The Binary Age
We’ve been born and raised in a binary world, a world of opposites where things are either black or white, 1 or 0, good or evil, Ying and Yang, manic or depressive. It’s not a surprise that in psychology, narcissistic disorders (characterized by a polarization of behaviors and representations) account for 60% of the diagnoses and another significant cut of the pie is occupied by bi-polar disorder (which is sometimes misdiagnosed impulse control, border personality or narcissistic disorders). We think in binary, we get mentally sick in binary (or at least psychiatrists and psychologists diagnose in binary) and live our lives in binary. Computers (I’m using the term broadly here), those machines that help us control and organize modern societies, think in ones and zeros, on or off. There’s no on-and-off position. Complexity is just not in our dictionaries.
The Quantum Age
We have lived our whole lives under the safe umbrella of determinism. Deterministic society, born in the XVIII century with Enlightenment, reached its pinnacle with Newtonian physics. In the beginning of the XX century Einstein killed it , but only a few have noticed. For most, 1+1 still equals 2.
120 years ago the world and the Universe were, in a way, constant, predictable and orderly. The laws of physics were easy to understand, accurate and valid across the board, which eased the natural tension that us humans feel when we can’t predict or understand something.
Quantum Mechanics and the General Theory of Relativity proved that absolutes do not exist, that predictability is an ilussion, that the laws of physics can be broken, that a cause can have not one, but an infinite number of effects; that things can be more than one thing at the same time (this is called Quantum Superposition); and that in fact -this one’s a shocker- there may be more than one Universe. This concepts may sound to you as wicked as the idea of the Sun being the center of the Solar System to Ptolomeus, but like it or not this is the present state of human knowledge. Just as Ptolomeus was “defeated” by Copernicus, Newton “lost” to Einstein.
Schrödinger´s paradox is the best way to illustrate the difference between binary thinking and quantum thinking.
I´m quoting and paraphrasing Wikipedia: “A cat, along with a flask containing a poison and a radioactive source, is placed in a sealed box. If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. There’s a 50/50 chance of the flask getting shattered. “The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead”.
The picture represents the quantum-mechanical “Schrödinger’s cat” paradox according to the many-worlds interpretation. In this interpretation every event is a branch point; the cat is both alive and dead, irrespective of whether the box is opened, but the “alive” and “dead” cats are in different branches of the universe, both of which are equally real, but which cannot interact with each other.
For us, those born and educated decades ago and even those born not too long ago but still under the spell of our educational system, grasping concepts like relativity, quantum superposition and complexity require a reformulation of the way we think, a re-wiring of our minds.
We are living in a new paradigm without realizing we are in it. The concepts of this new order are still extraneous to us, some of them may even seem science fiction. This happens because society as a whole, takes its time to assimilate changes, even more if those changes are radical. Our children are not yet being educated under this new set of rules and laws. Only if you get to college you may (depending on your career) start hearing about the so called paradigm of complexity but by that time, it’s going to be already too late. Our brains wire themselves in binary for the first 20 years of our lives. What you learn in college may just be an add-on; you may grasp the concepts, but your thinking is still going to be done the “binary” way.
It’s like learning a foreign language. Start learning it while you are in kindergarden and you have a chance to master it. Start learning when you are 20 and you could get to be, at best, a decent speaker.
“Quantum thinking” may open doors never imagined by those of us still trapped in a binary world. It’s time for this present generation of educators to start preparing young minds to fully comprehend the potential that thinking complexly entails: out-of-the-box-thinking, proneness to collaboration, integration, inclusiveness, and who knows, maybe nurture the next Einstein that will make us leap forward in the way we understand the universes 
Post image credit, Scientific American
Image and caption credits, Wikipedia
Article by Fernando
This is my blog - I write about careers, talent management and organizational development. I've been featured at Monster.com, Alltop, WeBlogBetter and BloggingPro among others. I hope you leave this blog with more than you arrived and I look forward to discussing your ideas and projects with you. See you in the comments section.
Fernando has written 230 awesome articles for us at Fernando Tarnogol – Careers Blog
| Blog → Careers Blog
{ 1 trackback }