The Quantum Mechanics of Kennedy and Khrushchev

There is a peculiar notion among some people in the hard sciences that they practice the purest, surest forms of knowledge. Biology is just applied chemistry, chemistry is just applied physics, and physics is just applied mathematics, and mathematics is axiomatically true (probably). All of these fields' laws and theories can be tested empirically with quantifiable data, or with basic logical analysis as in mathematics. A historian like me, on the other hand, only has sketchy qualitative data with which to work, no way to ethically repeat experiments in the field, and constant interference from politics seeking to assert historical narratives favorable to themselves. (And the less said about literature majors, the better.)

But this notion coyly pays tribute to the truth of the matter when it mentions how each field just applies knowledge from another. Every field does this, at least if it prospers in scientific discovery. Sometimes a new set of eyes is needed to see what's in front of them. Sometimes a bit of knowledge locked away in the advanced section of one field can help drive fundamental discoveries in another. History owes a lot to other fields. Radiocarbon dating, for one, has made mute stones sing like canaries at long last; so thank you, nuclear physics and chemistry. Linguistics has given us a lot of evidence for human migration throughout history, as has DNA sequencing. The hard scientist chauvinist might rebut, well, these are all hard sciences or soft sciences giving to history. What has history ever given to us?

My answer would be: understanding the nature of existence itself. Thank you, Khrushchev and Kennedy.

I should also thank J. Robert Oppenheimer, because had he never become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds, this contribution would not have been possible in the first place.

It feels dirty a bit to say nice things about Khrushchev, who drove the Soviet Union into the ground with his incompetent mismanagement. But in at least one regard, the most important regard, he upheld the correctest line of all: he did not end human civilization.

The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 is well-trodden history, even among normies, so I won't belabor it here. If you aren't familiar with it, the Wikipedia article is probably a decent refresher. Good? With me? Awesome.

Now, what's always struck me about this affair as odd was that just about everyone on both sides was all for this war.

In the top-level meetings in Washington, JFK was the only one with any trepidation whatsoever about going to war. I have to be real about how weird this is. JFK was a politically weak liberal playboy who couldn't even invade Cuba effectively. He would cringe and mince like a centrist between the Dixiecrat and SNCC wings of the Democrats before getting shot in broad daylight. He only got elected by telling lies he knew to be lies about the "missile gap" that Eisenhower couldn't refute without leaking classified information, and then stealing the Republican line on tax cuts out from under them. And yet, that little mewling Martha's Vineyard snot of a President suddenly became a big enough profile in courage to tell a roomful of top-level imperialist running dog brass to shut up about nuclear war, and they listened. After hours and days of him not backing down, to be sure, but it worked.

As much love as I clearly have for Jesus Fucking Kennedy the Bae of Pigs, at least his side was the bad guys. You can't be mad at the universe about false advertising when the bad guys act like bad guys. When the good guys let you down, though?

Not only do I have to uphold Khruschev in this episode (now I have to sprinkle my keyboard with holy water, thanks history), but I have to criticize Castro and Guevara, two people I almost unreservedly uphold and celebrate. That they should want a nuclear deterrent on their island, I can completely understand, respect, and even agree with. That they should be so eager to use it, I cannot. Mao also wanted nuclear war, but criticizing him isn't anything new for me.

If they had given the matter more thought, they would have realized that the destruction of human civilization would also be the destruction of its productive forces. Whatever was left would have to rebuild. If humans were left, we would have to rebuild civilization from scratch. If we were all dead, then some other animal would have to evolve to sapience sufficient to sculpt a civlization of their own before the sun becomes a red giant. In either case, the pain, suffering, tears, and death of millions to get the productive forces to this point would be for nothing; a new capitalism would have to be invented to rebuild more productive forces out of a new feudalism, and millions more would have to suffer anew for some far-off civilization to even have the chance at surpassing capitalism as a species that we would have just blown.

Khrushchev was alone on his side of the iron curtain in wanting to find a peaceful way out of the crisis. Khrushchev and Kennedy were alone in the halls of world power in upholding the correct line of the moment. But that's all it took. Maybe it was because they both had to make the final call, that the finality of that call sunk into them most.

Or maybe, because they both had to make the final call, the universe, which is created by observers, required them to make the call that would guarantee the continued existence of observers, and so they did, and every parallel universe where they didn't was instantaneously destroyed.

Just as studying the atom gave us the secrets of nuclear physics, it also gave us the secrets of quantum physics. Studying the behavior of particles at the atomic scale, we noticed their weirdness and their disregard of Newtonian physics. The weirdness boiled down to: the particles seemed to behave differently depending on if they were observed or not. Two main theories arose to explain this weirdness, and both are still considered plausible by mainstream scientists in these fields.

The more popular of the two is the so-called Copenhagen interpretation, which doesn't need to assert a multiverse to make sense of the universe.

The other interpretation is the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics, which explains the observer effect by saying that parallel universes exist where every option that can be, is. So if Schroedinger's cat could be alive or dead, until you open the box, you haven't forced the universe your own consciousness inhabits to go down a "cat-is-alive" or "cat-is-dead" path yet, and either could lie ahead of you. But once you open the box, your consciousness goes down a universe where one of those two things is definitely true.

The deeper implications of the many-worlds theory are profound and unsettling. If your observation creates the universe you are in, then it is quite possible that you will never enter into a parallel universe where you die. You couldn't, because you wouldn't be able to perceive it. This possibility is called either "quantum immortality" or "quantum hell" depending on the cynicism of the researcher. It could indeed be a hell, if in your personal universe you allowed evil to run amok (or even deeply partook in it yourself) and then inevitably got shaken off the protections of the wicked system you perpetuated. The universe guaranteeing you'll stay alive is not the same thing as the universe guaranteeing you'll be happy about it.

That's a fun little notion to chew on, but how could we ever know if it were true or not?

Well, there was once a moment in time where the entire world wanted to nuke each other, and we live in a universe where the two weak-kneed shitlibs who led their respective sides stiffened their spines and stopped the war against the wishes of literally everyone else on their team. I can only tell you with my qualitative historical data that that was a very unlikely result given the personalities involved. But we're here to talk about it, are we not? Unlikely as it may be, it happened.

Perhaps it had to, perhaps the universe and its murky laws mandated it to be so. The physicists will have to demean themselves by consulting the oracles of Clio to know more.