Quantum Dreaming: The Relevance of Quantum Mechanics to Geography and Sustainable Systems

Abstract

My presentation is a thought-piece designed to set fellow delegates thinking about a complex and rapidly changing world in which our conventional thinking, knowledge and modes of analysis about sustainable rural systems may increasingly be ineffective and unreliable. It will hopefully cause at least some of you to question your ideas and refine them, as has happened to me repeatedly in recent years. This task draws heavily on my article entitled 'Quantum Dreaming: the relevance of Quantum Mechanics to Regional Science' (Sorensen 2011). That article ranges more widely than I am able to do here, but it is also less focused on the issue of rural sustainability, which I aim to rectify. As the title implies my analysis is draped around the ideas of quantum mechanics, the premier body of theory explaining processes shaping the universe. In recent decades, however, social science researchers, including many geographers, have appreciated its potential insights into the ways in which economy and society function - and much else besides. The link in most these cases is the notion of uncertainty and how humans adapt to it in everyday living. Quantum mechanics is, as we shall see, embedded in uncertainty. Despite such august antecedents, I engage you in a discussion featuring Quantum Mechanics with some trepidation, for I lay myself open to ridicule as the initial quotes from Feynman (1965) and Campbell (1995) suggest. On the positive side, my work on this subject over the last two years has given me considerable vicarious fun and pleasure, as it is continuously evolving into a meta-theory of human uncertainty, which appears to have reached an apogee under rapidly evolving technologies, globalisation, and economic mismanagement of the kinds inherent in the Global Financial Crisis (GFC).