Why a NO is Never Final According To Quantum Physics

Life is full of uncertainties.

I’m one of those spoiled kids who always got whatever they wanted. I never had to sit through dinner, I skipped school whenever I felt like it, I got all the toys and junk food I wanted, and I never even worried about hiding my bad habits from my parents. Although they were quite overprotective, it was all too easy to persuade them.

There was no such concept as a strict NO until I became old enough to ask for things outside my relatives. The real world crashed on me like a vicious hurricane. For long, I was furious with my family because they gave me no preparation for the harshness of the real world. Then I started noticing something extraordinary. As there was no such thing as a NO I couldn’t magically turn into a YES in my experience, I fought for the same with everyone relentlessly.

Turned out, instead of being trained to accept failure, I was trained to fight till the end. Now that’s your weakness turned into a superpower right there.

Obviously, as I grew older, my persuasion techniques adapted and evolved. With time I learned that there were things simply out of my reach (eg.: a panther), and then there were things that needed a bit more hustle. I would plan everything; I would look for other ways to get where I wanted; No obstacle would stop me whenever I set my mind on something.

I had a personal Machine Learning algorithm running in the back of my head whose sole purpose was: “Get a YES on everything.”

What does Quantum Physics have to do with all of this?

Apart from being stubborn, I’m a research geek too. I love to deep-dive in topics that interest me, and when I say deep, I mean it. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to the weird and frustrating world of atoms. It was love at first sight. Ever since I’ve been binge-watching documentaries and explanation videos, I’ve been spending days and nights reading research papers and then trying to grasp it all in comprehensive ways. As I’m no mathematician nor a physicist, I tried to understand quantum physics by interpreting it in real-life examples.

You can imagine how excited I was when I realized that the quantum world justified my approach to overcoming obstacles.

The unpredictable

Science has always been the best tool we have for navigating the chaotic universe we live in. We use science to build, learn, create, and, upsettingly enough, destroy, too. Science lets us predict the outcomes of specific actions, so we don’t lose time on constant testing.

Science is what we rely on because we know it gives us a fixed answer, not answers; just one, certain answer.

Well, things get a bit fuzzy as we come closer and closer to the building blocks of the universe — the particles.

Particles are those tiny things that make up atoms and forces and everything around us. Turns out, their properties aren’t as predictable (and stable, as we’ll later see) as the rest of everything seems to be. If we were to throw an electron at a wall, we would have no way to predict where precisely this tiny troll would hit. We call this phenomenon superposition. All we can do is calculate its probable location using the famous Schrödinger equation.

In short, the Schrödinger equation helps us determine all the possible outcomes an experiment on particles’ properties could have. Not specific enough, but that’s as close as we can get. That is why we say a system is in a superposition of all the states it could be in, and if we want to get a certain answer — well, then we kinda have to look and see.

If this sounds puzzling, I suggest watching Brian Greene’s explanatory video on why this is the way it is.

What we’ve learned so far

Before you get to the point of changing a NO into a YES, you first need to get that NO. Most people don’t even come this far. They assume that their efforts would be in vain because their hypothetical Schödinger equation tells them that from all the possible outcomes, a strict NO is more likely. That’s why people dream big but take no action to get there, which is wrong.

When you approach someone with a request, their answer is close to unpredictable. You may get too nervous and mess up your speech; They might misinterpret your intentions, or it might be that it started raining, and the person you’re talking to has an unconscious habit of rejecting everyone on a rainy day. Life is full of weird.

But it may be the other way around, too. Again, reasons vary from low self-confidence to sunny-day habits.

Steve Jobs knows what I’m talking about

There’s a cool story about Steve Jobs and frequency counters. When he was just 12 years old, Steve suddenly had this urge to build a frequency counter. Having not enough necessary parts to do the job on his own, he looked up Hewlett-Packard’s co-founder Bill Hewlett in a phone book and gave him a call. After having a laugh here and there, Bill agreed to help him out and even got him a summer job on his company’s assembly line. The odds were against little Steve, but to him, it only translated to less chance, not none at all.

“Most people never pick up the phone, most people never ask. And that’s what separates the people that do things from the people that just dream about them.” — Steve Jobs.

So, the point being, no assumptions, however certain they may seem, should ever stop you from trying. The social fabric of humans is just as uncertain and, therefore, unpredictable, as the fabric of the universe on microscopic scales. But, my belief goes even further, just like the weirdness of the particles. Even after getting a NO, the fight is not over.

The variable

Quantum physics is hard to grasp with plain language. Hell, even scientists have a hard time understanding and interpreting it. That is why they like to use metaphors, and this is where I’ll be following in their footsteps. Allan Adams is a quantum mechanics professor at MIT. To demonstrate what particles are all about, he uses a simple example with color/hardness boxes. You can read his full paper here.

Imagine you have an electron that has two properties: Color and hardness. The electron can either be black or white, and soft or hard. No other kind of electron has ever been found. These properties are merely illustrative, and, if you’re wondering, they stand for the angular momentum of an electron that can only be measured to be either up or down. But, for the sake of simplicity, let’s stick with the color/hardness thing.

Now imagine you have two boxes, one that measures color and the other that measures hardness. The box has three holes, one for the input and the other for the output. As you send electrons through the input hole, the box’s mechanism sends them towards their properties’ corresponding ends. So, a color box would send white electrons on one side and black electrons on the other.

The experiments show that no matter how many electrons you take, you get half of them through one hole and the other half through the other. This is the same both for color and hardness. As far as we know (and trust me, we’ve looked hard), there’s no way of predicting which electron appears on which end, but we’ve already been through this. Note also that there’s no correlation between an electron’s color and its hardness. Meaning, if we take only white electrons and send them through a hardness box, we get half hard and half soft electrons — the same with black electrons and the same with both white and black together. No correlation found whatsoever.

But the magic happens when we take these electrons and send them through the color box, then through the hardness box, and then through the color box again. Let me show you an example.

Let’s take electrons that we know nothing about and send them through a color box. Then we take all the black electrons and send them through the hardness box. After getting half soft and half hard particles, we take, say, the hard ones, and send them through a color box again. All of them should be black, right? Wrong.

Something unexplainable happens when we do that. We yet again get half white and half black electrons, even though all of them were white when we measured before measuring their hardness. Somehow, the second measurement messes with the electrons’ initial property and sets it back to nothing.

Since this quality of electrons has been detected, the experiments have been conducted in all forms and ways, only to yield the same results every single time. They’ve changed the materials of the boxes, they experimented with different particles such as photons and protons, they’ve stood on their heads while experimenting — nothing changed (OK, maybe not on their heads, but you get the point).

The reason why this is so hard to comprehend is that there is no analog for the effect, dubbed as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. We, the non-physicists, could simply scratch our heads, shake our shoulders, and walk away. I think we shouldn’t.

Think about it. Although there is no direct analog for the weirdness of the quantum realm, we live in a world, inside of a social structure, that works in the same mysterious ways.

Coming back to my point

We saw how particles changed their properties after a different measurement. The same goes for that thing you want so badly you’re still reading this mumbo-jumbo (thanks for sticking around, by the way). Just as changing the measurement changes the outcome of the same particle’s same properties, changing your tactics and maybe even modifying the request might change the answer. Honestly, it happens more often than you’d think.

Let’s say you pitched an idea for an article to CNN on your first story, and they rejected you. Instead of pitching them again and again, and instead of giving up completely, you edit your pitch or maybe come up with a different one entirely, and you go for lower-hanging fruit. Once you’ve been published to a couple less famous but still credible magazines, you have a choice to make. Should you stick with the other magazines, or should you make another move with CNN?

It’s not something I or Steve Jobs came up with; it’s the way the universe behaves. Look at it from the right angle, and you’ll find that quantum physics too is teaching us to try, improve, and try again. I think we should all start listening to the universe instead of trying to make it obey us. It has so much to offer on its own, so many secrets to share with us, so much magic that can’t be explained, only internalized. According to quantum physics, nothing in life is impossible.

If you liked my interpretation of the quantum realm, check out another piece I wrote on my friend’s and his crush’s example (relationships, right?):