BMJ  2004;328:1385 (5 June), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7452.1385-a

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SOUNDINGS

Stayin' alive with quantum physics

Discos have always been rather an ordeal for me. I am musically dyslexic and, in the tribal society of adolescence, I should rightly have been considered disabled. Instead, at school I played rugby and read "nerdish" books. One was the incisive Chance and Necessity by Jacques Monod. Man is a machine, he asserted, and free will an illusion

Later, when I made the crossover from theoretical physics to medicine, I was surprised by the aggressive nihilism of the biologists' world view—for example, Richard Dawkins's pithy remark that "the world has precisely the properties one would expect if there is [at its root] nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."

Consciousness, it seems, is a rather tragic Darwinian epiphenomenon. Free will is likewise illusory in a universe that is merely a game of Newtonian billiard balls—its outcome determined at that first, bleak, break of time. And its author is either long gone, or certainly currently uninvolved.

My surprise partly stemmed from the vehemence and certainty of those who propounded these views. Anyone who had the temerity to believe otherwise was "scientifically illiterate."

Yet I had come from a discipline that had long since abandoned the model of the world as purely mechanistic. It was not possible to calculate the trajectory of even a simple electron without summing the wave function over the whole universe. Treat the problem as though all interactions must be local and you would simply get the answer wrong. The universe appeared interconnected in a way that left even my marijuana smoking, three lectures a month, arts student friends surprised. Biologists who knew anything about quantum mechanics maintained, not unreasonably, that quantum effects were averaged out long before reaching microscopic scales and therefore had no discernible consequences in biological systems. But this always seemed a little unlikely to me.

Maybe I am deluding myself that life has meaning and I have choice. But if so, I like the delusion, and have yet to come across a cogent argument that persuades me otherwise. I have, though, given up the belief that in a parallel universe I could dance like John Travolta. The universe is strange, but maybe not that strange.

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Painswick, Gloucestershire

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