Lessons from Quantum Physics for Foreign Policy?
Is science useless for foreign policy?
Do you believe that evidence-based policymaking will hold limited value for foreign policy? That the social world is too uncertain to allow for objective truths about international relations to emerge, especially in contrast to the hard sciences? Do you find the comparison between hard science and social science absurd?
I was thinking about these challenges while reading an interesting book about quantum physics: Too Big for a Single Mind: How the Greatest Generation of Physicists Uncovered the Quantum World, by Tobias Hürter.
I was struck by an argument recounted in the book between two of history’s most famous scientists, Albert Einstein and the younger Werner Heisenberg. Einstein lectures Heisenberg about the nature of science, trying to put the upstart in his place. The year is 1916; at stake is the future of quantum physics. (The argument is recalled in Heisenberg’s book, Essays with Einstein, and an extended excerpt can be found in this link.)
I think this early debate about quantum physics offers some really interesting lessons for foreign policy. (Spoiler: if the science of physics is uncertain, the science of foreign policy can also contain uncertainty.)
Some background: Heisenberg's new theory of quantum physics suggested that the world at the atomic level is fundamentally uncertain. Not that scientists just hadn’t figured things out yet, but that they were un-figureoutable. Subatomic particles were being observed in laboratory experiments behaving in ways that defied the classical laws of physics: A particle would instantaneously jump from one place to another, which should have been impossible. And a particles seemed change states to a wave when put under human observation. Heisenberg’s interpretation – which suggests the subatomic world does not entirely work according to deterministic laws of nature – not only challenged Newtonian physics, but also seems to violate Einstein’s Theory of Relatively. Heisenberg’s theory nevertheless described observable phenomena accurately, despite the lack of satisfying causal explanation.
"Nonsense!" Einstein responded, firing the opening retort in an argument that would carry on for the next decade. Einstein allowed that "it may be heuristically useful to keep in mind what one has actually observed. But on principle, it is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone.”
“In reality,” Einstein continued, “the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe. We try to order the phenomena, to reduce them to a simple form, until we can describe what may be a large number of them with the aid of a few simple concepts. All this sounds very reasonable, but we must nevertheless ask ourselves in what sense the principle of mental economy is being applied here. Are we thinking of psychological or of logical economy, or, again, are we dealing with the subjective or the objective side of the phenomena? ... We ought to remember that inferring concepts and things from sense impressions is one of the basic presuppositions of all our thought. Hence, if we wanted to speak of nothing but sense impressions, we should have to rid ourselves of our language and thought."
Einstein was defending his deep conviction that the purpose of science is to investigate fixed laws of reality that exist independently of human observation. According to him, “The aim of physics is to explain reality objectively, independently of any particular point of view." Heisenberg’s new theory of quantum physics suggests there is no objectively measurable reality at the subatomic level. Thus, Einstein concluded, such a theory of quantum physics cannot be considered science.
This is almost the same logic as the dominant paradigm within the foreign policy community that suggests there’s too much uncertainty in the social world and thus foreign policy cannot be considered a science.
OK, but what does this mean for foreign policy? I have a few thoughts.
Science is fundamentally uncertain. It must be noted that Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle” has been vindicated by history and remains widely accepted in the scientific community today. Nothing in our known universe seems to escape uncertainty. Science is NOT the absence of uncertainty. Science has no ironclad deterministic law, nor is it the study of “objective truth.” But that’s perfectly OK. Science is a process of slowly advancing our knowledge of infinitely complex reality while reducing our infinite misunderstanding.
Thus, foreign policy — which, like physics, is fundamentally uncertain — can also be a science. I'm sometimes lectured (especially by very experienced policymakers) that foreign policy fundamentally lacks objective laws and is thus an inappropriate domain for science. A common refrain from this skeptic’s camp is that “every international challenge is unique, rendering any attempt to discern generalized rules or patterns futile.” The argument is not merely that science has not yet caught up to the complexity of foreign policy but that foreign policy cannot be studied with science. Unless Einstein was right that quantum physics is not (yet?) a science, I think this argument is misguided.
This is a cause for optimism! My point is NOT that the science of foreign policy is equivalent to quantum physics (though at least one scholar I deeply respect, Alexander Wendt, has provocatively made something like this claim). Instead, my takeaway physics is that uncertainty and complexity are perfectly ordinary for any scientific research program. The science of foreign policy might be riven with uncertainty and complexity, too, especially because it’s so interwoven with politics and ethics, but that does not make its study misguided. In my view, the potential benefits of improving our knowledge of foreign policy are so vast that it would be silly not to invest heavily in its study.
As Heisenberg would write about opponents of quantum physics, “The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing?”
Any quantum physics nerds out there that can tell me if I’m missing the point here? Any social scientists who have thought about the relationship between physical and social science? I’d love to hear from you!