Everybody Wants to Rule the Quantum World
Tears for Fears’ Roland Orzabal wrote songs about quantum physics. Physicist Paul Halpern has a unique interview.
When physicist Erwin Schrödinger developed his famous feline thought experiment and Albert Einstein challenged the role of chance in quantum mechanics by stating that God does not play dice with the Universe, little did they know how their confrontations to orthodox views would someday become a part of popular lore. Especially in the case of Schrödinger’s cat, their ideas have become cultural memes, as seen on tee shirts, cartoons, and popular television shows such as The Big Bang Theory and Futurama.
Quantum indeterminacy is normally not the stuff of hit singles or music videos. Yet for a brief shining moment in the mid-1990s it was. After reading numerous popular accounts of physics, songwriter and musician Roland Orzabal, co-founder of Tears for Fears, delved into such ideas in the lyrics of two of his songs: “Schrödinger’s Cat” and “God’s Mistake.” I was privileged to interview him about the background behind those works.
Tears for Fears is a band best known for its international hits in the 1980s, such as “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” “Head Over Heels,” and “Shout.” Many people are also familiar with the band’s song “Mad World,” which became a hit as a cover version performed by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules, as part of the soundtrack for the film Donnie Darko. Yet surprisingly for a group that has been so successful, the band has consistently avoided formulaic pop, eschewed banal lyrics, and strived for idea-driven songs. The startling implications of quantum physics offered one such idea that the band, helmed solo by Orzabal at the time (and later rejoined by co-founder Curt Smith) took time to explore.
The turn to modern physics lyrics was an unlikely twist. As a child, Orzabal was far more interested in math, and of course music, than science. As he recalled:
I certainly struggled with general science at school, I couldn’t make the vital link between the chemicals in the test tube on the bunsen burner, and what was going on inside my head; and physics left me absolutely baffled. But I took delight in the problem solving areas of math. I even, at one point, contemplated becoming a math teacher.
Moreover, Orzabal saw classical, deterministic science as antithetical to the spontaneity and creativity he found in musical composition. The “magic” of the creative process seemed lost in a mechanistic world. As he related:
I think that ‘nuts and bolts’ science is at odds with the way a musician’s brain works, where you are, at times, searching for a divine spark, plucking things out of the air, making something from nothing, a thing we are told should be impossible. Of course, I am talking about the more creative, magical aspects of composition here. There tends to be a pretty clear distinction (at least there was at my school) between those who have an aptitude for the arts and those who have a leaning towards the sciences.
Gradually, though, he came to realize that there was more to science than the dry textbooks of his school days. His fascination with modern physics and the philosophical questions it raised began to grow after he was exposed to popular treatments of the subject.
I remember in the early eighties songs like ‘Einstein A Go-Go’ by Landscape, and Thomas Dolby’s ‘She Blinded Me With Science,’ but I’m not sure if they inspired an interest in the subject, it just seemed that the logic and detachment of science fitted in with the mood of early electronica. It wasn’t until, as an adult, when I started reading popular science books about the bizarre world of quantum mechanics, that I became fascinated with where science was headed.
Through popular accounts, such as The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav, Orzabal learned about the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. According to that standard view, an observer’s measurement can trigger a quantum system’s probabilistic collapse into one of its component states.
Strangely, the array of possible resulting states depends on the quantity being measured. For example, if an experimenter measures the position of an electron, the electron’s overall quantum state distills itself into one of the possible position state outcomes. The particular result cannot be predicted exactly, only probabilistically, like the spin of an ideal roulette wheel. However, if the observer decides alternatively to record the momentum of the electron, the set of possibilities is an array of momentum states, not position states. The act of observation then causes a random collapse into one of the momentum states. Suddenly, the universe is no longer mechanistic, but contains a human element — the act of observation.
As Orzabal related:
What appealed to me about quantum mechanics was that suddenly (to my novice mind) the fabric or essential nature of the universe was being challenged; that here was science verging on mysticism. It resonated with me, the suggestion that the person doing the experiment influences the outcome, that the outcome is influenced by what the experiment is indeed trying to prove. It seems to make more sense to me, that our view of the world directly influences and interferes with the world around us, as opposed to the suggestion or feeling that we are mere cogs in an unfeeling machine.
Orzabal became fascinated in particular with Schrödinger’s thought experiment, which envisions a cat trapped in a closed box with a radioactive source, a Geiger counter and a vile of poison triggered by a positive reading of the counter. During a certain time interval, there is a 50–50 chance that the sample would emit a particle, the counter triggered, the poison released and the cat killed. However because before observation the quantum state of the source is a mixture of decayed and non-decayed, the cat remains in a zombielike mixture of life and death until the box is opened.
As Orzabal noted:
Wonderful thought experiments such as Schrödinger’s Cat have an almost poetic, visual quality to them, which, as a songwriter, I found inspirational, so much so that I managed to play with the concept in a song of the same name.
His song “Schrödinger’s Cat,” released as a B-side of a single, was one of the early cultural references to the thought experiment, well before it became widely known outside of the physics community. It offers an epic of chaos within determinism. Juxtaposing a conductor’s cry “Last Train to Norwich!” — symbolic of a clockwork universe — with lyrics such as
Just as your cat sees in the dark You criticize the play and isolate the box I always knew you were a scientist at heart
— the song wonderfully shows how while classical science eschews the role of the observer, some interpretations of quantum mechanics embrace it.
Several years later, Orzabal turned Einstein’s famous protest against quantum uncertainty, “God does not play dice,” into the theme of another song “God’s Mistake,” which received much radio airplay, was made into a video, and performed on the Tonight Show.
In the song, Orzabal argues that love and other emotions are emblematic of the breakdown of the deterministic universe. He suggests that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, with its concept of dice-rolling, better matches the chance nature of the real world than does the traditional mechanistic view.
As Orzabal described the song in a radio interview around the time of its release:
This song comes from a period of my life when I wasn’t having a good time with my relationship. At the same time as I was going through this bad period, I was reading a lot of stuff on the new physics and parapsychology. Einstein said that God does not play dice with the universe. There’s a certain view we have of God which really stems from science: Newton, Einstein, the very classical science. So I took this idea of God sitting there and designing the universe in a very mechanical way, such that if you knew the starting point of every particle, you knew the end result, the outcome. So therefore 90% of human subjective experience — with love being a very important one, love which defies gravity, breaks Einsteinian speed limits — must be a mistake. Because it doesn’t fit in with the divine plan; it’s illogical.
In his solo album, “Tomcats Screaming Outside,” released in 2001, Orzabal continued his exploration of themes from modern physics. The rocker “Dandelion” includes the query “Does time stand still if you’re stuck in a wormhole?” A ballad, “Hey Andy,” about a friend’s death, begins with the line “God played dice and called you home.”
A novel he recently published, “Sex, Drugs and Opera,” cleverly refers to the Schrödinger’s Cat paradox when a dog goes missing and the protagonist finds himself in a mixed state of hope and despair. Orzabal has publicly mentioned that his own cat is named “Schro,” and has many fans on social media who share his interest in contemporary science.
Currently working with Curt Smith on a new Tears for Fears album, it is impossible to predict if any of its songs will allude to science. However there is a hint that one song (which may or may not appear) refers to time travel. On Twitter, where Orzabal has described himself as residing in the ‘West Country to LA Wormhole’, he has joked (or perhaps not) that he has written a song called “Dog Ate My Time Machine,” which from the funny title, shows some promise.
Modern physics is not just for scientists anymore. It pervades our culture and can even be found in rock music. As Bill and Ted would say, “Rock on, quantum physics dudes!”
Paul Halpern is the author of Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics.
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