The Contemporary Obsession With Quantum Physics

The word quantum can be seen or heard everywhere from entertainment to science and philosophy articles to conversations, contributing to the general Western perception that quantum physics is the epitome of scientific inquiry.  Even though a typical person probably does not even know what the phrase quantum physics is supposed to refer to, they might think it must be important simply because of the societal craze based around it.  People with little to no genuine autonomy and intelligence are more likely than not to be shaped by popular ideas and words, which leaves them particularly receptive to the widespread obsession with the speculative physics of a world that cannot even be seen and yet is embraced all the same, promoted with a host of red herring statements at many levels of culture.

Filmmakers, scientists, and writers throw the word quantum in front of random, wholly irrelevant words as if every concept is philosophically tied to the physics of a scale that one cannot even see with one's eyes.  On the contrary, quantum physics is not even relevant to much of macroscopic physics--which is itself irrelevant to many philosophical truths--except as a hypothetical set of interactions between matter and energy at such a miniscule level that the inferior nature of empirical observations cannot cast direct light on them!  Even if matters of core metaphysics and epistemology (dealing with things like logic, one's own consciousness, the basic existence of an external world, and the uncaused cause) are ignored by those fixated on mere matters of science, it is not as if one must contemplate the quantum world to understand everyday experiences with something like gravity to the most direct empirical sense possible.

The contemporary obsession with quantum physics appears to be driving miscellaneous people to associate quantum physics with almost anything they can think of.  As logic, introspection, and cursory sensory observations of macroscopic objects reveal, there is simply no way that anyone could ever even link any knowable fact to a quantum world without a completely different scale of bodily existence or without complete speculation or references from others.  Quantum physics, in other words, is nothing but a grand red herring to both the important aspects of philosophy in many different categories and the fundamental aspects of practical life.  Other than hypothetical practical benefits and unverifiable speculations which at most explore certain characteristics of the physical world as far as pure metaphysics goes, the ideas most commonly associated with quantum physics are just the result of cultural infatuation with a new trend in the scientific community.

Now, even the basic model of an atom and descriptions of what lies behind electrical phenomena involve physics at a scale so small that the true events therein cannot even be seen, so quantum physics is connected to certain theories behind some observable laws of nature.  I do not mean that there is no connection between whatever scientific events may actually occur at a quantum scale and those which occur at a macroscopic scale.  I mean that there is no way to get from strictly logical truths or direct sensory experiences to notions that resemble anything like what modern ideas about quantum physics entail.  This in no way suggests that a quantum scale does not exist, but it does expose the epistemological and conceptual limitations of quantum physics.  When the broader issues of physics are irrelevant to logical axioms and deductions, immediate phenomenology, and absolute certainty, there is nothing whatsoever for quantum physics, a mere subset of physics rooted in current hypotheticals, to philosophically stand on that merits such a cultural obsession with it.