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A QUANTUM LEAP

by Galen Guengerich

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September 22, 2002

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Reading:

By any measure, Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the greatest women in American history. Her accomplishments on the national and international stage are legendary, including her pivotal role in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Every night before she went to bed, Eleanor Roosevelt paused to recommit herself to the ideals she most cherished and the goals she longed for most fervently. She called it her nightly prayer.

Spirit of Life,
who has set a restlessness in our hearts
and made us all seekers
after that which we can never fully find:
forbid us to be satisfied with what we make of life.
Draw us from base content
and set our eyes on far-off goals.
Keep us at tasks too hard for us
that we may be driven to Thee for strength.
Deliver us from fretfulness and self-pitying;
make us sure of the good we cannot see
and of the hidden good in the world.
Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us
and our hearts to the loveliness others hide from us
because we do not try to understand them.
Save us from ourselves
and show us a vision of a world made new.

Sermon:

A couple of months ago, I read a line in Jacques Barzun’s cultural history of the West, From Dawn to Decadence, that both intrigued and puzzled me. The line is this: "A quantum leap is not the great pole vault that jargon assumes [it is] from the impressive sound of the words: it happens inside the atom without being detectable." This line set me to wondering–about what a quantum leap actually is, about how we commonly use the term, and about Barzun’s suggestion that our usage misrepresents the term’s meaning.

The dictionary describes a quantum leap in the way I am accustomed to hearing it used–as an abrupt change, a sudden large increase, or a dramatic advance. We typically use the term to describe epoch-making advances in fields such as astronomy, philosophy, medicine, and computer technology. The discovery of penicillin, for example, is often described as a quantum leap in our ability to combat the kind of infectious diseases that once could decimate the population of an entire city or even continent. Other quantum leaps in human knowledge and capability include the discovery that the earth is round rather than flat, the insight that human beings can think for themselves and are not mere pawns of the gods, the invention of moveable type and the first printing press, and the development of the assembly line and mass production.

For the most part, people in the modern world celebrate these achievements and hold the people who made them in high regard. We love quantum leaps. Nicolas Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein: each had a remarkable impact on the world, and all of our lives are dramatically different because of their contributions to progress. I wonder what must it have been like to be Copernicus and be the first person to figure out that the sun and not the earth is at the center of our solar system. For Copernicus to propose a sun-centered solar system in his day made about as much sense as proposing a flat earth does in ours. How could anyone have imagined such a thing at a time when the basic tenets of both science and religion required an earth-centered universe?

Or what would it have been like to be Marie Curie, the two-time Nobel Prize winning physicist? Working first with her husband Pierre and then others, she spearheaded the discovery of radium and subsequently developed the concept of radioactivity. Her fundamental insight, widely judged preposterous at the time, was that the emission of energy by uranium ore came not from a chemical reaction–that was the only available explanation at the time–but rather from the way its atoms were put together. Even before it became clear how completely her insight would change the way we live, one of her contemporaries observed: "No one single discovery…has ever been more subversive of long-accepted scientific views, or given rise to more perplexing problems regarding matters which were previously thought to be thoroughly understood."

It is true that some advances in knowledge and technology have been used for malevolent purposes. Nonetheless, discoveries like these, most of which make our world safer, healthier, more peaceful, and more meaningful, are what all of us dream of making ourselves when we are young, and what we dream of our children making as we grow older and less ambitious. Finding a cure for cancer or AIDS, creating an actual United Nations of the world, solving the problem of Third World debt, eradicating land mines, articulating a theory of justice that everyone agrees to without protest–wouldn’t it be fabulous if the solution to one of these problems struck you or me in the head, like the apple that struck Newton and caused him to make the quantum leap in understanding the laws of motion that underlie modern physics?

There is an irony in understanding a quantum leap as an abrupt change or a dramatic advance, however. As Barzun suggests, that is not what the term originally meant. Scientist Robert March explains that physics has seen two periods of rapid change in its most fundamental ideas. The first revolution began with Galileo and culminated with Newton. It developed an understanding of the physical world in mechanical terms–the world as a mechanism made up of objects and energy, inertia and velocity, acceleration and momentum. Each of these forces could be calculated, measured and, more importantly, predicted. March describes this theory, known as classical or Newtonian mechanics, as probably the most successful scientific theory of all time. It was even embraced by theologians known as deists, who not very imaginatively suggested that God must be like a master clockmaker, who created this mechanical world and left it here ticking away.

The second revolution, which began in the twentieth century and is still raging around us, has produced none of the comforting clarity of Newton’s system, because it deals with two dimensions of the universe that we don’t know much about: relativity and quantum theory. Relativity was largely the creation of one man, Albert Einstein, and it deals with the realm of the very large or the very fast. Quantum theory deals with the realm of the very small. Where these two realms come together, in the very small very fast world of elementary particles, lies what March calls the central mystery of the physical universe.

There is much that we do not know about what happens in the very small very fast realm, nor do we know why it happens. We know that electrons orbit the nuclei of atoms, but we also know that we cannot measure or predict where an electron will be at a given time–a fact known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. We also know that an electron can orbit only at certain distances from the nucleus. These are called quantum levels, and they are the spherical equivalent of floors in an apartment building. The electron can move between floors, but it can only move one floor at a time. It can whirl around on the first floor, or the second, or the third, but it cannot stop in between floors. For some reason, the elevator doors will not open.

This move from one quantum level to another is called, not surprisingly, a quantum leap. No one knows what makes an electron leap, or why it can only move one quantum level at a time, or why there is no in-between. But we do know that when an electron does make the leap, it is making the smallest change it possibly can. Quantum levels are so named because a quantum is the smallest unit of anything. A quantum leap, therefore, describes the smallest possible change that can be made. Or, as Jacques Barzun put it, a quantum leap is not a great pole vault: it happens inside the atom without being detectable.

The irony is that we speak as though a quantum leap were a change of epic magnitude, but in reality it is a change that makes the smallest possible difference. Huge changes in the physical world are simply the accumulated difference made by an infinite number of small changes. The changes themselves occur one quantum leap at a time; you barely know they are happening. But over time, the accumulated change can be astounding: the birth of a star or a baby, the exploding of a bomb or the opening of a flower, the warming of the seas in summer or the chilling of the air in autumn.

For me, the lesson of the electron and its quantum leap is both simple to state and difficult to learn. The reason we as individuals often fail to make quantum leaps in the common sense of the term is that we fail to understand how quantum leaps happen in the literal sense. All change is incremental, and usually infinitesimal. The only way the world changes is one quantum at a time. There are no shortcuts. I believe that the same principle holds true in each of our lives. The change we can effect happens one quantum leap at a time; there are no express elevators for us either. Which is why creating change in our lives or making a difference in our world comes not from making one quick fix, but from making a long commitment in the same direction. The important thing is to choose that direction and begin moving, one tiny step at a time. Remember that there are no giant leaps; there are only tiny leaps that over time add up to giant differences.

My guess is that most of the time you and I prefer the illusion of the quantum leap in the common sense of the term: the quick fix, the speedy solution. We do not have the patience to make a long commitment, nor the faith to believe that big results can come of small beginnings. I am reminded of a story that Jesus once told his disciples. Like the rabbis of his time, Jesus used simple stories called parables to illustrate a lesson or teach a timeless truth. This parable is about the kingdom of God, which is the term Jesus often used to describe a way of living that is open to the realm of all that is holy and sacred.

The parable goes like this. "And Jesus said, ‘With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs and becomes a tree, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade." Those who open themselves to the realm of the divine, according to Jesus, learn that the smallest seeds grow up into the greatest shrubs. The lesson is not that we should expect great bushes to spring full-blown from the ground. Rather, we should plant small seeds and have faith that they will grow.

Something like that same principle holds true in every aspect of our lives. Don’t look for places where you want big changes. Rather, look for a place where you can make a small change–even a tiny change, one you will hardly notice. Make it once, and then again, and then again. That is how everything happens: infinitesimally small changes, made one at a time. Letters are written and books are read one word at a time, marathons are run one step at a time, spreadsheets are built one cell at a time, encouragement is offered one neighbor at a time, children are raised one moment at a time, lessons are taught one example at a time, weight is lost one calorie at a time, tucking children into bed happens one night at a time, tunes are played one note at a time, homeless people are kept warm one blanket at a time, poetry is committed to memory one line at a time. There is no other way.

I would like for each of us to consider what quantum leap we would like to make–in both senses of the term. Think about what big change in your life or our world you would like to see. Then decide what tiny step you can take today that if done each day for a week, or a month, or a year, or a decade would yield a dramatic transformation. If we wait for some big change to transform our lives, it will never happen. The realm of the divine is the place where mustard seeds grow, where small beginnings made in faith and pursued with patience yield great abundance. As Eleanor Roosevelt knew, the secret is the restlessness in our hearts that makes us all seekers after that which we can never fully find. Following her example, we must set our eyes on far-off goals, yet keep our attention on the tasks at hand. Then her prayer can be ours as well: "Make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world…Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new." With this as our prayer, we too can change ourselves and our world, one quantum leap at a time.

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