“… the story of time’s arrow begins with the quantum mechanical idea that, deep down, nature is inherently uncertain.”

I read a very interesting article on quantum physics at Wired.com today. I believe it can be applied to the nature of stories and help explain our minds’ tendency and need to create and enjoy them.

Nature is inherently uncertain! What a beautiful statement! It has a ring of truth, acceptance, surrender and freedom. This sounds like a point that urgently asks to be further explored and its connections to the minute details of our lives thoroughly studied.

When I think about this statement in relation to storytelling, I feel more comfortable with the fact that stories too are inherently uncertain, just as their creators and audiences are. For one thing, they reflect an uncertain image of life. Secondly, they generate even more uncertainty as soon as they meet an audience. As many uncertainties as there are audiences.

It also explains why human beings and the characters they create and love are constantly striving for certainty and equilibrium. In fact, isn’t striving for certainty at the heart of all human conflict?

And now we know why! The article suggests that the moment a particle interacts with another (which, as I understand, happens as soon as the particle originates) it can no longer be described by its own ‘pure state.’ Professor Seth Lloyd who realized the relationship between quantum uncertainty and human uncertainty found that “When particles become increasingly entangled with one another, the information that originally described them would shift to describe the system of entangled particles as a whole. It was as though the particles gradually lost their individual autonomy and became pawns of the collective state. Eventually, the correlations contained all the information, and the individual particles contained none. At that point, Lloyd discovered, particles arrived at a state of equilibrium, and their states stopped changing…”

Bear with me as I try to make sense of this with my very basic level of comprehension. Is this how the story goes: We leave our ‘pure state’ of certainty as soon as we begin our lives and immediately turn into uncertain beings. By way of getting inevitably entangled with everyone and everything else in the universe and therefore becoming even more uncertain, we eventually reach a point of saturation with our entangledness. At this point we have sufficiently emptied ourselves out and become one with the collective ‘system’ that we stop changing/striving and finally become equilibriated, balanced, satisfied and happy?

Let’s try to apply it to the mythological structure of stories. A is confused, but doesn’t know it. A meets B. A gets even more confused and now knows it. B gets more confused too. Together A and B become more and more confused together until they have to change so so so much that A and B individually and collectively achieve a state of steadiness in a different and –in the case of stories– better way.

Lloyd says, “The universe as a whole is in a pure state. But individual pieces of it, because they are entangled with the rest of the universe, are in mixtures.” By living the story of our lives and all the little stories we generate and consume within it, we also become mixtures and eventually, hopefully, go back to that ‘pure state’.

Along the way, it sure feels good to know that uncertainty and certainty are natural and common in all of humanity, nature and the universe. Perhaps this is the reason why we tell stories and why we love stories. To entertain our uncertainties, to try to make sense of the inherent qualities in all of us, to move toward certainty…

Not surprisingly I am not certain about any of this. Have a read of the full article and send me your thoughts. Here’s the link: http://www.wired.com/2014/04/quantum-theory-flow-time/