Neville's Brain

Although Neville's brain was in a state of superposition, he was, when fully probed, a naive realist. Lynden Stone 2014

Lynden Elizabeth Stone is an Australian visual artist who explores the richness and ambiguity of existence using metaphors derived from quantum physics. I first met Lynden in the context of her Metaphase Typewriter Revival project where she reproduced with modern technology a nutty old experiment of mine put together at the dawn of the computer age that explored the conjecture that elemental quantum randomness might be used by spirits, both embodied and immaterial, to communicate in human language if a suitable computer interface were provided.

Lynden recently came to America as an artist in residence at Crane Galleries in Philadelphia where she exhibited the revived metaphase machine and other work concerning the ambiguity of existence. She just now completed her PhD at Griffith University in Queensland for a thesis entitled Doubting Conventional Reality: Visual Art and Quantum Mechanics in which she surveys contemporary visual artists who are using quantum-physics metaphors in the visual arts -- including her own work in this arena.

Part of Lynden's PhD thesis included a public exhibition of her work. She asked me to contribute some program notes for this show and promised me "an original art work" in exchange. A few days ago I received in the mail a pizza-box-sized package that contained Lynden's art work Neville's Brain.

In one simple image Lynden invokes several famous physicists beginning with the image of the Moon in the upper left corner. Lynden renders this moon in lenticular photography which was invented by British physicist David Brewster (who also invented the kaleidoscope). In the present context the moon image also suggests Einstein's famous quantum question to physicist Abraham Pais: "Do you really believe that the Moon does not exist when nobody looks?".

The black-and-white background of Lynden's piece consists of distorted Greek letters "psi" which is the symbol for the wavefunction in quantum theory. Neville's superposed brain is reminiscent of the "Wigner's Friend paradox" in quantum mechanics as well as John von Neumann's conjecture that when humans observe a superposed quantum system, their brain states should also turn into superpositions.

The fact that Neville is a naive realist despite his superposed brain summarizes the basic quantum conundrum of why the world always appears "classical" despite the fact that physicists can prove that the world is entirely "quantum". Today, the real mystery is not quantum mechanics; the real mystery is why the world appears to humans to be stubbornly classical.

JUJITSU UNIVERSE

We house-broke quantum reality

Taught Schrödinger's Cat to purr

Now daily life's as uncanny

As atoms ever were.

At the bottom right is the fuzzy sketch of an animal which might possible represent the famously ambiguous Schrödinger Cat. Except that Lynden's animal looks just like a dog.

Thank you, Lynden Stone, for this rich and original work. I will treasure it like a quantum Picasso.

Erwin's Puss by Lynden Stone, housed at Centre for Quantum Dynamics, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia