Idealog

Without Mead’s reputation, you might suspect him to be one of that green ink brigade who write to editors refuting relativity or proposing perpetual motion schemes. I’m predisposed to believe him not just for his reputation, but because what he proposes I learned in chemistry in the 1960s: I’m at home with the Schrodinger equation, and the notion that everything is made of waves frightens me no more than that everything is a wave and a particle at the same time.

There’s also a philosophical reason why I want to believe Mead, having to do with a subject I often bang on about here: excessive rationalism. The Copenhagen Interpretation introduces the observer’s mind into physics, which is, of course, why a lot of people like it, because it allows any number of loopy sci-fi plots to masquerade as popular physics. The truth is that the universe would behave exactly as it does were we not here to see it, and Bohr’s introduction of the observer into quantum mechanics will one day be seen as a theoretical disaster. The ground isn’t such a bad place to keep your feet on: it does after all yield the silicon from which the CPU inside your PC is made.