The Red Queen Still Rules

You didn't choose it — it chose you. Because you go cold, cold and still, steady enough when things get dangerous to hold the theory steady. This does not guarantee success at all. It is a gamble that shows someone was motivated enough to work on it.

The gamble is the theorist's, and the reader is not in it yet. So here is the ground: modern physics has run out of ordinary pictures, and the pictures it has left were invented by a Victorian mathematician to make fun of them. A queen who makes you run to stay in place. A grin with no cat. A clock stopped at six o'clock. A mushroom that changes your size and never says which side. That is the oddity this essay is built on.

Borrowing a mathematician's jokes

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Dodgson, a conservative mathematician at Oxford. He lived through the late nineteenth-century upheaval in mathematics — non-Euclidean geometry, abstract algebra, the first symbolic logic — and some readers hear in the Alice books his unease with it: a defender of Euclid laughing at mental models that had let go of common sense, of what can be seen and heard.

Here is the difficulty, and it is the whole difficulty. Carroll wrote those scenes as absurdities. The theorist today has to borrow them as descriptions. What he meant as "this cannot be how things are," the physics of the last hundred years keeps answering with "this is how things are." His language and mine point the same images in opposite directions.

That is not a failure of my words. It is Kuhn's incommensurability showing up on the page. We do not yet have a language that holds the incompatible and the paradoxical without turning it into nonsense, so we borrow the only language that ever dared to — the language of nonsense — and find it was closer to the world than its author wanted. One of the theorist's main tasks is to begin to find the better language.

I had to add Carroll here anyway. The images work too well.

The Red Queen: standing still is the most expensive thing there is

Our everyday seeing and hearing are trained on classical mechanics: if you run, you move forward; if something vibrates, it sounds. Modern physics keeps breaking that training.

In Through the Looking-Glass the Red Queen makes Alice run as fast as she can just to stay in the same place. For a theorist, that is the vacuum. The "empty" space of quantum field theory is not empty: it is a restless fluid/wave/gel alive with phase changes, where particles are no longer little objects but disturbances in a changing medium. Staying stable in such a place costs constant motion and constant thermodynamic exchange. Standing still is the most expensive thing there is. The irritating Red Queen remains the winner.

The Cheshire Cat: a grin without a cat

"Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin," thought Alice; "but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!" — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Physicists named a real effect after it. In the "quantum Cheshire cat," a property of a particle appears to travel along a different path from the particle itself — in a 2014 neutron experiment, the neutron went one way while its magnetic moment showed up the other. The cat here; the grin there. Carroll's joke about a property floating free of its owner became the name of a measurement.

The Mad Hatter: time stuck at six o'clock

Seeing and hearing both need sequence — a sound lasts, a movement traces a path. The Hatter quarrelled with Time, and now it is always six o'clock, always tea-time, and the party has to keep moving round the table to clean cups, a cycle with no way forward.

That is the frustration of trying to carry time and entropy through two models that disagree about them. Newtonian physics and the arrow of entropy need a time that flows; the fundamental quantum equations run the same forwards and backwards, and in some attempts to join quantum theory with gravity, time drops out altogether. The pieces don't fit at the same table.

The Caterpillar: when scale changes the rules

On top of the mushroom sits the hookah-smoking Caterpillar, asking "Who are you?" while Alice grows and shrinks by eating from either side of it. Proportion is thrown to the winds, and Alice loses her stable sense of who she is because her size will not hold.

He does give her the instruction, on his way down off the mushroom and into the grass: "One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter." And Alice answers it the only way it can be answered: "One side of what? The other side of what?" The remark is correct and useless in the same breath. It names an effect and leaves out the dimension it runs on.

That is the position of a physicist at a new scale. Push gravity down to the smallest scales — far smaller than an atom — and the calculations throw up infinities that the usual repair, renormalization, cannot tame. A model that works beautifully at four feet tall stops working when you shrink far enough. A new size needs a new way of sensing the room, and nobody hands over the side of the mushroom that does it.

The last word on Alice

I have more trouble with Carroll than I do with my own quantumly entangled theories. In the theories, logic and proportion stop fitting the world. In Carroll they stop fitting any language or thinking at all, and he seems to find that funny. I have kept him anyway, because the images work too well. But the last word on Alice, for me, is not his.

It is the Jefferson Airplane's. Grace Slick wrote "White Rabbit" for Surrealistic Pillow in 1967, and in three minutes it says plainly what the books have spent a century being made polite about:

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small And the ones that mother gives you, don't do anything at all Go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall

Carroll's transformations are a joke told at proportion's expense. The song's are a report. And the line that carries it is the one about mother's pills: the approved doses, the ones handed over by the people responsible for you, do nothing at all. The changes that matter arrive from somewhere else and are not sanctioned. That is the part of Wonderland the song kept and the twentieth century lost — the illogic of the turn of the century, sanded down into Disney material in 1951 and sold back as a polite children's story.

The song never explains itself. It leaves Alice ten feet tall and the Caterpillar's question standing: who are you, when the size will not hold?

Actually

My twin grandsons are eleven. "Actually" has been their favorite word since they were two — "Well, actually, Grandma!" — and there have been lots of actuallys under the bridge. It is worth noticing what a child is doing when he says it. He is not reporting what he sees. He is correcting the world with the account of it, and the account comes first.

The more I think about it, the more it seems the theories explain the world better than the world itself.

That is not a claim that the model has outrun the evidence. It is a claim about who is doing the explaining, and the world does not. The world happens, in sequence, and the sequence gets called a fact. Nothing in the given scene carries a reason with it: the mushroom has two sides and says nothing about which; the neutron goes one way and its magnetic moment the other; the restless vacuum calls itself empty. A theory is the only thing that has ever arrived with an account attached — why the apples fall and the moons stay, why standing still costs anything, why the grin can travel without the cat.

So this is not a competition between two rival reports of one set of events. The world supplies the events. Only the theory supplies the reason. A model that explains the world better than the world does is not flattering itself; it is doing the one job the world has never done for itself. And the child knows this before anyone explains it to him: the account is the thing worth having, and the world is what has to be brought around.

Every borrowing in these pages says the same thing in Carroll's register. The Red Queen's ground, the grin off the cat, the clock stopped at six, the mushroom with no told side — each is an appearance that cannot account for itself, and each has been answered by a model that accounts for it better than the scene ever did. Carroll laughed at the model. The model kept explaining.

The house, and the better language

Like Alice, a theorist — especially one trying to break with the current paradigm — feels like a gambler holding a terrible hand against the house. The house is the Red Queen, and she always wins.

And yet Carroll left us the ground to stand on. He brought a mathematician's wit to nonsense, and the nonsense turned out to be one of the few languages already shaped for the paradox. The task now is to take the borrowing one step further: to say these things in a language where they are no longer jokes. The Airplane got there first, in three minutes: the pills that mother gives you do nothing at all. The better language will have to say what does.