QUANTUM TRINKETS

Do you remember when everyone was taken up with debates about what colour a dress was?

There were a few of those trinkety illusions: a pair of trainers that might have been either pink-and-white or blue-and-grey, a woman saying either ‘laurel’ or ‘yanny’ for some reason, and of course, the black-blue/white-gold dress - the phenomenon that was said at the time to have ‘split the Internet’.

It’s too easy to look at social media now and wonder just how trivial all that was. The pre-Covid, pre-Trump, pre-Boris, pre-Brexit world seems so innocent.

And yet, I don’t actually think it was. I’m not advocating a conspiracy here, but I find it fascinating that in each of these viral cases, there was some foreshadowing.

For example, there was the postmodern idea of personal truth. When you saw with your own eyes that ‘the dress’ was blue and black, it became increasingly difficult to hear anyone argue that it might be anything else. It became your immovable truth, and one that couldn’t be argued away, or even put up for debate, by the vehement cries from the white-and-gold team.

It led, inevitably, to a sort of playground tribalism. There were those who agreed with you, and there were those who saw exactly the same image you did, who came up with an exactly opposite view: fake news before the term existed. Social media took us by the hand to our camps either side of the valley, gave us dopamine to keep our spirits up, then taught us to throw rocks across no-man's-land.

The audio clips are interesting too. You can almost pick what you want to hear. Indeed, I spent a full forty minutes in 2018, listening to laurel/yanny on repeat while I did something else. I was fascinated that it continually switched between the two, back and forth. Eventually I could even tip the balance one way or the other.

Then there was brainstorm/green-needle. I was so intrigued by how my brain could pick up exactly the same wave-form over and over again, and yet turn it into two very different recognisable patterns, depending on how I was prompted to think. It feels like a scary indication of how susceptible we are to preconditioning, or how a situation can change depending on how it’s interpreted.

It’s what Heisenberg discovered isn’t it? The uncertainty principle at the heart of the universe. An electron spins in a probability cloud and the only way to pin it down into a particle or a wave is to measure it. We’ve only had a hundred years of this weirdness, but it might just be that we’re a bit more quantum-mechanical than perhaps we think.

If you look at ‘the dress’ you can probably tell that the colours are in an undeterminable state - a very narrow window where your brain has to make a decision either way. In fact, all of these trinkets are in that window. Is it white/gold in shadow on a sunny day? Is it blue/black against a darker background? You get to pin down the electrons, determine the wave function, make a choice - just like you did with the 45th President, the benefits of the UK standing alone from Europe, and whether it was a good idea to inject yourself with an apparently untested vaccine.

Only, these things aren’t meaningless trinkets any more - they’re real-world Internet-splitters, society-dividers and taboo subjects around the family dinner table for many people. They have impact and consequences.

I suppose, a few years on from those illusions, I’m wondering whether a tacit understanding of the quantum world is helpful. The zeitgeist pushes us apart into binary choices, but perhaps the world is not quite so, well... classically black and white? Perhaps when we really understand that others see the same, important things we do and they reach very different conclusions, it’s something that’s worthy of respect and honour, rather than stones and catapults. Perhaps all of us are just trying to interpret the world through our own spectacles, and it just isn’t as clear cut as maybe we think it is. 

Perhaps the dress was blue-gold-white-black all along.