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Monday, October 14, 2024
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The Long Way Home

Reading books is my favorite pastime, mainly because I can do it while I’m eating, drinking, or smoking a pipe.

On the other hand, I should never review books. The following mentions a book and some themes but isn’t a review. But this book is unparalleled if you’re seeking a mind-bending exercise that will leave you questioning the very fabric of reality.

Several years ago, my friend Joel asked me to join a business consulting firm he started in Portland, OR. The firm served clients in the freight transportation industry, a busi­ness I knew more than a little bit about.

I’d known Joel for a long time. We “came up” in the freight brokering business during the heady years of deregulation in the 1980s. Mutual respect made working together a re­warding experience.

Joel’s management and consulting philos­ophy centered on the science of quantum physics. This science attempts to explain how the universe works at the smallest scale. It deals in probabilities and observation— measurement.

For business, the probability of success hinges on understanding all the parts and pieces, identifying expected outcomes, and implementing systems to measure progress or its opposite. This is where the practical application of quantum physics in business becomes evident.

He captivated me with the tale of Schrödinger’s Cat. Erwin Schrödinger, a Nobel physicist in the mid-20th century, de­vised a thought experiment: Picture a sealed box with a live cat, a radioactive atom, a Gei­ger counter, and a vial of poison. The atom has a 50% chance of decaying within an hour. If it decays, the Geiger counter detects the radi­ation and breaks the vial, killing the cat. Ac­cording to quantum mechanics, until the box is opened and the cat is observed, it exists in a superposition of both alive and dead states.

As a lightly educated freight broker, I thought this idea seemed off-putting. But curi­osity eventually got the better of me. I entirely bought into the business side of understanding the essential components of a business, setting objectives, and creating a process to observe and measure outcomes. But I put the idea of Quantum Physics in the pile of ideas gathering dust on my desk.

Not long ago, I found a book, the one re­ferred to above, that rekindled my interest. It is “The Dancing Wu Li Masters, An Overview of the New Physics,” by Gary Zukav. The cover blurb was, “…Gary Zukav opens the fascinat­ing world of quantum physics to readers with no mathematical or technical background.” That’s me.

It goes on, “‘Wu Li’ is the Chinese phrase for physics. It means, ‘patterns of organic energy,’ but it also means ‘nonsense.’”

If the nonsense of Schrödinger’s Cat, men­tioned in the book, hooks you, wait until you read about the dancing Wu Li Masters.

Einstein and the boys found something that appealed to my nonsense side. They found that light, God’s creation right after the heav­ens and the earth, is both particle and wave. A particle is a discrete unit of matter or energy often visualized as a tiny, localized object. A wave is a disturbance propagating through space, like a pebble dropping in a pond or the radio signals that dominated our life in the 20th century.

Depending on how and when you observe light, it will either be a particle or a wave. But you can’t know, like you can’t know if the cat is alive or dead until you open the box and observe.

After slogging through Zukav’s work, I re­alized that understanding quantum physics is similar to understanding teenagers.

Think about Eddie Haskell, Wally Cleaver’s buddy on “Leave it to Beaver,” the sitcom for baby boomers. When observed by Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver, Eddie was the epitome of the perfect young man. Like a particle, he was a tiny, localized character. But when the paren­tal observers looked elsewhere, Eddie was a holy terror without dignity or compassion.

Quantum physics reinforces that a single observation is never enough to uncover the truth in business or other human interactions. It reminds us to always consider multiple per­spectives.

Steve Fernlund
Steve Fernlund
Typically these “about me” pages include a list of academic achievements (I have none) and positions held (I have had many, but who really cares about those?) So, in the words of the late Admiral James Stockwell, “Who am I? Why am I here?” I’m well into my seventh decade on this blue planet we call home. I’m a pretty successful husband, father, and grandfather, at least in my humble opinion. My progeny may disagree. We have four children and five grandchildren. I spent most of my professional life in the freight business. At the tender age of 40, early retirement beckoned and we moved to Grand Marais. A year after we got here, we bought and operated the Cook County News Herald, a weekly newspaper in Grand Marais. A sharp learning curve for a dumb freight broker to become a newspaper editor and publisher. By 1999 the News Herald was an acquisition target for a rapidly consolidating media market. We sold our businesses and “retired” again, buying a winter retreat in Nevada. In the fall of 2016, we returned to Grand Marais and bought a house from old friends of ours on the ridge overlooking Lake Superior. They were able to move closer to family and their Mexico winter home. And we came home to what we say is our last house. I’m a strong believer in the value of local newspapers--both online and those you can wrap a fish in. I write a weekly column and a couple of feature stories for the Northshore Journal. I’m most interested in writing about the everyday lives of local people and reporting on issues of importance to them.
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