"A defining feature of quantum mechanics, after all, is that it looks hard, but the picture that it paints of reality is soft and fuzzy. In many respects it isn’t a hard science, but a soft science. A wave equation, for example, looks hard when it is written out as a mathematical formula – but it is an equation of a wave, which is soft.
Instead of atoms being hard and independent – as the feminist theologian Catherine Keller notes, there is a strong correspondence between the ‘separate, impenetrable’ Newtonian atom and the male sense of self – they are indeterminate and entangled. Instead of predictive certainty, we have the uncertainty principle. If quantum mechanics had been invented, and its evolution and interpretation shaped, mostly by women instead of those young men – if its ‘founding fathers’ had been ‘founding mothers’ – we would be calling it the most feminist theory ever.
Quantum is therefore a soft science dressed up to look hard. When male physicists first stumbled upon these ‘soft’ quantum properties of matter, it is unsurprising that, rather than embrace their classically defined feminine side, they reacted by adopting a hardcore mathematical approach summed up later by the physicist David Mermin as the direction to ‘Shut up and calculate!’ Which, to non-physicists, reads like: ‘Keep away – this is much too hard!’
In contrast, the social science version counted women and feminists among its first inventors. Danah Zohar, who trained as a physicist, described how her book The Quantum Self (1990) was inspired in part by her experience of pregnancy and early motherhood: ‘There is something deeply feminine about seeing the self as part of a quantum process.’ Or as the feminist theorist (and trained physicist) Karen Barad put it in her quantum-queer-feminist (if that’s a thing) book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007): ‘Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not pre-exist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating.’
One of the most obvious features of modern science is that it carries with it the imprint of ancient divisions and biases. And one of the most obvious features of quantum ideas is that they undermine everything that might be considered ‘Hard’ and ‘Male’ about reality according to this (rather dated) scheme. Instead of being clearly defined and firmly independent, both mind and matter are better described as indeterminate and entangled. Which goes a long way to explain the rather remarkable fact that these quantum tools and ideas, which are designed to analyse such properties, have been effectively kept in their box for more than a century.
Of course, the universe is not ‘Male’ or ‘Female’ and nor does it align itself with ancient Greek archetypes. However, it would be naive to think that the same can be said of the human pursuit of science."
- David Orrell, from "A Softer Economics." Aeon, 1 February 2022.
