Stud. Hist. Phil. Mod. Phys., Vol. 29, No.

3, 369 — 389, 1998

( 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved
Printed in Great Britain
1355-2198/98 $19.00#0.00

The Culture of Quantum Chaos

M. Norton Wise and David C. Brock*

1. Introduction

We report here on an ongoing study of a self-defining community of physicists

whose work spans an interestingly diverse set of subjects, typically in the
borderland between macroscopic and microscopic description and between
quantum and classical domains. Its methods are typically semi-classical. It is
this borderland—of people, subject, and methods—in which we are primarily
interested and which we will attempt to characterise. For concreteness, we will
focus on the subset of ‘quantum chaos’ and more particularly on the work that
the physicists Eric Heller and Steven Tomsovic have called ‘postmodern quan-
tum mechanics’, using their characterisation to ground a somewhat more
expansive interpretation.1
Heller and Tomsovic provide the following rational for their use of the term
‘postmodern’:
Postmodern movements are well known in the arts. After a major artistic
revolution, and after the ‘modern’ innovations have been assimilated, the threads
of premodern thought are always reconsidered. Much of value may be redis-
covered and put to new use. The modern context casts new light on premodern
thought, which in turn shades perspectives on modernism.
Robert Harris at the University of California at Berkeley coined the term
‘postmodern quantum mechanics’ to describe the keen new interest in semiclassical
approximations. These approximations have their roots in the premodern old
quantum theory (Heller and Tomsovic, 1993, p. 38).

* Program in History of Science, 129 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey,
U.S.A. (e-mail: nortonw@princeton.edu and dcbrook@princeton.edu).
1 Elsewhere we will discuss the relation of ‘postmodern’ as used here to other senses of the term,
especially in art and architecture. See Brock and Wise (s. d.).

PII: S 1 3 5 5 - 2 1 9 8 ( 9 8 ) 0 0 0 1 4 - 8

369
370 Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics

‘Modernism’ thus refers specifically to quantum mechanics (though the term will
expand below), preceded by premodern classical mechanics and the old quan-
tum theory and followed by a postmodern revival of the semi-classical methods
of Niels Bohr and the correspondence principle. The revival is motivated by the
attempt to trace phenomena of chaotic dynamics from their classical mechanical
treatment as ‘deterministic chaos’ into the quantum domain. But ‘quantum
chaos’ is an ironic designation because, strictly speaking, the uncertainty prin-
ciple should mask, or soften, the sensitivity to initial conditions that character-
ises chaos classically. Surprisingly, although the softening does occur, the
classical dynamics has been found to persist into the quantum results and can be
clearly seen there as ‘scars’ in the quantum probability amplitudes of mesoscopic
systems, or systems in the borderland between quantum and classical. Thus
semi-classical descriptions seem called for.
Such semi-classical descriptions (e.g. of electrons moving in a potential well)
are constructed from semi-classical, or hybrid, entities: classical in the sense that
they are like particles moving in a definite trajectory; quantum in the sense that
they carry phase and interfere with one another, like waves. These hybrids are
strange objects indeed. Strictly speaking, they are non-ontological, calculational
devices which yield approximations to a full quantum solution to the Schrödin-
ger equation. Heller and Tomsovic do not claim that they exist. Existence is not
at issue, only their mode of behaviour. But analysis of this behaviour yields new
knowledge not obtainable by examining either purely quantum wave distribu-
tions or purely classical trajectories. Thus they are ‘necessary’ in the important
sense that they yield understanding and explanation of what is going on
physically on the quantum—classical border. This is the situation labelled post-
modern. It has many interesting corollaries in Bohr’s correspondence principle.

2. Bohr and the Correspondence Principle

Niels Bohr often expressed the view that human knowledge is sharply limited;
that our theoretical abstractions represent partial viewpoints which will always
lead to contradiction if we push them too far by treating them as truths about
the external world, independent of us. For example, ‘radiation as waves in free
space as well as isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties on
the quantum theory being definable and observable only through their interac-
tion with other systems’ (Bohr, 1927, p. 56). More fully, they are forms of
perception, grounded in the relation of subject and object. Herein, for Bohr, lay
the problem of ‘meaning’: ‘in our description of nature the purpose is not to
disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, so far as it is
possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience’ (Bohr, 1929,
p. 18).
Bohr tended to discuss meaning and understanding when he addressed
broad audiences of physicists, most famously in the four lectures and essays
that he wrote between 1925 and 1929 and collected as Atomic ¹heory and the
The Culture of Quantum Chaos 371

Description of Nature (Bohr, 1931). Here Bohr sought to articulate the signific-
ance for human knowledge of the new quantum mechanics, employing espe-
cially the concepts that he had himself contributed to its development as the ‘old’
quantum theory and drawing attention to a variety of psychological dilemmas
with which he had long been concerned: individuality, subject—object relations,
the tension between rational and irrational elements of experience, and the
irreducibly holistic nature of that which human consciousness tries to under-
stand analytically. Here paradox seemed to rule, even in the objective world of
physics, where ‘occasionally just this ‘‘objectivity’’ of physical observations
becomes particularly suited to emphasize the subjective character of all experi-
ence’ (Bohr, 1929, p. 1).
As is well known, in his attempts to develop a quantum theory of the atom,
Bohr made extensive use of the notion of ‘formal analogy’ (with roots in Kantian
philosophy as well as Maxwellian field theory), a few aspects of which we will
review here. Aware that planetary orbits of electrons about nuclei could not
represent the physical reality of the ‘stationary states’ in his model, Bohr
nevertheless used the orbits as a guide to development of a more adequate
quantum mechanics, employing the term ‘formal analogy’ for this heuristic
strategy from at least 1916. The problem was not only that such orbits repre-
sented accelerated motion of charged particles, which classically should have
radiated away their energy in a spiral toward the nucleus, but that the condition
for the existence of the orbits (neglect of the radiation reaction) was incompat-
ible with the condition for their observation (radiation). More profoundly, since
the stationary states were defined by their periodicities, many electron revol-
utions were required to establish them. But in that case the position and velocity
of an electron at any moment could not determine its future motion under the
attractive force of the nucleus, as it would according to classical mechanics: ‘any
use of this concept of stationary states excludes the possibility of tracing the
motion of the individual particles within the atom’ (Bohr, 1929, p. 12). In using
classical orbits to represent stationary states in quantum mechanics, therefore,
the orbits had to be treated in terms of properties that could be ascribed to them
as indivisible wholes, as ‘individuals’, not further analysable mechanically.
In developing the notion of formal analogy from 1916 to 1922, Bohr seems to
have drawn heavily on the views of a family friend who was also his professor of
philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, Harald Höffding.2 Höffding had
himself drawn on Maxwell for his understanding of formal analogy but as
a neo-Kantian existentialist and close reader of Ernst Mach’s positivist analysis
of sensations. In brief, this displaced rendering made the causal accounts of
classical mechanics necessary for human knowledge because causal description
in space and time was a mode of human perception. So too, however, was
evolution, or the perception of essential change, which stood in an antinomic
relation with the continuing identity implied by strict causation. Causation and

2 Faye (1991) gives the most extended discussion availabe of the Bohr—Höffding relation. See also
Wise (1986).
372 Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics

evolution constituted the two type-phenomena of all being for Höffding. Bohr
apparently saw them as underlying the two postulates of his atomic model:
continuous stationary states (causation) and discontinuous transitions (evolu-
tion). To Bohr as to Höffding, the two categories characterised all knowledge,
both psychological and physical, because they characterised the co-existence
and co-determination of body and mind. Thus the concepts and language of
classical mechanics, seen in terms of the antinomies of continuity and discon-
tinuity, whole and parts, and definition and observation, were simply ‘our forms
of perception’. Mechanical pictures of such things as continuous trajectories in
space and time were now both necessary to human knowledge of phenomena
and at the same time impossible as an ultimate reality ascribed to those
phenomena: ‘an independent reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither
be ascribed to the phenomena nor to the agencies of observation’, and yet ‘the
limitation of our forms of perception by no means implies that we can dispense
with our customary ideas or their direct verbal expressions when reducing our
sense impressions to order (Bohr, 1927, p. 54; Bohr, 1929, p. 16). From 1927,
Bohr labelled the great metaphysical antinomies underlying these remarks
‘complementarity’.
His insistence on the priority of traditional mechanical categories in human
understanding meant that classical forms of perception supplied an indispens-
able guide to knowledge of quantum states and processes, which nevertheless
could only be related to such pictures by formal analogy between classical and
quantum accounts. For example, Einstein’s photon theory, that light of a fre-
quency l was propagated not by a wave but by particle-like photons of energy
hl, nevertheless required a formal reference to the classical wave picture. As
Bohr wrote of the energy relation for a photon (E"hl): ‘The formal nature of
this statement is evident because the definition and measurement of this fre-
quency rests exclusively on the ideas of the wave theory’ (Bohr, 1927, p. 29; see
also pp. 31 and 33).
His strongest expression of the classical—quantum analogy Bohr called the
correspondence principle. It is often simplified to the statement that when an
electron in an atom is far from the nucleus (thus at high quantum numbers,
where the electron’s motion changes slowly) the classical and quantum descrip-
tions of radiation from the electron must agree. That is, the frequency l of
radiation emitted in a quantum jump between stationary states must agree with
the frequency which would be emitted by an electron in the classical orbit
corresponding to that state, for which the radiation frequency would necessarily
equal the mechanical frequency of the orbit. But as Bohr had developed the
principle by 1918, it referred not to simply-periodic orbits but to multiply-
periodic orbits and it depended critically on his description of the orbits in
action—angle variables. These variables allowed him to exploit classical mechan-
ics without exceeding its limitations as the form of our perceptions.3

3 Darrigol (1992, pp. 113—118), gives a lucid mathematical account of Bohr’s use of action—angle
variables.
The Culture of Quantum Chaos 373

In the action—angle formulation the actual trajectories of the orbits were

integrated out, leaving a characterisation in terms of integrated action variables
associated with the quasi-periodic components of the orbit as a whole and the
periodicities of those components. That is, the technique extracted the mor-
phological properties of the orbits, effectively their shapes and periodicities, and
made these properties the basis for understanding the strange quantum postu-
lates of stationary states and transitions, even though ‘such features of the
mechanical pictures as frequency of revolution and shape of the electronic orbits
are not [as literal pictures] open to comparison with observations’. This ‘visual-
ization of the stationary states by mechanical pictures’ (Bohr, 1927, p. 36) served
as a bridge to connect concrete mechanical description with abstract quantum
relations. The morphology provided just enough intuitive perception of orbital
properties to serve the requirements of human understanding without implying
that the orbits actually existed as particle trajectories from point to point. As
Bohr put it for the Stark effect: ‘every trait of the action—angle solution can be
recognized, although hidden under a quantum theory mask’ (Bohr, 1927, p. 39).
It will appear below that Heller and Tomsovic present a very similar view of the
role of periodic orbits in quantum chaos. Both there, and in complexity theory
more generally, morphology plays a central role.
Extracting the periodicities, furthermore, allowed Bohr to give a redescription
of the orbit in a Fourier series of harmonic components, like the harmonic
vibrations of a violin string. He was thereby able to develop the correspondence
principle into a tool for determining what sorts of stationary states would be
allowable in a quantised atom, what selection rules would govern transitions,
and, especially, how complex atomic structure could be built up by the forma-
tion of successive ‘shells’ of electrons, yielding the periodic table of the elements.
With respect to transitions, the correspondence principle now required that the
frequency of the radiation emitted in a transition between any two stationary
states must ‘correspond’ to one of the periodicities of the electron’s classical
motion in those states, by formal analogy to the classical mechanical identity
between the frequencies of the standing waves on a violin string and the
frequencies of the sound waves it generates, or to the identity in electromag-
netism of the frequencies of oscillation and radiation of a charged particle. But
the quantum mechanical correspondence exhibited a strange property, for while
the stationary state—as classically described—would consist of multiple peri-
odicities simultaneously, the radiation corresponding to any given transition
could exhibit only one frequency. Thus the classical—quantum correspondence
could only be statistical, a one—many correspondence, in which one stationary
state with many periodicities corresponded to many individual electrons under-
going transitions to and from other stationary states. The correspondence
principle therefore already by 1918 supported a kind of wave—particle duality
and with it a statistical interpretation of quantum states of the atom. Thereby,
Bohr gave the general complementarity between the possibilities of definition
and observation, as represented in the continuous stationary states and discon-
tinuous transitions of the atom, a specific form in the notion of wave—particle
374 Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics

duality. Seen in this way, it is not surprising for Bohr to have insisted after 1926
that for a full understanding of the atom both Heisenberg’s abstract matrix
mechanics—in which the matrix elements represent the probabilities of discon-
tinuous transitions—and Schrödinger’s more physical wave mechanics—in
which the waves develop continuously in space and time—were necessary. Their
complementary roles appear as a rather natural development from his method
of constructing formal analogies to classically visualisable orbits. So too does his
insistence on interpreting Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations in terms of the
complementarity of definition and observation, or causality and evolution, the
necessary result of mutual adjustment between our sensory and mental capaci-
ties. Heller and Tomsovic, like many others in the quantum chaos area, make
such adjustment between intuition and analysis a primary goal of their work.
Famously, Bohr insisted on these interpretations against the opposition of his
younger followers: Pauli, Jordan, and even Heisenberg, who increasingly
wanted to jettison classical analogies as a crippling nostalgia for a lost material-
mechanical reality. Their more mathematical-idealist position exemplifies what
might well be labelled abstract ‘modernism’ in the physics of the twentieth
century, by analogy with art and architecture.4 Its adherents have sought the
essence of physical reality in the bare mathematical forms of its descriptions,
rather than in the intuitive spacetime descriptions of classical mechanics. The
historical epitome has of course been Einstein’s replacement of the physical
ether propagating light waves with the relativistic covariance of Maxwell’s
equations. Equally characteristic for the modernist ideal has been the goal of
subsuming all particular cases under universal mathematical laws—‘funda-
mental’ laws—governing the most elementary particles, leading to the grand
unified theories of high energy physics and ultimately to quantum gravity. But
the fact that the laws called fundamental are often of little use in building up
from micro-entities to macroscopic objects, leads Heller and Tomsovic, along
with many others, to seek more intuitive methods. Although the abstract
modernist ideal has permeated much of twentieth century theoretical physics, its
status is once again in question.
Bohr’s young allies believed they had good reason to mistrust the intuitive
pictures of the old quantum theory. Most notoriously, three separate attempts
to determine the stationary states of the helium atom, with its two interacting
electrons, all failed in 1922 (Darrigol, 1992, pp. 175—179). Kramers and Bohr in
Copenhagen, Born and Heisenberg in Göttingen, and Van Vleck at Harvard,
using perturbation techniques to locate the states, found that the energy levels
did not agree with experiment. It appeared, therefore, that a more drastic
departure from spacetime description was not only desirable but necessary, and
it was in part the pursuit of such a departure that led Heisenberg to his 1925
‘reinterpretation’ of quantum mechanics in terms of matrices of transition
probabilities, providing nothing more tangible than a set of numbers represent-

4 That the ‘modernist’ label is more appropriate than one might at first suppose is nicely exemplified
in Galison (1990). See also Wise (1994).
The Culture of Quantum Chaos 375

ing observable intensities of radiation. Even Schrödinger’s wave mechanics of

1926, which to the horror of the supporters of matrix mechanics aimed at
recovering a physical picture of stationary states as something like a smeared-
out electron, actually required one to imagine wave functions moving in as
many dimensions as there were degrees of freedom in the system, meaning six
dimensions for helium, counting three degrees of freedom for each of its elec-
trons. Thus, from the perspective of either of these two new approaches,
visualisation appeared to offer a very poor strategy indeed for understanding
quantum mechanics. The formulation accepted by most physicists turned out to
be the abstract symbolic mathematics of the Dirac—Jordan statistical trans-
formation theory, coupled with what came to be called the Copenhagen inter-
pretation, which not only identified wave functions with probability amplitudes
but also insisted that traditionally physical properties like position and mo-
mentum could not be regarded as existing for electrons until a measurement had
been done to realise them.
Although this most successful physical theory of the twentieth century has
regularly been idealised as presenting the mathematical truth behind appearan-
ces, it has also produced a sense of frustration even in its most proficient
practitioners. Virtually no one has claimed to ‘understand’ quantum mechanics.
Instead, ‘modern’ physicists have somewhat uncomfortably resigned themselves
to developing powerful techniques of formal analysis and computation which
allow detailed interpretation of experimental results but provide little physical
understanding of a more traditional sort. Heller and Tomsovic quote Eugene
Wigner’s quip: ‘It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem.
But I would like to understand it too (Heller and Tomsovic, 1993, p. 38).

3. Quantum Billiards

One motivation to pursue alternative methods for those who study quantum
chaos is that the basic equation of quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equa-
tion, is not integrable for the complex systems that they examine, meaning that
no solutions in a closed form are obtainable. The problem arises even for what
appear to be very simple systems, like a hydrogen atom in a magnetic field or the
helium atom with its two electrons. Physicists have found the problem endemic
for larger atoms and molecules and their highly excited states as well as for
‘nanostructure’ objects less than one micron in size, which are newly open to
experiment and to actual fabrication of devices. This is the mesoscopic domain
lying in the transition zone between the quantum microworld and the classical
macroworld.
Hailed as a reopening of the ‘premodern agenda’, the new work that Heller
and Tomsovic discuss begins from Bohr’s correspondence principle, reasserting
its fundamental role. It is not that they or others regard the mathematical
structure or even the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics as false. It is
just that the full theory does not provide ‘physical insight’ in complex cases and
376 Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics

therefore is neither very useful heuristically in pursuing experimental work nor

very helpful in understanding what they call the ‘physics’ or the ‘essential
physics’. Understanding here refers to visualisable models, to the behaviour of
waves and particles in space and time, and to the physical intuitions of classical
mechanics. ‘Unavoidably’, Heller and Tomsovic claim, ‘we think classically
about systems of more than a couple of particles’. Had Niels Bohr made such
a statement he most likely would have expressed it as a fundamental epi-
stemological principle using the language of ‘our forms of perception’ (above).
Flattening the problems of realism involved in that discourse, these new semi-
classicists reduce mechanical intuition to a fact of everyday human experience.
They are concerned with the instrumental use of workable methods: ‘In this
article we will sidestep the philosophical debate and focus on the issues of useful
approximations and physical insight’ (Heller and Tomsovic, 1993, p. 38). And
yet the new methods, as practical methods of understanding, turn out to be as
indispensable to their work as Bohr’s formal analogies were to his.
The problems through which the semi-classical approach to understanding
quantum probabilities has largely been articulated are familiar billiard prob-
lems, which have also been investigated experimentally (Sridhar and Heller,
1992, p. R1729; Wilkinson et al., 1996). One considers a single billiard ball
bouncing from cushion to cushion (standing in for an electron restricted to
a small region) and seeks to understand the quantum analogue, namely the
wave function that would result from solving the Schrödinger equation for
the problem. The billiard tables are not the usual rectangular ones, but have
shapes like a lemon or a stadium, for which the Schrödinger equation is
non-integrable and the billiard ball exhibits chaotic dynamics (Fig. 1). The
lemon billiard actually has both non-chaotic and chaotic solutions, while the
stadium billiard is completely chaotic, but in neither case are the patterns of
wave motion that are governed by the Schrödinger equation obvious from the
shape of the table.
The patterns are, however, given intuitive meaning in these researches by
interpreting them in terms of the intuitive trajectories of billiard balls, and
therein lies one of the prime attractions of the method. But the comparison of
wave patterns and trajectories depends on an intermediate construction,
a bridge, like the correspondence principle. This bridgework consists essentially
of summing up many billiard-ball trajectories, with the all-important addition
that the particles carry phase, like a wave, and that the phases interfere construc-
tively and destructively, thus building up regions of higher and lower amplitude
to simulate the probability amplitude of the quantum waves.
The technique thus depends on three separate depictions: the fully classical
billiard balls, the summation of semi-classical hybrids—part particle, part
wave—and the fully quantum wave function. It also depends on the computer
to generate each of these depictions: to trace the billiard-ball trajectories; to
perform the complex sums over the hybrid trajectories in the semi-classical
simulations; and to find accurate numerical solutions to the Schrödinger equa-
tion to compare with the simulations. In fact, the whole programme would be
The Culture of Quantum Chaos 377

Fig. 1. ¹he lemon billiard. On the right are classical trajectories and on the left the corresponding
quantum solutions. ¹he top state is classically chaotic while the lower three are quasiperiodic. From
Heller and ¹omsovic (1993).

unthinkable without the computer to produce the semi-classical and quantum

results.
It may be worth emphasising that in producing the semi-classical bridgework
the computer literally performs a construction, it builds up a simulated wave
function from the hybrid trajectories as members. As Heller and Tomsovic put
it: ‘The trajectory is the scaffolding on which semiclassical approximations to
378 Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics

the wavefunction are built’. Again, ‘[t]he picture is one of a swarm of trajectories
carrying amplitude and phase around with them. They [2] collectively build
the wavefunction’ (Heller and Tomsovic, 1993, pp. 40, 42). In particular, a begin-
ning wavefunction u (x@, 0) (say a localised gaussian at time t"0) is advanced in
time to u (x, t) by a semi-classical propagator G(x, x@; t), the Van Vleck—Gutzwil-
ler Green’s function, as in the equation
=
u (x, t)+
P~= G(x, x@; t) u (x@, 0) dx@. (1)

The Green’s function represents a sum over all classical trajectories from x@ to
x in time t, each carrying the classical probability of the trajectory and a phase
determined by the classical action integral along the trajectory. ‘In this way
classical trajectories from various initial locations x@, weighted by the amplitude
u (x@, 0), guide the moving wavefronts of u (t)’ (Heller and Tomsovic, 1993, p. 43).
The calculation, furthermore, continues to give an accurate representation of the
development of the wave function far beyond the time when classical chaos
should have destroyed it, according to earlier conceptions (Tomsovic and
Heller, 1993).
Like Bohr’s correspondence principle, this formal analogy is made as a statist-
ical analogy, a one—many analogy: the dynamics of one quantum state is
simulated by building up a statistical ensemble, ‘a swarm’ of semi-classical
trajectories, which collectively simulate probability waves. Remarkably, these
simulations have been found to agree very closely with the numerically obtained
solutions to the Schrödinger equation. The agreement justifies further use of the
simulations in understanding the character of the numerical solutions.
This creative role is apparent already in Fig. 1, for the lemon billiard, where
the probability waves on the left are compared with purely classical trajectories
on the right for a chaotic motion (top) and three quasi-periodic motions. The
latter cases show that the spatial distribution of probability is clustered around
the quasi-periodic classical trajectory, enabling one to understand, in a sense,
why the probabilities have the distributions they do. ‘Hidden dynamical sym-
metries exist that are revealed easily through the classical motion. They are
called hidden because the more complicated quasiperiodic motion is not at all
obvious from the shape of the box’ (Heller and Tomsovic, 1993, p. 40). Thus it is
the morphology of the classical motion (including in other examples its peri-
odicities) that enables one to understand the quantum result.
The work hailed as the major accomplishment in interpreting spatial distribu-
tions, however, is that for cases where the classical motion is fully chaotic, as in
the stadium billiard of Fig. 2. This is the system for which Heller originally
showed not only that the wave functions could be simulated by random sums of
semi-classical trajectories, but that ‘scarring’ of the wave functions, or buildup of
probability, occurred along certain periodic orbits, as indicated by the solid
lines. These orbits are never stable for the stadium, but scarring occurs along
those orbits that are less unstable than others. (An interesting question is how
scarring is related to Anderson localisation.)
The Culture of Quantum Chaos 379

Fig. 2. ¹he stadium billiard. ‘Scarring’, or build-up of probability, occurs along classically
quasiperiodic trajectories. From Heller and ¹omsovic (1993).

Reflecting the fact that this result is completely unexpected and could not be
understood without using the semi-classical analogy, Heller and Tomsovic
adopt their strongest language for its significance: ‘Periodic orbits that are not
too unstable cause scarring’ (Heller and Tomsovic, 1993, p. 42; our emphasis).
This is a rather shocking sentence because the fictional classical trajectory
becomes, by formal analogy, the cause of the quantum solution, which is held to
represent the correct physics. But it is not an isolated misstatement. They and
380 Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics

others regularly use similar language, as in the remark that wave functions are
‘clearly influenced by periodic trajectories’, with Heller’s original article cited for
the discovery: ‘The influence of isolated periodic orbits on eigenstates and the
first theoretical explanation of scarring [2] were given in 1984 (Sridhar and
Heller, 1992, p. R1729). The attribution of cause and influence to classical orbits
might seem to be only a way of talking about how the simulations function in
assisting understanding, but they nevertheless provide the intuitive and theoret-
ical explanation of the phenomena. Their status will require much more reflection.

4. The Community and its Subject

We have so far been concerned to exemplify through quantum billiards the

methods used to obtain answers and insight in quantum chaos. To attempt to
characterise the ‘culture of quantum chaos’ in this way, however, is to adopt
Thomas Kuhn’s strategy of articulating the paradigm of a community in terms
of characteristic problem solutions, giving limited insight into the people. In this
and the following section, therefore, we will push a bit further to try to gain some
broader sense of the movement, and why it might be considered a local culture
at all, by interrelating the people with their work.
The movement is first of all relatively small. Its adherents (judged qualitat-
ively in terms of the pool of people attending various conferences) number
perhaps 150—200 and growing. But much depends on who is numbered within
the field. To ask even for the name of the field within which practitioners are
working evokes no simple answer. They are working in areas so various as the
physics of large nuclei, atomic and molecular physics, mesoscopic systems,
microwaves, and the acoustics of long-range underwater rays. In fact, diversity
seems to characterise the field in the minds of its practitioners. It also character-
ises the practitioners themselves, in the sense that they tend to come from hybrid
disciplines and/or to work in a number of the areas making up the field. Heller
came from chemical physics and worked on the quantum measurement prob-
lem. Tomsovic has worked in nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, and acous-
tics. This diversity of disciplines and subjects, and the possibility of making
interconnections between them, is clearly one of the primary attractions of the
field.
The ‘unity’ of the movement, then, is not a unity either of the physical objects
of investigation or of general theoretical principles. It may be said instead to be
held together by a loose grouping of theoretical tools and the problems they
solve. For example, following a conference on ‘Applications of Chaos in Many-
Body Systems’ organised by Heller, Tomsovic and Hans Weidenmüller in 1994,
it was reported that ‘random matrix theory [2] provided a common frame-
work for many of the discussions’ (‘Program’, 1995). Semi-classical theory and
supersymmetry have supplied similar organising tools. The problems these tools
help to define and solve exhibit a loose generic unity. Tomsovic suggests
characterising them as those in which complex wave dynamics appear. He has
The Culture of Quantum Chaos 381

helped to organise other conferences (each involving about fifty people) with
names like ‘Tunneling in Complex Systems’ and ‘Chaos in Mesoscopic Systems’.
The latter was advertised as probing ‘the role of underlying chaos in quantum
coherent phenomena and, more generally wave equations. Discussion will focus
on quantum interference effects such as those found in electron transport
properties, time-dependent response, theoretical advances in semiclassical and
random matrix approaches, universality, and related phenomena in other fields
such as acoustics’.5 A term like ‘wave complexity’ thus might best serve to
capture the spectrum of contributed papers but ‘quantum chaos’ is the centre of
attention.6
The movement exhibits also a great deal of solidarity, remarkable considering
the variety of people and subjects involved. It can even boast a highly articulate,
perhaps even flamboyant, spokesman. In his widely delivered and read article,
‘What is Chaos, That We Should Be Mindful of It’, Joseph Ford advertises in
biblical tones that ‘[a]s the evangelist of chaos — some say bishop, some say
guru — I am personally committed to chaos as revolution’ (Ford, 1989).
Referring to chaos as ‘that scene of great theoretical beauty of which we are all
a part’, he announces it as ‘the third scientific revolution of this century’,
following relativity and quantum mechanics.
Only slightly less the evangelist than Ford, Martin Gutzwiller also sings the
praises of the new physics of chaos. Quantum chaoticians (or chaologists; both
terms are used) regularly refer to a 1970 paper by Gutzwiller—on the use of
semi-classical methods to obtain energy levels of quantum systems—as their
founding document, followed by Heller on ‘scarred’ distributions in 1984, and
then a rapidly expanding literature from about 1987. Thus the movement was
still very young and self-conscious when in 1990 Gutzwiller delivered the
summation to a conference on quantum chaos. Feeling like a preacher to true
believers, he urged them ‘to spread the good word among the non-believers and
sinners in the physics community’. Ford had already repeated at the conference
the message that ‘we are fomenting the third revolution in the physics of the
twentieth century’. But physicists were resisting the revolution. In Gutzwiller’s
view, ‘most of them can’t quite accept the fact of having missed something so
fundamental in our understanding of nature’ (Heller and Tomsovic, 1993, p. 38,
and Gutzwiller, 1991).
Three features of the revolution stand out in Gutzwiller’s summary. First is
complexity and diversity in the ‘real world’ of atoms and molecules. Far from
bemoaning the loss of simplicity and unity, he celebrated it: ‘I think we should be
glad that physics is not dominated by classical uniformity, and enjoy the
diversity of the quantal world’. He was referring here to the world of molecular
chaos, where ‘small molecules like acetylene have tens of thousands of states for

5 Announcement, ‘Conference on Chaos in Mesoscopic Systems, April 29—May 3, 1996’, Institute

for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA (Steve Tomsovic, coordinator).
6 A sampling of a few books under the heading ‘quantum chaos’ will suggest how the term has come
to identify a field. See Nakamura (1993), Casati and Cerdeira (1995), Blümel and Reinhardt (1997)
and Casati, Guarneri and Smilansky (1993).
382 Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics

our entertainment and edification’. Second, understanding in this varied world

of the mundane required of necessity the use of semi-classical methods, ‘since
our intuition is mostly based on classical mechanics’. But thirdly, intuition had
taken on a new partner: ‘in contrast to the earlier revolutions of this century, we
are now able to stimulate our intuition with the help of computer simulations’
(Gutzwiller, 1991, p. 463).7
All three of these features—diversity in the real world, intuitive methods, and
computer simulations—are central for Heller and Tomsovic’s account of the
‘postmodern era’. Although circumspect about the ‘third revolution’, they never-
theless welcome the sea-change in the ideals of the new physics. It is important
to note, however, that neither they nor anyone else in the field doubts the
validity of the ‘modern’ theories of quantum mechanics and relativity. Most are
not seeking any alternative universal theory that would be more ‘fundamental’
in modernist terms, such as the Bohmian deterministic mechanics that has seen
a recent revival. Rather they share Gutzwiller’s delight in the character of the
work, its ethos. As Heller put it, students are delighted to be ‘getting their
physical intuition back’ and are ‘voting with their feet’ in choosing their classes
and fields of research. But equally delightful in Heller’s view, and perhaps
especially important in the present physics job market, the diversity of problems
in complexity studies means that there are ‘many winners’. Perhaps, he specu-
lates, ‘the race to be the best’, so characteristic of the grand unifying theories of
high energy physics, ‘is ending’.
Views of this kind tend to sound romantic. Perhaps they are in some sense,
but they are grounded in an insistent awareness that heroic competition masks
the real accomplishments of the vast majority of physicists. And in physical
terms, purity masks reality. This observation brings us to the intellectual
position which many practitioners of quantum chaos apparently share. They
find that the very purity of unifying theories and of the simple objects they
adequately describe often makes it difficult to understand real objects and
processes, which never quite conform to the ideal types: harmonic oscillators,
isolated hydrogen atoms, waves in homogeneous media. The intuitions which
the ideal types provide do not suffice if one wants to understand the surprises of
non-ideal objects. We have focussed above on the very particular surprise of
scarring in quantum billiards. Extensive exploration of the phenomenon in
physical experiments and in semi-classical computer experiments has led to the
locution that the periodic orbits for the equivalent classical billiard ‘cause’ the
scarring. Both Heller and Tomsovic are prepared to defend this locution. It can
follow, however, from neither of the pure theories of quantum or classical
mechanics taken by itself. In an important sense, both theories are present in the
semi-classical domain. They form a real hybrid in which the quantum wave and
the classical particle trajectories are both present. At least two specific meanings

7 Gutzwiller has developed his approach to quantum chaos in Gutzwiller (1990), appealing to ‘the
intuition rather than the analytical ability of the reader’ (p. vii) and including the historical roots of
the subject.
The Culture of Quantum Chaos 383

attach to this ‘intuition’. The first follows from simply watching the videos that
Tomsovic has produced to show the time development of wave packets in
circular and stadium billiards. With little practice, one can ‘see’ the reflections
and interference patterns that reveal the classical trajectories within the waves.
Secondly, as Heller observes, the crucial question is of just when, in the
transition from quantum to classical, the phases of the waves, or of the hybrid
particles carrying phase, cease to matter. Answers to questions of this sort are
buried in the semi-classical methods required to explore the transition, rather
than in any ontological claims of quantum or classical physics. This is perhaps
the deepest sense in which the semi-classical methods are ‘necessary’ to under-
stand the physics and in which quantum chaos is ‘fundamental’.
In summary, the field of quantum chaos (and related subjects) displays
diversity and hybridity at several levels: disciplines, domains of physics, and
methods. It is essentially cross-disciplinary in that its practitioners often come
from hybrid disciplines or work in several areas on subjects which attract people
from different fields. It seeks its problems in the transition areas between
domains of quantum and classical, wave and ray, micro- and macro-physics.
And its methods are designed to operate in just these border areas using hybrid
mathematics. All of this hybridity generates diversity at every level (and vice
versa). In fact diversity generated by hybridity in many ways characterises the
field. In this, however, it is apparent that the culture of quantum chaos is
participating in a much larger movement within physics as a whole, a shift which
is producing what its advocates regard as a more balanced distribution of
problems, goals, and values.

5. Boundary Crossing

The larger shift of sensibilities that has occurred since around 1970 is marked
by an increasing interest in the physics of everyday objects as opposed to entities
produced in the ‘artificial’ physical conditions of high energy accelerators or in
remote theories of quantum gravity. With their interest focussed on macroscopic
systems, theoreticians search for principles of building up rather than of break-
ing down, of construction rather than reduction. Biology and consciousness
provide the holy grail in these areas rather than the ultimate building blocks of
matter.
An early manifesto for this shift in consciousness was Philip Anderson’s now
famous ‘More is Different’, which appeared in Science in 1972 after perhaps five
years of germination in colloquium talks and conferences and five years before
his Nobel Prize. He hammered ‘the arrogance of the particle physicist’ with the
view that ‘the more the elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of
the fundamental laws, the less relevance they seem to have to the very real
problems of the rest of science, much less to those of society’. In the macroscopic
domain, Anderson argued, ‘fundamental’ takes on a different meaning. ‘At each
level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the
384 Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics

new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as

any other’ (Anderson, 1972). To articulate this fundamentality, he focussed on
‘symmetry breaking’ at successive levels of organisation, from highly symmetric
individual particles to less symmetric many-particle systems: from nucleons to
heavy nuclei, from atoms to crystals. And in this and later papers he developed
many examples of the emergent properties arising from such many-body
complexity: rigidity, superfluidity, superconductivity, ferroelectricity and fer-
romagnetism, extending even to speculations on the requirements for life and
consciousness.
For our purposes, three other characteristic points are worth emphasising
from Anderson’s longtime promotion of complexity: diversity, impurity, and
ambiguity. As for the quantum chaoticians, his delight attaches to the vision of
a whole new world of physics: ‘The world around us seems an inexhaustible
reservoir of subtlety and complexity’. In this world of diversity, the intellectual
problems prompt expletives like ‘fascinating’, ‘gripping’, ‘uniquely difficult’,
‘dazzling’ (Anderson, 1981a). And their diverse beauties require a new attitude
toward the modernist aesthetic of simplicity; not that simplicity should cease to
be a goal of physics but that it should never efface complexity. Secondly,
complexity typically arises in the region between two previously idealised
domains of purity, as in the symmetry-breaking processes of phase transitions,
or between conductors and insulators, or in amorphous ‘glasses’. These inter-
mediate regions, as Anderson emphasises, are quite literally domains of
impurity, as in semi-conductors, where ‘Anderson localisation’ is critically
important.8 Semiconductors are literally hybrids. Their very impurity suggests,
thirdly, an ambiguous position between subjects and between disciplines. But far
from a source of confusion, this ‘ambiguity’ signals to Anderson a source of
enrichment. The ambiguity is actually only an ambiguity of reference, or object,
implying a capacity to include a multiplicity of objects, but without reduction,
more like varieties of rhododendrons than like subsuming the wedge and the
screw under the inclined plane. The effects of impurity, properly understood,
should lead to cross-connections or bridges between subjects, an ideal he
expressed as ‘the principle of maximal cross-reference’. But such understanding
is likely to come, in Anderson’s view (here representing the Santa Fe Institute),
only from cross-disciplinary interaction: ‘We believe the growth points of
science lie primarily in the gaps between the sciences’ (Anderson, 1989a, p. 576;
1989b, p. 585). Just as complexity is a product of physics done at the boundary
between two pure forms, where the diversity, impurity, and ambiguity of the
hybrid are exhibited in full technicolour, so its students live on the boundaries of
the disciplines.9

8 The original localisation paper is Anderson (1958). On impurity, see also Anderson (1959).
9 For an extensive analysis of hybridity in another contemporary domain, the electronic imaging
detectors of high energy experimental physics, see Galison (1997, Chs 6 and 7). More generally (esp.
Ch. 9), Galison develops the notion of ‘trading zones’ to describe interactions between different
subcultures of physics.
The Culture of Quantum Chaos 385

A second example will bring this quite general shift in sensibilities and values
up to the present. At the physics component of celebrations for the 250th
anniversary of Princeton University in 1996, the theorist James Langer, soon to
be elected President of the American Physical Society, presented his views on
‘Nonequilibrium Physics and the Origins of Complexity in Nature’. He emphas-
ised many of the same points as Anderson (who was in the audience): his own
‘conviction that the physics of complex, every-day phenomena will be an
extraordinarily rich and multi-faceted part of the science of the next century’;
that it would involve ‘close collaboration with many kinds of scientists and
engineers’; and that ‘we must place the understanding of life, and human life in
particular, at the top of the list of our most compelling intellectual challenges’.
He nevertheless remarked that ‘even Anderson may have underestimated how
many fundamentally new directions for investigation would emerge, and how
profoundly that diversity of challenges may change the nature of research in
physics’. His excitement and optimism about being ‘on the verge of deep new
understanding of a wide range of every-day phenomena’ did not rest on new
unifying principles but on ‘tools’: experimental, computational, and conceptual
tools. In the belief that ‘complex systems will not fall usefully into a small set of
universality classes’, he counselled his fellow physicists ‘to modify our innate
urge to speculate about unifying principles at very early stages of our research
projects’ and instead to pay much closer attention to the diversity of specific
conditions and mechanisms (Langer, 1997).
To illustrate his point, Langer compared two dynamic phenomena that look
morphologically quite similar, dendritic growth (e.g. in snowflakes and metal
alloys) and fracture growth (e.g. in earthquakes), concluding from a lucid
theoretical analysis that the two processes ‘are in two entirely different univer-
sality classes (ibid., p. 20). In biological terms, one might say that the two
processes are analogous but not homologous, like the wings of a bird and an
insect. Crystal growth and fracture are similar only in being driven from thermal
or mechanical equilibrium in ways that make them highly unstable. This
dynamic instability makes the resulting patterns highly dependent on specific
conditions and therefore highly variable, ranging from regular, to fractal, to fully
chaotic.
Langer was quite conscious that his enthusiasm for contingency and diversity
deviated from the modernist aesthetic: ‘Note that my scale of goodness is
different from the traditions of twentieth century physics, which insist on grand
unifications and underlying simplicity’ (ibid., p. 21). And yet, he insisted that this
did not imply pessimism about discovering new basic principles and unifying
concepts. It was just that those principles and concepts would have to be able to
accomodate the specificity requisite to conditions of instability, where small
quantitative differences make large qualitative differences. Not everyone in his
audience agreed, not even condensed matter theorists.
Per Bak and Giorgio Parisi, for example, were both looking for universality,
Bak in the sense of the ‘great and general question [2] why are the things
complex’ and Parisi in the sense of a limited number of universality classes.
386 Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics

Langer thought it premature to be looking for the general answers or to suppose

that complex systems would fit into a small number of universality classes,
suspecting instead that the sensitivity of such systems suggested ‘an indefinitely
large number of universality classes’ (ibid., pp. 23—24). Similar issues emerged in
a more polemical form in response to a talk by Harry L. Swinney on ‘Emergence
and the Evolution of Patterns’. After describing and showing remarkable pic-
tures of patterns formed in a number of dissipative systems, Swinney concluded
that when driven far from equilibrium, ‘each system behaves differently [2].
There is no universality’. The response of Alexandre Polyakov, whom Anderson
(as chair) introduced as coming from ‘the other half of physics’, seemed to drip
with condescension, perhaps with what Anderson had long ago called ‘the
arrogance of the particle physicists’ or maybe just frustration. ‘One really can’t
help feeling childish fascination looking at this picture of different beautiful
systems. But switching to my adult mode, I start thinking about what I can
really do as a theorist apart from going to my kitchen and trying to repeat these
experiments’. The adult quantum field theorist is thus opposed to the child and
the cook in the kitchen of experimental complexity. Bak continued these
standard tropes of gender with those of natural history: ‘It seems to me that you
are viewing the patterns in non-equilibrium systems like a zoo, where we view
one animal at a time, admire it and describe it, and then go on to the next
animal’ (Swinney, 1997, pp. 71—72).
Between Langer and Swinney, on the one hand, and Bak, Parisi and Polya-
kov, on the other, the conflict of values may be said to centre intellectually on
whether universality classes are few or many. The discussion is reminiscent of
pre-Darwinian debates over whether biological varieties were restricted to
a fixed and finite set of species (Cuvier, Lyell) or whether they varied indefinitely
(Lamarck). The historical analogy is useful here not only because of the repeated
reference to biological phenomena but because Lamarck’s view depended on
ascribing an important role to hybrids, their capacity to produce, when fertile,
a limitless variety of offspring. In more directly relevant terms, the question is
whether universality classes constitute a discrete set, like those of geometrically
ordered pure crystals, or are more like Anderson’s various glasses? As yet there
is no consensus among physicists generally on issues like these. They are about
beliefs, aims, and values. Some people are horrified by the messy impurity of
hybrids; others are delighted. The difference runs deep.
Another gauge of this difference may be found in the canonical historical
references used by physicists of both sorts. In complexity studies those references
often call up the long-standing problem of the generation of shape, of mor-
phogenesis. Langer refers his six-cornered snowflakes to Kepler and Thoreau,
for whom the growth of such gems contained mysteries of the ‘genius’ of nature.
The long-term mysteries—why six arms; why do the separate arms grow very
similar side-branching patterns; and why is each snowflake so unique—are now
resolved by complexity physics in terms of, respectively—the hexagonal sym-
metry of ice; the constancy of atmospheric conditions over the size-scale of
a snowflake; and turbulence in the air, which carries the unstable liquid—solid
The Culture of Quantum Chaos 387

boundary of neighbouring snowflakes through quite different atmospheric his-

tories (Langer, 1997, pp. 13, 18). Morphogenesis, at long last, is yielding to
physics, and that is part of Langer’s excitement. Had the chair of his session,
Albert Libchaber, discussed morphogenesis with respect to his own famous
experiments on helium in a box (Rayleigh—Bénard convection roles in a one
millimeter box of helium), he might have cited two of his favourite sources:
Goethe On the ¹ransformation of Plants and D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson On
Growth and Form (Gleick, 1987, pp. 197—202).
Similarly, Swinney harkens to Alan Turing on ‘The Chemical Basis of Mor-
phogenesis’ (Swinney, 1997, p. 56). Anderson long ago called up the catastrophe
theory of René Thom’s Structural Stability and Morphogenesis (Anderson,
1981b, p. 419). What requires notice is that such morphogenic references are
quite unusual for physicists in the twentieth century, at least until the last thirty
years. And they displace the canonical reference to Einstein in ‘modernist’
physics. In discussing the Bohr—Einstein debates over the uncertainty principle
and the completeness of quantum theory, Anderson rejected both Bohr and
Einstein in favour of a many-worlds interpretation but stressed the Bohr-
inspired view that the deepest significance of quantum theory is not in the
micro-level per se but in the micro-macro relation, citing Bohr’s reflection that
‘the explanations of the macroscopic properties of matter [have been] more
satisfying and more fundamental’ (Anderson, 1986, p. 511).10 Swinney is even
more explicit in displacing Einstein. He approves Freeman Dyson’s observation
that, in contrast to Einstein’s and Oppenheimer’s earlier view that discovery of
the fundamental equations of physics was the only thing worthy of a top-notch
physicist and that finding solutions was mop-up work, it is often the solutions
that are required in order to understand the nature of the equations. In fact,
citing Philip Holmes, he notes that even knowledge of closed-form solutions
may not be sufficient. Experiments and simulations may be required to reveal
the character and structure of the solution (Swinney, 1997, pp. 58—59).
This is the case that Heller and Tomsovic make for quantum chaos in an even
stronger form. To see the spatial probability distribution for the stadium
billiard, for example, is not yet to understand it. Physical understanding, they
argue, requires the semi-classical simulation to see how the scars in the distribu-
tion are built up and how they are related to classical periodic orbits. And it is of
course to Bohr that they refer for the necessity of classical intuition in dealing
with quantum systems, thus to the correspondence principle and associated
semi-classical methods and analogies: to hybrids.
While the physics conference was going on, the chemistry department, too,
was hosting a celebratory conference, just up the hill. One of their speakers was
the theoretician of chemical physics, Eric Heller, who provided a lucid example
of how semi-classical methods can illuminate processes of quantum tunnelling.
He could just as well have joined Langer and Swinney in the physics conference.
The culture of quantum chaos, although small and solidary and identified with

10 Interestingly, Anderson finds classical physics more puzzling than quantum physics.
388 Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics

particular tools and concepts, clearly requires to be set in a much larger cultural
setting. Perhaps ‘postmodern’ will turn out to be the best label after all.

Acknowledgements—We have benefited greatly, both technically and interpretatively, from dis-
cussions with Eric Heller and Steven Tomsovic. Where their views are not referenced, they derive
from interviews with Eric Heller on 10 May and 27 November 1996 and with Steven Tomsovic on
7 August 1997. For their helpful comments we would like to thank Philip Anderson, David Aubin,
Nancy Cartwright, Phil Johnson-Laird, Ted Porter and many participants in conferences at the
University of California, Los Angeles, Princeton University and Imperial College, London.

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