Pondering a cat conundrum

8:30am Wednesday 5th November 2008

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ALTHOUGH both my Roman Catholic faith and my youthful enthusiasm for physics lapsed several years ago, sufficient vestiges of both remain to spark my interest in the correspondence in last week’s Review about Amanda Hart's controversial classes at the All Saints Pastoral Centre near London Colney.

Ms Hart’s letter tells us that her classes are based on quantum physics and inspired by Albert Einstein.

As, I regret to admit, my study of physics ended in the sixth form of secondary school, quantum mechanics is a matter of which I have only a very superficial understanding, but I suspect I know at least as much about it as does Amanda Hart.

It is a highly technical branch of physics, involving advanced, no doubt fiendishly complex mathematics, describing how some physical quantities, such as the energy of a subatomic particle, can exist only at certain precise, discrete levels. This phenomenum accounts for the dual nature of light, which appears to behave as both a wave and a particle, as well as the way chemical elements combine in fixed ratios to form compounds.

Quantum mechanics teaches us that electrons orbiting an atom may be considered to be located somewhere within a region of space, but their exact positions are unknown and unknowable.

According to Wikipedia: “Areas of probability, referred to as clouds, may be drawn around the nucleus of an atom to conceptualise where an electron might be located with the most probability.”

Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that it is impossible to know exactly where a particle is at any moment, as it is influenced by the actual act of observation.

Heisenberg and the Danish physicist Niels Bohr developed the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, challenged by Erwin Schrodinger in a famous “thought experiment”.

In a bid to disprove the Copenhagen Interpretation, Schrodinger imagined a cat in a sealed box whose life depends on the state of decay of a radioactive atom.

If the interpretation was correct, he argued, the cat would be both alive and dead when the box was opened.

In some way that completely eludes me, some gunpowder and an amplifier are involved as well.

Albert Einstein, whose contributions to science Ms Hart summarises as “everything is energy, and if we tap into that understanding we gain power within our world to create peace, harmony and balance”, wrote to Shrodinger about his hypothetical cat: “You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality – if only one is honest.

“Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality – reality as something independent of what is experimentally established.

“Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gunpowder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits.

“Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation.”

Maybe if I attended Ms Hart’s classes I would discover whether the cat is alive, dead, or both at the same time, but since from her letter it appears they are concerned with hypnotherapy, a technique which for all I know may be both scientifically sound and genuinely therapeutic, I rather doubt it.

WHILE I may have a faint grasp of physics, economics is a subject I know almost nothing about.

The national papers are full of doom-laden headlines, stock market charts resembling some particularly hazardous mountain range, and photographs of young men wearing crumpled shirts and worried expressions as they grasp mobile phones.

Whether readers should blame Gordon Brown, George W Bush, the Bank of England, the International Monetary Fund, John Maynard Keynes, trade unions, “hedge funds”, “short sellers” or Karl Marx, I really can’t advise.

Luckily, help is at hand, or at least in my inbox, which contains a stirring message from one David Pinder, who writes: “Ours is the story of a powerful nation brought to its knees by a series of well-intentioned mistakes.”

After detailing these alleged mistakes he concludes: “Individually, these mistakes have all brought problems, with which we struggle to cope. The present Government’s incompetence has been matched only by its mendacity.

“To borrow ever larger amounts of money to spend on Utopian schemes, as it now proposes, is morally indefensible.

“We can continue to bury our heads in the sand, in the forlorn hope that someone will find a pain-free solution.

“Alternatively, we can return to being a progressive country with high standards of education, where scientific advance, opportunity and enterprise are a matter of course..”

Mr Pinder, thank God, is not a lone voice of sanity crying in the wilderness, his words of salvation unheeded as the storms of chaos rage about him. He is, fortunately, at the head of a valiant army, who under the banner of the New Party will surely sweep to power at the next General Election, soon to lead us along thorny paths of righteousness to broad and sunlit uplands.

But this New Party, while it may well be new, is certainly not the first in Britain to campaign under the name.

The last was formed in 1931, by Sir Oswald Mosley, and its members were soon unashamedly calling themselves the British Union of Fascists. It was not long before men in paramilitary uniforms were pompously marching through the East End of London, organising appalling violence against Jews and other minorities.

Mr Pinder’s views may have only a passing resemblance to those of Mosley, and I am sure he would never stoop to or encourage violence of any kind, but I will be surprised if he wins any more electoral success.