. It comes
from an attempt to understand quantum theory. Let me say a little about what
quantum theory is.
Quantum theory is the theory we use today to understand the microphys-
ical and microbiological domains. It's an enormously successful theory. with
no significant competitor. The main thing to understand about the quantum
theory is that all previous physical theories have dealt with being, and quan-
tum theory deals with becoming. Let me explain this:
In prequanturn physics, every object of study. every system, has some-
thing called a state. The sharpest possible experiment you can do with such a
system is to prepare it in one state and then look to see if it's in another.

Edited transcript of a lecture held at the Ars Electronica on June 23, 1992, in Linz,
Austria.

Copyright © 1993 Taylor & Francis 139

0196-9722/93 $ 10.00 + .00
 140 . D. FINKELSTEIN

That's called a transition. A transition is a kind of elemental becoming, and

it's defined in all prequantum physics by two beings, two states of being,
two states. The experiment will fail if those two states are different. It is
guaranteed to succeed if they are the same. A state is a result of the past and
it virtually determines the future. In quantum physics, there are no such
things. The input and output parts of an experiment are described not by
states of being, points, but by things that have a directional element, direc-
tions in a space of as many dimensions as are appropriate to the system. And
this can be a very large number indeed. An experiment is guaranteed to
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succeed only if the two directions are exactly the same. It is guaranteed to
fail only if the two directions are exactly orth~gonal. In between, the theory
does not predict whether the experiment will succeed or fail. It tells you to
go and look if you really want to know. The theory states its own incom-
pleteness. The theory impels-it does not compel. This is more like astrol-
ogy than the physics that came before quantum physics.
This idea, that becoming is prior to being, is not new. The Bible pre-
cedes the beings of earth and heaven with an act of creation, an elemental
becoming. The word "physics" itself comes from the Indo-European root
for "becoming." More recently, philosophers like Krishnamurti and physi-
cists like David Bohm have insisted that being is an illusion and that the
actuality is.change, although they do not use the interpretation of quantum
theory thatI'm presenting here.
Despite its unblemished record, most of the quantum founders, includ-
ing Einstein, de Broglie, Schrodinger, and Dirac, regard the quantum princi-
ple as fundamentally wrong. And although the quantum theory is now over
65 years old, there is still much debate over its interpretation. This is be-
cause the quantum theory contradicts a world view that has dominated phys-
ics since Descartes. Even after 65 years, it still seems too strange to be taken
seriously. Each morning I have to go through the whole thing and reassure
myself, no, it's not totally wild to proceed on this road. Most physicists
today have used quantum theory to compute the results of experiments and
deny that they understand it. Feynman, for example, said that if you try to
understand quantum theory, you will fall into a black hole and never be
heard from again.
This is a report from inside that black hole. It does not yet prove Feyn-
man quite wrong. Nevertheless, I would like to share the little that I have
found so that other wanderers can take up from where I leave off. Now I
think there are two main directions for the further extension of quantum
physics today. One is to the very small, which is the same as very high
 THINKING QUANTUM 141

energy. for example. to gravitational quanta or gravatons. The character of

parameters for this domain were estimated by Planck. We speak of distances
like 1O-3s m, times of 1O-4s s, and masses of particles on the order of 10- 8
kg. This is actually what I am spending most of my time on nowadays. but
it's not what I am talking about today.
The other problem. the other extension of quantum theory that has to be
carried out. is to the very large systems, perhaps to the largest system. the
universe. And this is where endophysics comes in. Quantum theory deals
only with experiments done by some huge system, which I call the exosy-
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stem. on some tiny system, called the endosystem-for example. experiments

done by a person on a photon, a particle of light. It has to be that way. so that
the exosystem can have some separate part on which it can record each
possible outcome of the experiment. For example, in a spectroscope. there is
a separate piece of fum for each possible frequency that the photon might
have. The exosystem has a whole variable. and therefore a whole range of
dimensions, for each single dimension of the endosystem being determined.
As a result. the number of dimensions of the exosystem increases exponen-
tially with the number of dimensions of the endosystem.
The idea of an inconspicuous observer. looking at some system without
disturbing it. is totally ridiculous in the face of such estimates.
The exosystem must also include an entropy dump. a garbage dump.
Entropy measures the number of possibilities. When we diminish the num-
ber of possibilities for the endosystem that we are observing. inevitably we
increase the number of possibilities for ourselves. When the number of pos-
sibilities of the endosystem decreases, then that of the exosystem increases.
Because of these two things. we cannot do sharp experiments on the
universe. There is no external film or notebook on which we can record the
results, and there is no external garbage dump.
Before discussing how to do without these standard bits of equipment of
the experimenter, let me say a little about how we got into this peculiar
position. First of all, I'll talk about the birth of the state, and then about the
death of the state, and just a little about the return of the state in modem
times.
The concept of the state seized Rene Descartes like an epiphany, when
he came down with a fever in the city of Ulm on his travels. The story goes
that from his sickbed during the day he watched the tip of a swinging branch
through the lattice of his bedroom window. And during the night the idea of
Cartesian coordinates came to him, together with a mystical conviction-I
use the word "mystical" in the sense of the poet William Blake. who used it
 142 D. FINKELSTEIN

as an angry rejection. This conviction was that coordinates were in exact

correspondence with the geometrical and physical quantities they
represented-that there was a virtual identity between symbols and actuality.
By coordinating points with numbers, Descartes made geometry a part of
algebra. Geometry studied through algebra is called analytic geometry. Des-
cartes conceived of his analytic geometry as the basis of the universal
"rnathesis," or wisdom. And he undertook what he thought to be the Pro-
methean project of discovering this mathesis.
Cartesian mysticism assumes that the structures of language are in exact
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correspondence to what they stand for in the outer world and that the course
of a mathematical computation completely simulates the course of events in
nature. There was said to be a debate between Newton and Descartes, but
insofar as the Newtonian mechanics vindicated the Cartesian principle, the
triumph of Newton was also one of Descartes. Physics was dominated by the
Cartesian epistemology until the quantum theory. It claimed to provide a
mathematical picture of things as they are, a symbolic system in one to one
correspondence with nature. We turn now to the death of the state.
The bridge between the prequantum and the quantum physics was a
provisional theory that Bohr invented. Nowadays we call it the old quantum
theory. Bohr postulated that atomic electrons had states in the sense of Des-
cartes, but that these states were not themselves observable. The electron
usually moves in one of a discrete family of Newtonian orbits. And then it's
invisible. It becomes visible only if it makes a transition, or a quantum jump,
from one of these orbits to another. Then Bohr goes on to say that the
electron emits a quantum of light in such a transition and gives the frequency
for this quantum in terms of the energy difference for the classical states. So,
according to Bohr's provisional quantum theory, the old quantum theory, the
atom has states, but we see it only when it makes a transition from one to
another, when it emits a photon that induces a 'similar transition in our eyes.
The point is that this changes our idea of what knowledge is. It changes
our epistemology. In the old conception, knowledge is a state of the knower
that correlates with a state of the known. It Seems that knowing is actually a
transition in the knower that is correlated with a transition in the known. We
never see states, but only transitions. So, in quantum theory, physics at last
recovers from Descartes' fever. Quantum nature is never completely de-
scribed. Quantum language is not a picture of nature. It is a record of input-
output operations, operations that we have carried out. So, according to
quantum theory itself, its mathematical description of nature is doubly in-
complete. It describes only a small part of the universe, and it answers only
 THINKING QUANTUM 143

a negligible part of the questions about that small part. Instead of complete
descriptions, quantum theories settle for maximum ones, best possible ones.
And each of these is but one of many possibilities. Mathematics becomes a
theory of our creation, and to identify a mathematical object with nature is to
mimic not Prometheus, but merely Pygmalion.
And now to the death of the state. Bohr raised the question of what it
can mean to know something that can be perceived only when it it changing.
Einstein, following the long line of Newton, Francis Bacon, and Occam,
told us once again that we should not insist on the existence of what we can
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never see, whether it's the ether, absolute time, or the stoic pneuma. "Non
jingo hypothesis," Newton put it, or words to that effect. I think that Heisen-
berg followed this line also. Since we never see states, according to Bohr, we
should not insist on" them. So, in prequantum physics, every transition has an
initial state and a final state, and connects only those, and is defined by
them. In quantum physics, a transition is a basic entity in its own right, not
reducible to definiteinitial and final states. Heisenberg's quantum theory is a
theory of these elemental quantum transitions. And so are all subsequent
quantum theories.
In prequantum physics, we implicitly assumed that individual behavior
is determined at the collective level. Under the same circumstances, we
expected different atoms to do the same thing. This meant that in an allowed
transition the input and output states uniquely determined each other and
could be identified, and this resulting entity is what was classically called the
state. Different atoms behave alike when they have the same state.
In quantum physics, individual behavior is determined at the individual
level. Different atoms can always behave differently. They therefore have no
state in the original sense. Even in an allowed transition, the input and output
operations are independent variables and cannot be identified.
So statelessness is closely connected to incompleteness. Quantum theory
and arithmetic are both incomplete in the sense that their postulates do not
decide all their propositions, although they are incomplete for vastly differ-
ent reasons. Indeed, calling quantum physics "incomplete" is a negative
way to express its greater richness and openness. I prefer to speak of quan-
tum spontaneity rather than quantum incompleteness. Classical mechanics
was also incomplete. Its initial data were not even imagined to be specified
by the theory. It's merely that this spontaneity was lumped at the beginning
in the remote past. And in quantum theory, spontaneity is distributed through
all time and space and is with us now. The fundamental processes of quan-
tum physics thus are stateless transitions, beingless becomings. In this sense,
 144 D. FINKELSTEIN

what Heisenberg discovered in 1925 is a nonobjective physics, to borrow the

term that Wassilij Kandinsky coined for his art in Munich just several years
earlier. There is a prominent nonobjective tendency in mathematics, for ex-
ample, in group theory and category algebra, and it appears in physics in
Copenhagen quantum theory.
I would like to give just a bit of a flavor of this nonobjective develop-
ment without going too much into mathematics.
Let me say again what I mean by a being. A being is an entity that has a
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state of being, or a state, for short. This is a complete description of the

being. So, each being has a collection of such possible states, called its state
space. For such a being, becoming is secondary, an elementary becoming is
described by a pair of states, initial and fmal. Let's call such a pair an arrow,
figuring the arrow as going from the initial state to the final state, from the
tail to the head. States don't connect. Given two states, there is no way in
which they give birth to another. Arrows connect. If the head of one arrow is
the tail of another, the two arrows have a resultant. They give birth to a new
arrow which you can think: of as a kind of product. If two arrows don't
connect, you can call their product "zero"-zero here meaning undefined.
Generally, this product of arrows depends on their order. In this way it
differs from the product of numbers. Arrows don't commute. In the arrow
language, you can still express states to being. You can think: of an arrow
whose head is the same as its tail. Such an arrow is called an identity arrow,
or simply an identity. Identities do commute. Most arrows don't, but identi-
ties do. If two identities are the same, then so is their product. If they are
different, their product is zero. And it does not depend on their order. So,
the identities and the beings are there inside the becomings, and they form
the largest commuting collection of arrows. This is how you recover some of
the original idea of being, from the becoming they undergo.
Now we make a transition in our theory, we change our mathematics.
We study a theory of becomings without benefit of beings. We conceive a
more general concept of arrow, one that does not arise from a head and a
tail, which are states of being. We still insist that these arrows can happen,
these becomings can happen, one after the other. We still insist they have a
kind of product, and we still permit this product to depend on the order.
Quantum theory is not merely the introduction of noncommutativity.
There is just as much noncommutativity for classical arrows. Even in the
quantum theory, you can speak of an identity, an arrow that has the property
that doing it twice is like doing it once; its product with itself is itself. An
arrow that does not have this property would seem to represent change rather
 THINKING QUANTUM 145

than status quo. In the case of the becomings that come from a state space,
the becomings enjoyed by beings, every arrow has an initial identity and a
final identity. In the quantum theory, this is not the case.
Now we can look at Heisenberg's quantum theory as a theory of such
arrows without beginnings and ends. There, the fundamental description that
Heisenberg uses is something called an operator. In its material form, an
operator is seen to be a square table of numbers, real or complex. For
example, in the theory of the photon polarization, a two-by-two collection of
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numbers defines the Heisenberg operator and represents with maximal de-
tail an elemental act of becoming of the photon polarization. There is a
standard way to multiply such tables, Heisenberg reinvented this, rediscov-
ered this, just on the basis of his physics, even though mathematicians had
already postulated it on other grounds in the previous century. This product
of Heisenberg's matrices simply represents one of these becomings happen-
ing after another. In the quantum theory, an arrow is also representable by a
matrix. For example, in the case of a coin flip, there are two possibilities
called "heads" and "tails" in English. We imagine a table that is 2 x 2; an
arrow from heads to tails is represented by a 1 in the heads row and the tails
column, and an identity is then represented by a 1 on the diagonal. Those are
states of being. The ones off the diagonal represent genuine becomings. In
the classical theory, the closest or sharpest description you can give of an
arrow has only one I in its table, and the rest of the entries are zero. In the
quantum theory of Heisenberg, all the entries in this table could be nonzero.
This is very hard to understand from the classical point of view.
Sometimes, these operators are thought of as being analogous to flows
or mappings of the entire state space of classical theory. This is a misunder-
standing. Such a mapping would be a whole field of arrows. The Heisenberg
operator really represents just a single arrow, an elemental becoming, not a
composite one. So, the quantum system does not have a state, in the sense
that the transitions are not pairs of beginnings and endings. And, mathemati-
cally, a Heisenberg operator has many nonzero elements where its prequan-
tum counterpart has only one.
Let me say a little about the return of the state. The doctrine that every
system must have a state of being and that this determines all its actions and
its becomings, as well as the transitions between these states, I am going to
call "ontism" for short. The doctrine advanced here, and tentatively attrib-
uted to Heisenberg, that the fundamental entities of nature are not such
beings, but actions, I call "praxism," By being I mean an entity that is
defined by what it is. An action is defined by what it does.
 146 D. FINKELSTEIN

There is a super-Heraklitean tendency in quantum theory. Heraklitos

understated the case. We can't step into the same river once. Our step
changes the river. The truth isn't merely that everything flows, as Heraklitos
is said to have said, it's not merely that everything changes its state, but that
everything flows and is nothing but flow.
Let me tum to the problem of endophysics. Quantum theory today de-
scribes how a large entity, the exosystem, "looks at" a small one, the endo-
system. It looks at atoms from outside. But we cannot look at the universe
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from outside. We must learn how to study a system from inside to make a
quantum theory of the universe. This "physics from inside" is what I meant
by endophysics.
Endophysics seems to call for a further extension of relativity, perhaps.
In prequantum physics, every system of becoming is uniquely associated
with something calJed a frame, the collection of all the states of the system.
In quantum physics, there are also collections of possible identities, but they
are not unique. You can think of each experimenter as defining one. This
means there is an extension of relativity when you go from prequantum to
quantum physics.
Giordano Bruno (for one) relativized the center of space. Galilei and
Newton relativized the rest state. Einstein relativized time. Heisenberg rela-
tivized being. This extension of relativity that Heisenberg made, Einstein
was never able to accept. Quantum theory extended relativity to a domain
that Einstein refused to follow.
It seems that this process isn't over. The absolute frame of Heisenberg's
theory still exists for the experimenter. Bohr refused to suppose that the
universe can be described by quantum theory. There is a famous interview in
which he was asked whether there could be a quantum theory of the uni-
verse. He got up and walked around for a while thinking and then exclaimed
angrily: "You might as well say that we are not sitting here, but only dream-
ing that we are sitting here." It is very hard to doubt our own being, and
that's what's called for. So, it's likely that the next extension of relativity will
occur in quantum cosmology. If we ever take into account the spontaneity of
the entire universe, we must surely allow some to the experimenters in it.
It's rather curious that while Bohr allowed being to be prior to becoming
for the experimenter and not for the atom, and existentialists allowed becom-
ing to be prior to being for the experimenter and not for the atom, modem
physics suggests that they are both wrong and that becoming is prior to being
for everything.
This extension of relativity, to doubting the being of the experimenter
 THINKING QUANTUM 147

himself or herself, I call relativity of the third kind. Relativity of the first
kind mainly allowed for experiments on the same being having different
names. I say "here," you say "there," but we are talking about the same
thing. Relativity of the second kind is the relativity of quantum theory. It
allows for the nonbeing of the experimentee, the subject of the experimenter.
Relativity of the third kind allows for the nonbeing of the experimenter and
the relativity of natural law.
Thank you.
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DISCUSSION

Q: The aspect of becoming of course involves the notion of time. Now, in

quantum theory, as it is usually formalized, the notion of directed time, as
would be required for this aspect of becoming, is actually alien to quantum
theory. It is not part of quantum theory. Quantum theory is a completely
reversible theory, formalized by unitary operators, and so on. So, would you
like to comment on this-maybe apparent-c-dichotorny, or contradiction?
A: You are touching on an important point and an important problem. The
unitary quantum theory that we all know is precisely the quantum theory of
closed systems, the quantum theory where one maintains an absolute parti-
tion between the exosystem and the endosystem. In quantum physics today,
we begin to see some of the transformations that move this boundary. For
example, von Neumann introduced a famous theory of the measurement
operation in which a piece of apparatus is moved from, let's say, the exosy-
stem to the endosystem. Such transformations are also represented within the
theory, but not by unitary transformations, by nonunitary transformations.
They change the system under consideration. The fact that the idea of be-
coming has within it an element of temporality presupposes some aspect of
time, actually gives one hope that one can make a theory of the classical kind
of time based on a quantum theory of becoming. I have made several at-
tempts in that direction, none of them successful.
Q: I would be interested if you would comment further on your third kind of
relativity, the relativity of the experimenter. You just hinted at what that
might be. If you could just give us a little bit more on that.
A: Actually, with relativity 3, we bring physics closer to natural language.
Relativity 0 is like a totalitarian language in which every word has a single
meaning and two people are not allowed to use different languages. Relativ-
 148 . D. FINKELSTEIN

ity I arises when you have people using different languages talking about the
same thing, and there is a one to one translation, each word in one language
corresponding to a unique word in the other language. The relativity 2 of
quantum theory is like a dictionary in which some of the words in one
language don't translate into the other, and others have several possible
meanings, together with their probabilities. In a dictionary, you might find
several meanings, some archaic, some obsolete, some rare. So, quantum
theory is a little bit more like real life than classical mechanics was.
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In relativity 3, we finally accept the fact that not all people talk about
the same thing. That was still assumed in quantum theory, where all the
transformations of Dirac's transformation theory deal with different ways
of looking at the same system. In fact, the world is full of many systems,
and one physicist will study a crystal, another will study a microbiological
molecule, and there must be relations between these languages if we all
live within the same universe. Some of these relations, a very small num-
ber of them, were already sketched as far back as von Neumann, when he
moved apparatus from the exosystem to the endosystem. In modem field
theory, these kinds of transformations are represented by oper~tors of cre-
ation and annihilation. Creation and annihilation, or destruction, are just
grandiose terms for moving something from the exosystem to the endosys-
tern, or back again. The words give you an impression of creation from
nothing, but in many actual experiments where these things are used, of
course, the electrons are not growing out of nothing, they come out of the
cathode, and they do not disappear into nothing, they are absorbed by the
anode. All these operators of creation and annihilation are of course non-
unitary, and relativity 3 has to be an algebra of such operations.
The really difficult question is how to continue using mathematics and
language and symbols at all, while recognizing that they are themselves only
approximations. There is a tremendous urge to use classical thought in read-
ing words: Each letter is either an A or a B and, we imagine, never a
quantum superposition of an A and a B. But the fact is that the logic of
superpositions, the quantum logic, includes classical logic as a very special
subcase. The fact that we ordinarily make all these assumptions when we are
reading does not mean that what we are reading is necessarily wrong. It may
. only be necessary to make these assumptions explicit.
Q: Could you comment further on your view how the transition in the
known corresponds to the transition in the knower?
 THINKING QUANTUM 149

A: I did not mean anything very mysterious by that. When an atom decays
from an excited state to the ground state, it emits a photon, we say. We don't
actually see the photon in flight, however. The photon reaches our eye, and
.our perception of it is a transition in the visual purple of our retina. That's
the induced transition that I am speaking of, and that sets off a train of such
transitions all the way in our central nervous system and modifies our circu-
lating memory. What I have just said, of course, is an external view of this
whole process, by another observer, looking at me, from outside. It's still
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exophysics.
Q: Is there anything that can be observed without an observer? That's essen-
tially the point I was trying to make before. And any universal theory, which
yours may be, has to account of the existence of the observer and incorpo-
rate the observer.
A: I agree, an observation requires an observer. A system must have both an
exosystem and an endosystem. Relativity 2 assumes just one exosystem. If
endophysics is the attempt to dispense with the exosystem, I think it is
hopeless. There is an enormous temptation, even in modem physics, to
assume a godlike stance, to deify the physicist and put him outside the
universe.
Q: I know. This is the bad tendency we have, but it is ridiculous.
A: Right. The idea of relativity 3 is to resist this temptation, not to renounce
the exosystem and attempt a pure endophysics, but to accept it and relativize
it.

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