Essay 34: Empire is lethal and unnatural and it will eventually die
Here and elsewhere we shall not obtain the best insights into things until we actually see them grow from the beginning (Aristotle quoted in Jaeger) Werner Jaeger (1997): Aristotle: Fundamentals of the history of his development.
Things are getting desperate so we have no time to muck around, we must get straight to the point. The concept of empire contradicts quantum mechanics; quantum mechanics is the foundation of the universe; therefore empire contradicts the universe.
Empires built on military violence have reshaped the human world over the last ten thousand years at enormous costs in life, language and culture.
In a recent article Massimo Faggioli explains that American Catholicism is no longer just a refuge for socially conservative ideologues as it was between the 1990s and the early 2000s. It is now a brand, for sale to the highest bidder. Massimo Faggioli (2025_02_19): Donald Trump captured American Catholicism — and the ramifications are being felt around the world
Like half the population of the US, the Church has sold out to the king in waiting while the revolutionary Pope Francis lies dying. Francis brought the liberation theology of Latin America to Rome but he met stiff opposition from within. This was to be expected, given the history of the Church.
We are in a battle between empire and nature. On the one hand we have imperialism, represented by Pope Francis and would be king Donald. Although Francis is dying, but he represents a very well defined and ancient imperial force. It s unlikely that his successor will be much different.
Trump is alive and kicking. He does not appear to know what he is doing but his masters are imperialists and they have just one idea, to become wealthy and powerful at the expense of everybody else.
The imperial Roman Catholic Church
We begin with the papal backstory.
The idea of an omnipotent and omniscient controller goes a long way back. We see it recorded in literary classics like the Mahabharata. It is probably related to the invention of writing. In the old days we can imagine two classes of writers: accountants represented by thousands of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform inventories; and scribes and poets working for powerful politicians to create legends for their masters to explain and justify their power and to convey their commands to their subjects. Zahiru'd-din Mohammad Babur (2020): The Babur Nama
Most everyday people who grew food, built roads, made jewellery, art, weapons, harnesses, vehicles, cities, pyramids, mines and aqueducts were illiterate so they did not write. Their stories did not surface until much later. Subtle stories about nature only really came to the surface after the scientific method, based on physical contact with reality rather than trade and politics, became established.
Jesus of Nazareth was a good man, a Jew who knew the Law and quoted it.
A Pharisee asked him which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
Jesus said to him, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment.
The second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” (Mt 22: 36-40)
He was also a radical who attacked the religious establishment in Judea: You brood of vipers! How can you speak good, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. (Mt 12:34).
This upset the ruling priests and they colluded with the occupying Romans to have him crucified. Jesus was brought before the Governor, Pontius Pilate, who questioned him and declared him innocent.
But the populists in the crowd shouted, “Crucify him! Crucify him! (Lk 23:21). So Pilate made a very Trumplike move: he released the man who had been imprisoned for rebellion and murder, the popular choice, and he handed Jesus over to the crowd for execution. Jesus was crucified in the Roman manner, but legend has it that he did not stay dead but came alive again on the third day.
Once again the scribes created a new world. The Hebrew Bible tells a story similar to many ancient texts, a difficult relationship between a god and their people, but promise of a glorious future for the nation of Israel. This did not happen. Superior imperial forces crushed them. The Roman occupation of Judea ended it with the expulsion of the Israel from their promised land.
The writers of the Christian New Testament used the life of Jesus to devise a happy ending to this sadness. They revisited the catastrophic human interaction with Yahweh and Satan in the Garden of Eden. They explained that the death of Jesus, the Son of Yahweh has placated the old man for the original insult. Death was conquered by his resurrection, baptism qualified his followers to an eternal life of post mortem bliss.
By the fourth century these appealing features of Christianity made it a force to be reckoned with.
The emperor Constantine, motivated by his mother (now Saint) Helena, saw an opportunity exploited a millennium later by the English King Henry VIII. He established Christianity as the imperial religion and expropriated pagan property.
He convened a council of Christian bishops in Nicaea (now İznik, Turkey) which met from May until the end of July 325. The Council asserted that Jesus really was the Son of God and drafted the Nicene Creed as a symbol of Christian unity. The creed makes no mention of the law of love promulgated by Jesus.
In 381 the Council of Constantinople further standardized Christian doctrine, and confirmed and expanded the Nicean creed into the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed still recited today. The Fathers of the Church produced a vast literature refining the details of Christianity. Aurelius Augustinus, the bishop of Hippo in Roman North Africa, explained the Trinity established by the Councils. His ideas have since been taken up by many theologians.
All this converted Christianity into the Roman Catholic Church. The Church grew in power and popularity. It survived the fall of the Empire to become an autocratic theological military organization. It executed a long series of crusades against Islam and other “heresies”. It remained the centre of political power in Europe until the French Revolution
This Church enjoyed a brief scientific episode in the middle Ages, partly as a consequence of the Crusades. The work of Aristotle had been preserved in the Eastern Empire. It came into Islamic hands during the Muslim-Byzantine wars. Aristotle’s Greek was translated into Arabic and many Muslim scholars wrote commentaries on his work. Thomas Aquinas and others adapted Aristotle’s work to service Christianity. They developed a model of God based on the unmoved mover described in book XII of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Michael Bordt (2011): Why Aristotle's God is not the Unmoved Mover
The military operations of the Church were very expensive. To pay for them the Church began to sell indulgences. The faithful could make cash payments for posthumous reductions of the punishment in purgatory required for entry to heaven.
This abuse was noticed by Martin Luther among others and led to a major split in the Church, the Reformation.
In semiliterate Europe the Bible was effectively a secret document, written in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic.
Luther translated it into German. Printing was invented and millions of bibles began to circulate. People to see for themselves the scriptural foundations of the Church. This unsettled the church which had previously maintained a monopoly on interpretation of the Bible.
Then the Church lost a scientific battle with Galileo about the structure of the solar system, the Galileo affair. Galileo was right.
The Holy Inquisition gave him the option of recantation to avoid the death penalty for heresy, and he wisely chose it. He had seen the truth with his telescope and new that staying alive would cause no harm. Galileo Galilei (1633): Recantation of Galileo (June 22, 1633)
On the centenary of Einstein’s birth on 10 November 1979 the Roman Pope Saint John Paul II foreshadowed a modern study of this “Galileo Affair”. On 3 July 1981 the Papal Academy of Science established a Study Commission for this purpose. The Pope announced its conclusions in an address to a Plenary Session of the Academy on 31 October 1992:
4. [. . .] One might perhaps be surprised that, at the end of the Academy’s study week on the subject of the emergence of complexity in the various sciences, I am returning to the Galileo case. Has not this case long been shelved and have not the errors committed been recognised?That is certainly true. However, the underlying problems of this case concern both the nature of science and the message of faith. It is therefore not to be excluded that one day we shall find ourselves in a similar situation, one which will require both sides to have an informed awareness of the field and of the limits of their own competencies. Saint John Paul II (1992_10_31): Address to the Plenary Session on ‘The Emergence of Complexity in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Biology’
Throughout his discussion of the Church’s treatment of Galileo the Pope stuck firmly to the ecclesiastical dichotomy between revelation and science.
He explains:
12. [. . .] There exist two realms of knowledge, one which has its source in Revelation and one which reason can discover by its own power. To the latter belong especially the experimental sciences and philosophy. The distinction between the two realms of knowledge ought not to be understood as opposition. The two realms are not altogether foreign to each other; they have points of contact. The methodologies proper to each make it possible to bring out different aspects of reality [. . .].14. Humanity has before it two modes of development. The first involves culture, scientific research and technology, that is to say whatever falls within the horizontal aspect of man and creation, which is growing at an impressive rate. [. . .] The second mode of development involves what is deepest in the human being, when, transcending the world and transcending himself, man turns to the One who is the Creator of all. It is only this vertical direction which can give full meaning to man’s being and action, because it situates him in relation to his origin and his end.
And so we reach the 21st century Roman Catholic Church that sold itself to the kinglet Donald. The Church is an absolute monarchy ruled by an infallible Pope. It derives its legitimacy from an invisible imaginary God whose properties are mutually contradictory.
In it women are second class citizens without the spiritual qualities necessary to join the Priesthood. Their bodies belong to God to create more Catholics. The children are indoctrinated from a tender age. Meanwhile clergy around the world sexually abuse children and the Church vigorously resists pressure to do anything about it.
In order to keep itself pure it promotes a doctrine of two truths, science and philosophy on one hand, divine revelation on the other, curated by its own tame theologians.
It remains true that most people will believe anything in order to avoid execution, or even to avoid losing their jobs. In order to free ourselves from the need to believe absurdities, we must replace this ancient theology with something scientific based on reality.
What has Nature got to offer?
What has nature got to offer against this magnificent and ancient structure of art, architecture, literature and a committed following of more than a billion people? The short answer is, everything. We begin with the hypothesis that the world itself is divine. From this point of view everything from the creation of the world to the most sublime reults of human art and science are natural products.
The essence of scientific method is physical contact with the world. As John Hopfield noted in the lecture he gave when he won the Nobel Prize for his role in the development of artificial intelligence, physics is a point of view for understanding the totality of humanity and our Universe. John J. Hopfield (2024_12_08): Nobel Lecture: Physics is a point of view
The history of many fields is marked by episodes of rapid change between longer periods of business as usual. Thomas Kuhn noticed this pattern and his work attracted a lot of interest from historians of science. Thomas Kuhn (1996): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The most salient feature of any revolution is that some of the old system must go. In the political sphere, what has to go is imperialism, the claim of a certain subset of the human population to command, exploit, enslave and kill other people.
Jesus put it clearly: love God, now the whole universe; love your neighbour, that is everybody, including Samaritans.
These ideas have emotional appeal but they have deeper scientific significance. Because the universe plays all the roles of divinity, physics and theology have the same subject and must be mutually compatible. Science feeds on physical contact. Theology must see and feel god if it is to be a science. Gravity is our primary contact with divinity and shapes our world.
Popes think they can be infallible because they have an error free connection to a God who, like Laplace’s demon, controls every event at every moment everywhere in the world. This is impossible. The airline industry is populated with people who go over the top trying to be infallible. Despite their efforts, every few billion kilometres something goes wrong. If it is bad enough, it makes the news but there are lot of near misses to keep them on their toes.
We began with a little syllogism: The concept of empire contradicts quantum mechanics; quantum mechanics is the foundation of the universe; therefore empire contradicts the universe.
Now we must see how quantum mechanics builds universe. From this it becomes clear that imperialism can only be maintained by predatory military violence.
Quantum mechanics is itself the result of global paradigm change, the loss of determinism.
For me one of the saddest stories in science is the career of Albert Einstein. He started brilliantly in 1905 and revolutionized physics: special relativity; E = mc2; the light quantum, for which he won a Nobel prize nearly twenty years later. In 1915 he produced the general theory of relativity. This work established his reputation forever and showed us the universe as a whole.
But he became doubtful about quantum mechanics. He produced some trenchant critiques which forced the proponents of the new theory to think deeply. One of these, the EPR paper, brought attention to spooky action at a distance, entanglement. This phenomenon shows that quantum mechanics lies deep in the foundation of the world, before the advent of space and time. Einstein, Podolsky & Rosen (1935): Can the Quantum Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?
In 1933 he gave the Herbert Spencer Lecture at the University of Oxford. This lecture marks a definitive break with quantum theory. Speaking of the work of de Broglie, Schrödinger, Dirac and Born he said:
I cannot help confessing that I myself accord to this interpretation no more than a transitory significance. I still believe in the possibility of giving a model of reality, a theory, that is to say, which shall represent events themselves and not merely the probability of their occurrence. Albert Einstein (1933): On the Method of Theoretical Physics: Herbert Spencer Lecture 1933
This was not to be. Quantum mechanics does in fact define mathematical equations which model of reality, but these equations are multi-dimensional and describe a probabilistically distributed spectrum of results for any experiment. These probabilities upset him:
Die Quantenmechanik ist sehr achtung-gebietend. Aber eine innere Stimme sagt mir, daß das doch nicht der wahre Jakob ist. Die Theorie liefert viel, aber dem Geheimnis des Alten bringt sie uns kaum näher. Jedenfalls bin ich überzeugt, daß der nicht würfelt.Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the "old one." I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice. Albert Einstein (1926): God does not throw dice
He was a determinist, a follower of the demon Laplace desribed in his Philosophical Essay on Probabilities:
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. Laplace's demon - Wikipedia
This is an ancient belief. The omniscient and omnipotent God of Christianity, for instance has immediate providence over everything. Every event is known to God and ‘meant to be’. Aquinas, Summa, I, 22, 3: Does God have immediate providence over everything?
Charles Darwin was not the first to think of evolution, but he recognized that the essential ingredient of evolutionary creativity is variation. He studied it in detail. Living in a rural community, he saw how the deliberate selection of breeding stock enabled farmers to gradually move their livestock in particular directions, toward faster horses, sweeter apples or finer wool. Charles Darwin (1875): The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication
A deterministic process cannot be creative. A reliable computer presented with a particular problem gives the same answer every time. This concept is embodied in the software engineering mantra garbage in garbage out . This has become newly relevant with the artificially intelligent machines that trawl the internet for guidance. Judith Bishop (2025_02_26): Erotica, gore and racism: how America’s war on ‘ideological bias’ is letting AI off the leash
Without the probabilistic feature of quantum mechanics, it does not seem possible for the Universe to have evolved from a structureless, eternal, omnipotent initial singularity to its present state.
The conspicuous casualty of quantum mechanics which upset Einstein was the loss of determinism, but this was only partial. Although the timing of particular quantum events is unpredictable the nature of the events is defined with great precision. The quantum of action, the masses of particles, the speed of light and the values of quantum states measured by energy or frequency are precisely related by the equations E = ℏ𝜔 and m = E / c 2. W. F. McGrew et al: Atomic clock performance enabling geodesy below the centimetre level
The early days of quantum theory from 1900 to the early 1920s were marked by incremental changes associated with the names of Planck, Einstein, Bohr, de Broglie, Heisenberg and Schrödinger. After Einstein’s revelation of Minkowski space it was obvious that quantum theory must conform to special relativity.
The first important step in this direction was taken by Paul Dirac. He began with the non-relativistic Schrödinger equation in space time which is linear in time but quadratic in space / momentum. Special relativity treats space and time on an equal footing and Dirac felt that time must be linear, so he needed to find the square root of the momentum operator. He found a neat trick with the gamma matrices to eliminate the cross terms in this square root and arrived at the Dirac equation. He wrote:
It was found that the equation gave the particle a spin of half a quantum. And also gave it a magnetic moment. It gave just the properties that one needed for an electron. That was really an unexpected bonus for me, completely unexpected.
Dirac’s equation also predicted the existence of antimatter, although this was not clarified until Carl Anderson discovered positrons in cosmic rays. Carl D. Anderson (1936_12_12): Nobel Lecture: The production and properties of positrons
Dirac’s equation became a foundation of the relativistic quantum mechanics we call quantum field theory (QFT). This theory struck many difficulties. The principle problems arise from the assumption that spacetime is a continuous manifold. This problem was solved with renormalization and by the 1970s QFT had entered the mainstream of physical theory as a comprehensive description of the fundamental particles known as the Standard Model. Standard model - Wikipedia
Although many physicists are very proud of this achievement and some feel that they are approaching the mind of God, some philosophers and other critics are not so sure.
After an extensive analysis of QFT the philosopher Meinard Kuhlmann wrote:
In conclusion one has to recall that one reason why the ontological interpretation of QFT is so difficult is the fact that it is exceptionally unclear which parts of the formalism should be taken to represent anything physical in the first place. And it looks as if that problem will persist for quite some time. Meinard Kuhlmann (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): Quantum Feld Theory
Although QFT is an effective algorithm for working with the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces, gravitation is unrenormalizable so QFT fails to embrace the most ubiquitous force of all. From this point of view the standard model of physics is not much help in devising a suitable model for a divine universe.
Despite this difficulty, we now have classical interferometers to detect and measure the gravitational waves caused by cosmic events, a new window into the dynamics of the universe.
I noted above that intellectual revolutions often require old beliefs to be abandoned. Since is birth 125 years ago, one of the principal difficulties with the interpretation of quantum theory has been to break free of Minkowski space.
In their book on axiomatic QFT, Streater and Wightman write:
Since in quantum mechanics observables are represented by hermitian operators which act on the Hilbert space of state vectors, one expects the analogue in relativistic quantum mechanics of a classical observable field to be a set of hermitian operators defined for each point of space-time and having a well-defined transformation law under the appropriate group. Streater & Wightman (2000):PCT, Spin, Statistics and All That
In other words, we are building QFT on top of Minkowski space which as Einstein points out in at the end of his 1915 paper, is also assumed to be the foundation of gravitation:
However, the postulate of general relativity cannot reveal to us anything new and different about the essence of the various processes in nature than what the special theory of relativity taught us already. Albert Einstein (1915): The Field Equations of Gravitation
We notice that Minkowski space is pixellated by the quantum of action: ∆x . ∆p ≈ ∆E . ∆t ≈ ℏ. This suggests that the nature of discrete elementary particles has something to do with the structure of space.
Perhaps the physicists have got cart before the horse. Maybe Minkowski space is not the foundation of quantum mechanics, but a consequence.
I approach this problem from a theological direction, seeking to explore the hypothesis that the universe creates itself, an idea implicit in the hypothesis of an eternal omnipotent initial singularity. I am far from understanding the computational details of QFT but I am heartened by the words of Richard Feynman: physical understanding is completely unmathematical, imprecise, an inexact thing but absolutely necessary to a physicist; and Peter Osper: Research is to see what everybody has seen and think what nobody has thought. Feynman, Leighton and Sands FLP II_02: Chapter 2: Differential Calculus of Vector Fields, Peter Osper (1957): Review: Albert Szent-Györgyi (1957): Bioenergetics
In his Metaphysics written more than 2000 years ago Aristotle conceived an unmoved mover, an intellectual entity whose action is thought (Aristotle’s word energeia) to activate the formal universe of his mentor Plato 24 . The medieval Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas and his contemporaries transformed Aristotle’s work into a model of the Christian God.
In the Aquinas model, the creator is eternal, omnipotent, omniscient and absolutely simple. The attributes of omniscience and absolute simplicity reflect the ancient belief that intelligence is an immaterial power, so that the maximally intelligent being must also be maximally immaterial. In the modern world however we see, as Landauer tells us, that information is physical, represented by physical symbols like these letters. Rolf Landauer (1991): The physical nature of information
Let us start with an initial singularity, naked gravitation, analogous to the creator modelled by Aquinas. This entity is the substance of gravitation deprived of energy and the Minkowski space upon which Einstein built his field theory.
It is also deprived of the formal structure of omniscience postulated by Aquinas (since it has no physical structure to represent information). It also reflects the hypothesis that the total energy of the universe is zero. It is eternal (because nothing comes from nothing), and omnipotent since it is the source of the enormous universe. Its action is constrained, like the traditional Christian God, by the fact that inconsistent states cannot coexist. Richard Feynman (2002): Feynman Lectures on Gravitation
Further it fulfils the hypotheses of fixed point theory and acts at random since it has no structural control 28 29 . These conditions enable it to create a random Hilbert space within itself, that is variation, the creative feature of evolution. The mathematical idea of fixed point theory is similar to Augustine’s idea that the image formed when god reflects upon themself is in fact divine. Brouwer fixed point theorem - Wikipedia ,John Casti (1996): Five Golden Rules: Great Theories of 20th-Century Mathematics - and Why They Matter, Mary Sirridge (1999): Quam videndo intus dicimus: Seeing and Saying in De Trinitate XV
Quantum mechanics arises spontaneously as this random structure maps itself onto itself by superposition. We can imagine the emergence of stationary features in this wave field created by hermitian operators which correspond to the elementary particles we observe in the current universe.
We can further imagine that these stationary structures induce the bifurcation of naked gravitation into potential and kinetic energy. As in QFT the kinetic energy causes the instances of stationary quantum formalism to be realized as observable particles. The potential serves to bind the systems created together.
We observe that all the elementary particles fall into one of two classes, bosons and fermions. The properties of these particles may be seen as the sources of the Minkowski metric and their distinction accounts for its pixellation. The peculiar metric signature of Minkowski space, 1, 1, 1, -1, enables it to accommodate massless bosons travelling at the speed of light on null geodesics, and it also provides a three dimensional euclidean space for massive fermions, which are subject to the Pauli exclusion principle, to move freely.
This simple model frees quantum mechanics from the constraints of special relativity and provides a role for gravitation in the creation of the Universe. We know, from the modern conception of quantum mechanics as a theory of computation and communication, that it is well within its power, given a suitable evolutionary process, to create all the physical features of the Universe. Nielsen & Chuang (2016): Quantum Computation and Quantum Information
This simple model has features which suggest that democracy rules, at least in the world of elementary particles.
1. It provides a general framework which does not appear to contradict any of the data. It is not mathematical but may provide some of the insight recommended by Feynman:
A physical understanding is completely unmathematical, imprecise, an inexact thing but absolutely necessary to a physicist.
The idea is supported by Dirac’s feeling that mathematical success does not guarantee correctness:
The rules of renormalization give surprisingly, excessively good agreement with experiments. Most physicists say that these working rules are, therefore, correct. I feel that that is not an adequate reason. Just because the results happen to be in agreement with observation does not prove one's theory is correct. . . . I have spent many years searching for a Hamiltonian to bring into the theory and have not yet found it. I shall continue to work on it as long as he can, and other people I hope will follow along such lines Peter Goddard (1998): Paul Dirac, The Man and His Work
2. The creation of particles through quantum mechanics coupled with the provision of energy from gravitation endows each particle with a hermitian operator (a quantum mind) which governs its interactions with other particles in a way analogous to the role of our mental states in our interactions with one another.
3. Provision of 2 above eliminates the need for field, since particles carry the software to resolve all their one-to-one interactions. The infinity, continuity and lack of a clear ontological basis for fields creates most of the problems listed by Kuhlmann. Even before Gödel and Turing destroyed his formalist dream, Hilbert clearly rejected the reality of infinity which is implicit in field theory:
In summary, let us return to our main theme and draw some conclusions from all our thinking about the infinite. Our principal result is that the infinite is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought — a remarkable harmony between being and thought. David Hilbert (1925): On the Infinite
4. A physical field is in effect a surrogate for imperial rule, subjecting the behaviour of all physical particles to some mysterious controller inserted from outside. Quantum field theory no more provides us with an origin for the fields that rule the world than the average imperialist can provide justification for any claim (other than violence) that they are entitled to control the behaviour of their “subjects”. The philosopher Sunny Auyang describes the rather confusing role of fields in QFT. Our position contrasts with the standard view that the fundamental reality of the world is field and attributes autonomy to particles. Sunny Auyang (1995): How is Quantum Field Theory Possible?
5. QFT cannot deal with gravitation because it cannot be renormalized and renormalizaztion is absolutely essential to QFT.
I conclude by emphasizing two principles that lie at the heart of my exposition and use them to construct a simple political model of the world based on quantum theory that holds at all scales.
The first I call the heuristic of simplicity. Here we are working at the base of the Universe right next to the initial singularity. Although theologians talk about the ineffable mysteries of God, if God is really absolutely simple there is nothing to be said about them except that they exist. As Aquinas puts it, the essence of God is their existence. The true story must begin quite simply.
As our picture of the universe becomes more complex, we are still subject to the information theoretical constraint that the entropy of an explanation should be equivalent to the entropy of the system described. This effects the courtroom injunction to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothjng but the truth. We expect the complexity of explanation to be equivalent to the complexity of the reality explained.
The second is the symmetry with respect to complexity built into quantum theory by unitarity. Communication theory shows that the sum of the probabilities of the phonemes in human speech or the symbols in human writing is 1, identical to the sum of the probabilities of the outcomes of a quantum observation. This probabilistic symmetry applies to all forms of communication, regardless of its complexity
This idea is implicit in quantum theory through the normalization of vectors independently of the dimension of the operative Hilbert space so the vector representing the universe comprising the superposition countable infinity of basis states representing (say) fundamental particles has length one and direction defined by the Universe.
Although the difference in scale between fundamental particles and an ideal democratic polity is immense, they are formally quite similar.
This similarity enables us to draw an analogy between the autonomous freedom of individual people and the autonomous freedom of individual elementary particles. Democratic politics, like quantum mechanics, fits in Hilbert space. Voting itself is linear, a form of superposition. Individuals and political parties are characterized by their directions in political space which may be modelled as vectors in a Hilbert space. Every person is represented by a basis vector and their sums in various combinations present us with a comprehensive picture of the political directions in an electorate. There seems to be fundamental harmony between democratic politics and the nature of the world.
