💡 An electron’s memory of Mesopotamian song

[kesbeacon]

Tumblr is a black hole of cool takes that I’ll never find again. There’s a post that’s gone around that goes something like, ‘my teacher (?) said that the present that we see couldn’t have resulted from the past we were taught.’ It might actually be a quote from something, or it might have been from the OP’s personal recollections. Either way, I’ll never know unless it serendipitously crosses my dash again, because I can’t remember the exact wording and I didn’t reblog it.

But it’s such a great and thought provoking insight; even though it’s clearly meant to be a commentary on a specific area of historical misinformation – at a guess, the colonisation of the Americas – it’s got much broader applicability. I’ve been chewing over this for a while, and the current product of this line of thought is the question ‘could this fact I’ve been presented with result in the world as it exists?’

Discipline skip! In quantum physics, it appears to be the case that quantum information cannot be destroyed*. Theoretically, all processes are reversible. A particle’s current state encodes its previous and future states.

History is, of course, not a quantum object**, and things are lost to the ages all the time – and yet. It’s made of an awful lot of particles both actual and metaphorical. It is*** certain that there is, somewhere out there, a particle that still holds the information of how it was swirled around by the breath of an ancient Mesopotamian singing a song to their child. If you had a big enough computer, could you calculate it?

Could the world we see exist if that Mesopotamian hadn’t sung that song and thereby moved that particle?

There’s a tension here; practically, these things are unknowable. But I think it expands your mind to think about them, and to wonder what information about the past is encoded in the present and how. It’s not as simple as it’s often presented; it’s easy to make pop history takes that turn authentic if recent folk customs into Survivals From The Age Of The Ancients (cough Victorian antiquarians).

We have to be able to be more subtle than that, and more accepting of uncertainty, and more willing to look at other ways in which that past is preserved. Historians do this a lot; we look for history in the negative spaces and use the historical imagination to try to work around the limitations of our sources. We have so much history, and it’s so full of (often bleeding) holes. And no matter who tries to hide it, something was affected by it. So what was it?

*This is, of course, the subject of debate, especially with regards to the black hole paradox. Also, shout-out to Daniel & Jorge Explain the Universe, which is my regular source of mind-blowing physics information, and apologies to physicists for everything I’ve misunderstood.

**I did a whole-ass history degree to be able to say this with a fairly high degree of confidence!

***I hope.