Take a quantum leap of faith

Matthew Du Plessis: There's me, sitting in my treehouse. I'm about six years old, and I've got a comic book.

In it, I learn great secrets. That with great power comes great responsibility. That one must always stand up for what one believes. That being bitten by a spider might not be the end of the world. That sea monkeys exist, and that if only my parents had had the decency to live in America, I could have sent off for some.

I was a True Believer, as Stan "The Man" Lee called us in his Bullpen Bulletins.

Despite believing truly, I've come to realise, of late, that some of the things portrayed in those comics that I fervently believed to be true were anything but. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that Sea Monkeys were actually just brine shrimp.

But belief is a difficult habit to shake. Above all else, I believe in consistency. In internal logic. Whether in stories, games, or the fabric of reality itself, as long as the rules and parameters that were established at the outset are being observed, I'm as happy as a hog in a hedge. When something breaks its own rules, however, then I despair.

Which is why, despite my enthusiastic deciphering of its implications in recent columns, quantum physics annoys the hell out of me.

In an editorial in the latest issue of New Scientist, there's an offhand remark about how the gas helium behaves when it's cooled to two degrees Kelvin - it turns into what's called a "superfluid". Fair enough: cool a gas and it becomes liquid. Why "super" though?

Because apparently, and frankly I've only the New Scientist's word on this, superliquified helium is able to defy gravity and flow uphill.

That's right: it goes UP THE HILL. Which just ain't right. And as if that weren't bad enough, it ignores friction. According to the article, if you put supercool helium juice in a spinning bowl, it'll just sit there, unmoving. But if you spin the helium itself, it'll carry on whirling around forever and a day.

Does that not infuriate you? Does that not make you want to punch a physicist, with their fancy talk of inertia?

Not that you should take it out on the physicists themselves. It's not their fault the universe doesn't adhere to its own rules. No, it's the universe's fault.

Which is probably why you get so many quantum physicists who, going against the industry trend, believe in a creator. That way they've got someone to blame.

Poor old God. Judgement Day comes around and suddenly all the physicists appear in front of Him with a critique .

"You call this a creation?" they ask in disbelief. "First you say nothing can go faster than the speed of light is a constant, and then suddenly it's all, 'hey everybody, guess what, I just created quantum entanglement!' - and oh yes the zoology department wants to know, what's this business with the platypus? You were just making things up as you went along, weren't you? And don't get us started on helium. Seven days it took you? The night before, more like."

That's all ridiculous, obviously. But then physicists do insist on peer review. Crazy bunch.

Others among them take solace in the words of the poet John Keats, who espoused a philosophy he termed "negative capability": "It struck me, what quality [forms] a Man of Achievement . I mean 'Negative Capability', that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

Which is, I'm afraid, also a bunch of cop-out crapola. It might be okay as an excuse for the makers of the TV show Lost not to explain how the four-toed statue of Taweret fetched up on the island, but not when it comes to the building blocks of this universe.

I say "this" universe, because some of the other theories that attempt to reconcile quantum anomalies require there to be an infinite number of parallel universes. Which is more Fringe than Lost territory, and clearly far more likely than sea monkeys. Excelsior.