What do Schrodinger's cat, experimental psychology, and education policy all have in common?

by H. Goldman

This month, physicists at the University of California at Santa Barbara were for the first time able to "see" what I call the Schrodinger's cat effect. This is the quantum superposition of two "opposite" energy states in a single particle in a visible object (if a 60 micrometer long metal strip qualifies as visible).

The object, a strip of metal, was in a superposition of resonating and rest states. In other words, it could be observed as being either resonating or at rest at a given time (when an object or particle in a superposition of energy states is observed, it goes into what is called quantum decoherence, so only one energy state can actually be observed).

A similar effect occurs in Erwin Schrödinger's famous thought experiment. In it, a cat is in a box with a flask of poison and a hammer connected to a Geiger counter. Now, if the box is shielded from all quantum decoherence, because a "particle" is also a wave in this state, there is a chance that the Geiger counter will register radioactive decay and release the poison, and also a chance that it will not. Thus, in this situation, Schrödinger pointed out, the cat would also be in a superposition of two energy states: life and death. This, of course, is often conceptually elevated to mean that the cat could be both dead and alive at once.

With the experiment with the rod, then, just like in Schrodinger's macabre thought experiment, most people have jumped to the conclusion (because, as always when dealing with quantum mechanics, the original paper was conceptually vague) that the strip was vibrating and not vibrating at the same time in the same way that Schrodinger's cat was dead and alive at once.

This, of course, is paradoxical. But the paradox only appears when we attempt to take abstract physical concepts (the quantum superposition of energy states) and elevate them to normative descriptions of physical behavior (the cat being both dead and alive) without equivalently normative observations. In the experiment with the strip of metal, the strip was not observed to be both vibrating and not vibrating, its resonance was recorded at various times, and the recorded resonance frequencies showed that it could be  resonating or at rest.

The point here is that only correlations were observed, and conceptually elevating these correlations leads to, confusion. As the philosopher Wittgenstein said of experimental psychology, misunderstanding correlation leads to "experimental methods and conceptual confusion."

After reading Kakofonous' piece on Charles Murrays' book, Real Education (note that I haven't read the book myself), I found that the ideas of educational "giftedness" that underpin Murray's proposals suffer from the same conceptual confusion.

This confusion persists in his suggested alternative to a BA for students who aren't able to excel in college as well as the No Child Left Behind Act. When we attempt to measure mental capacity, we are reduced to using tests, grades, etc., and our attempts to measure college success really only consist of similar criteria (with the addition of whether one drops out). To draw a conclusion from these things about individual students (or even districts as a whole) without looking at the K-12 education system behind them is to say "Student X can't succeed in college because he or she was born unable to succeed in college" or "students in district Y are not doing well on exams. Therefore, the district should be penalized."

These are conceptually confused statements. They assume that there is something inherent in a student that gives her a set mental capacity, but there are only correlations backing this up (for instance, low test scores are seen to correlate to an inability to handle a college environment), and these correlations, in turn, are based on assumptions about behavior. However, no matter how high the mountain of data is, no matter how many resonating/not resonating rods that we have, we can't use these things to make normative conceptual conclusions. They can only show that we are making accurate predictions.

Moreover, I would argue that it is not the college system that is the problem. Rather, it is the K-12 education system, which fails to prepare students for college in the first place. In most elementary, middle, and high schools children simply aren't instilled with a love of learning. Although this can be partly contributed to culture, it is also because of a lack of incentives for good teachers, the existence of socioeconomic barriers to a good education, and a curriculum that is already built for students to be able to enter the manual labor force. Creating a fast-track into the workforce for students who can't succeed in college misses the point, and is arguably writing off the futures of students, as college life is the last chance for a student to be inspired after leaving a school system that, itself, is built to funnel youth into the workforce.