Why care about this?

Already a couple people have emailed me and essentially asked why anyone should care about this.

In general I think that people are free to care about whatever they want, and I think I have made the origins for my personal interest on this topic pretty clear.

But the question is still a good question, and I must admit that I think to some degree _everyone_  should care about quantum physics, although in no way do I think people should be compelled to care about it.

So why do I think _you_ personally should care about quantum physics?  Yes, I mean you - the person reading this right now.  Before I tell you that I want to tell you a little more about my background.

For the past ten years or so I have been a Java programmer for IBM.  For those of you that don't know, the Java programming language is important in a couple ways.  The main way, at least as I see it, is Java gives programmers the ability to really reuse, and extend, programming work that other people have already done.  Java programmers do not have to "reinvent the wheel."  This has allowed a whole list of things to happen - for one thing new Java functions and programs are written in a fraction of the time that it used to take, because the programmers don't have to redo everything.  That explains why the introduction of new programs has pretty much exploded in the past ten years, and it is one of the reasons even the open source programing stuff has been able to get so big and so powerful and so full of features.

During the past ten years my personal job changed from writing new java programs to just porting existing programs to a new platform.  The porting idea is that a relatively small group of programmers can produce big, great programs and then a few more of us would 'port' these programs to different servers, saving money.  The idea makes good business sense because it allows all of us to be more productive.

In theory, porting the program should mean running it on the new server platform and watching everything working great with no changes.  The theory is that Java is "write once, run anywhere."

In practice, though, while we are getting closer to that ideal, we are not there yet.  Many times when I ran a java program on a new server platform something would not work.  That was the main reason I was paid to port the program, my job was to find those failures and make sure they got fixed.

In many ways those java programs were like icebergs, where the part above water is the statements that are in the source code, and the huge amount below water is all the statements and methods and programs that were already written to support the new stuff.  The new programmer could be very productive because he/she didn't have to re-write or even worry about all the underwater stuff.

But sometimes he/she did have to worry, because sometimes, when I tried to run the new stuff on a new server, somewhere, below the surface, the dang iceberg was hitting a snag and sinking the Titanic.  I gotta tell you, to0, that because these java 'icebergs' were constantly being added to on the surface, they were getting to be HUGE, like huge enough to sink the Titanic, and big enough that they had to be shipped on multiple DVDs.

Trying to trace down and find where, underwater, the collision was happening was much worse than finding the gouge in the side of the Titanic.  There were literally thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of places that failure could be.  Granted I didn't need to examine by hand thousands of places one after the other, but I still needed to peel the onion, one layer at a time, to get to the origination of the problem.  Sometimes there could be over a hundred layers of the onion to dig through.

My point is that, like java programs, reality is also 'layered,' with one level resting on the one below it, and like java programs, usually it is just fine for us to not worry about the stuff underneath, because the surface is working just fine and we know most everything about it.

Yet sometimes, in rare occasions, what happens below the surface matters a lot to what happens up here.  Much of our history of physical science, and everything that rests on that, like chemistry and mechanics and computer chips and optics and a whole lot of other things, has been the process of looking  below the surface and understanding what is happening down there.

So why should 'we' care about quantum physics?  Because down there, in certain limited but very important ways, what happens _does_  affect all of the physical reality we have at the macro level.  There is a good chance that some very rare cases, something we don't really know about yet, could have a very big and very beneficial effect on our daily lives.  Think of what our understanding of electricity has done for us.  Think of what our understanding of chemistry has done for us.

That's why I think we should care about this.