The Voice referendum on October 14 will be a significant moment in Australia’s history. It has the potential to improve Australia immeasurably – or does it? Amid all the claims, counter-claims and outright BS, it can be hard to know what to believe.
Luckily, quantum physics can help. That’s right. Not only can it help explain major mysteries of the universe, quantum physics can also guide us on how to vote in a referendum that concerns constitutional recognition of our Indigenous peoples. And along the way, it can teach us about good journalism, and about fostering trust.
How? The first thing to realise is that quantum physics is difficult. It’s about something we can’t see, a part of the universe to which we don’t have direct sensory access. Describing something far removed from our daily experiences, it’s based on a mathematical theory developed 100 years ago by Schrödinger and Heisenberg, who were science’s version of Lennon and McCartney. While their celebrity was limited to the community of physicists, their theory has transformed society and our understanding of the cosmos.
Unfortunately, some people deliberately exploit the theory’s difficulty in order to peddle their particular brand of snake oil. It might be ‘quantum healing’, ‘quantum mysticism’, ‘quantum love’, ‘quantum crystals’, ‘quantum consciousness’, ‘quantum meditation’, ‘quantum energy’ or ‘quantum astrology’, but it’s all more bunkum than quantum. One of us has written a book about this, called Quantum Bullsh*t. And quantum BS is rife. Type ‘quantum physics’ into a search engine and you’ll be knee deep.
By contrast, a genuine understanding of quantum physics can give us major insights. It can give us glimpses of the complexity of reality. Our universe isn’t easy to understand; the same goes for the political debates surrounding the Voice. The complexity revealed by quantum physics is similarly evident in politics. The political structures and the political discourse that constitute our democracy, encapsulating a wide range of contrasting interests, is confounding.
How should we respond? In science, we respond with the scientific method. This involves coming up with the best theory possible, then testing it. Over time this theory will probably be replaced with a better one. At the moment the best we have in physics is the 100-year-old theory we know as quantum physics, which scientists are in a constant process of re-evaluating and, if possible, improving. In democracy, similarly, we are engaged in a constant process of re-evaluating and improving our political structures, including our Constitution.
These political structures also involve the news media covering politics, who carry a responsibility. Just as science needs to commit itself to the scientific method, journalists and commentators need to respond with a commitment to accuracy, fairness and balance, as encapsulated in codes such as the MEAA Journalists Code of Ethics. And they need to separate news from comment, identifying which is which. As key players in the public sphere, journalists and commentators can work towards enriching the discourse around a contested issue, or they can stereotype, sensationalise and polarise.
This is where trust becomes crucial. In the public sphere, as in science, we cannot possibly 'prove' everything that we take to be true. Epistemically, we cannot validate every single claim that we rely upon to build our world view. None of us has the capacity to do this. Life and society become unmanageable if you buy two litres of milk only to find it’s water, or if you deposit money in your bank account today only to find tomorrow it’s disappeared. Our society functions thanks to trust, including the trust in our democratic institutions and the information we use to guide us in our decisions. Science relies on this sort of trust, through the processes of expert knowledge, peer review, and building knowledge on knowledge. Similarly, our society functions effectively when our journalists are trustworthy, and when the public trusts them.
Putting all that together, we can be even more specific about how the scientific method can help us to improve journalism and democracy.
First, we need to promote education and critical thinking. In the world of quantum physics, understanding requires a solid grasp of the mathematical formalities underlying the theory. In politics, it requires a decent grasp of the issues at hand. Not everyone will be, or wants to be, a constitutional expert, but everyone should ensure they have a basic political fluency about what’s being proposed. Collectively, our challenge is to prompt those who are disengaged to become engaged; individually, each of us has a responsibility to inform ourselves. And that’s not hard, because clear and succinct information about both the Yes and No campaigns can be found on the Australian Electoral Commission website. Right now, if you don’t know enough about what’s being proposed, that’s on you.
Second, we need to foster skepticism without breeding cynicism. Questioning is crucial in science, as in politics, but it should be balanced with respect for expertise and evidence. That means we need to challenge bogus claims that the Uluru Statement is, in fact, 26 pages long. We need to query the motivations behind AI-generated campaigners. And we need to heed the latest research, such as the emerging work on ‘prebunking’, in which the goal is to vaccinate users against misinformation by exposing them to a targeted dose and thus making them better able to identify and resist it.
Lastly, we need to build and reinforce institutions that uphold truth and accountability. In science, this takes the form of peer review and rigorous validation. In politics and journalism, it requires democratic processes and a strong, independent press. In a context of ‘information disorder’, we need to build trustworthiness of, and trust in, our political institutions and our political journalists. To this end, researchers and bodies such as the International Panel on the Information Environment are doing important work.
To put all this another way: we need to follow the lead of the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, which is the world's largest science experiment. The LHC produces 300 gigabytes per second of raw data, akin to the amount of information social media algorithms want to show us about the Voice. However, the LHC filters the vast majority of it out as noise or otherwise irrelevant data, resulting in about 0.1 per cent being kept as ‘interesting events’. Similarly, we would benefit from adopting a policy of ‘useful, credible information only’. In the case of the Voice, paid advertising, conspiracy theories, coordinated disinformation, misleading and baseless arguments are the noise that is safely filtered out. Don’t waste your time with them. All the useful information necessary to make an informed decision is available. Use it to make your decision and then save your bandwidth because, just as the LHC cannot afford to waste computational resources on irrelevant data, we cannot afford to waste our mental bandwidth on information that doesn't enrich our understanding. Attention is the currency of the mind - spend it wisely.
Science takes the best model, then works to come up with a better model to replace it. This presupposes that there may never be a perfect model. Reality is complex, and all we can work towards is that our understanding continues to improve, and our models continue to improve.
The same is true of politics. Our democracy is impressive, but hardly perfect. Still, we can keep making it better, by casting our vote in a way that best fosters democracy, and is best for all of us. Quantum physics can teach us to avoid quantum bullsh*t by asking, simply: based on evidence, what will be better for the future of Australia, and for all of us?
Chris Ferrie, Associate Professor, UTS Centre for Quantum Software and Information
Sacha Molitorisz, Senior Lecturer - UTS Law