Normally, when we think about cause and effect, we try to understand what causes an event, and then we use that understanding to manipulate and predict future events. So when an accident happens we look for a reason, and then we try to use that knowledge to prevent future accidents. Equally, if somebody makes a financial gain we try to understand how they did it so we can copy it. Rightly or wrongly, we identify a line of causality from past and present, and hope to continue it into the future. Sometimes, of course, we see an event as the meeting of several causes, and then we understand it as less predictable, since it is a lucky or unlucky coincidence. In these cases we find it much more difficult to use knowledge to manipulate future events. But we still try to to apply this linear past-to-future causality.

But this process is different if we try to apply it to very small things – things like particles, for instance, which are so small they have never been directly observed. As things get smaller, there is an increasing difficulty in the observation of effect, and so attention is diverted to the discovery of previously calculated effects rather than to the discovery of causes, as we are used to. So the discovery of the Higgs bosun, for instance, involved the detection of an effect – an event (the Higgs bosun) we knew must be happening – which we could not see, and which scientists only thought of because it was an effect they had calculated must happen. They had identified a cause for the Bosun before they observed the phenomenon which was the effect. This rather strange process reverses our normal retrospective, because, as with the Higgs bosun, we find ourselves searching for assumed and predicted effects rather than probable causes. Scientists knew the Higgs should be there.

This means that while, normally, invention is the use of known causes to discover new effects, in quantum science it works the other way round. Quantum science is the use of presumed effects to confirm calculated causes. So instead of a new event, it is as if we have simply found the old one we thought was there. This is a very odd kind of discovery, because it leads us to the opposite of discovery as we usually imagine it. It is a confirmation of what we were thinking. And then, if we then want to modify what we thought, we have to think again.

This requires a high degree of open mindedness, because it means being willing to consider any event as possible, even after one has happened. The beginning is, as it were, the event itself, and we then need to look backwards.

This might be difficult if you believe that the beginning is the word. In fact, it is tricky from a much more straightforward linguistic point of view. There is quite literally no existing thing for the new word for the thing you are looking for. It is worth reading that sentence twice, as Brian Cox might say. If you look at the current table laying out the Standard Model of physics, it has been a gradual process of the invention of events, and then the attachment of language. Repeatedly, it is odd to find that the concept of something so entirely precedes the word for it. Normally, if an event happens, we name it and then look for a cause. We even have a name for events which are unnamed – we call them ‘Black Swans’. There are no Black Swans in quantum physics. Instead, the world, it appears, is full of unknown events for words, rather than words for unknown events, as we usually assume.

Philosophically, naming then occupies a different and unacknowledged dimension of understanding and knowledge.  Linguistic additions reverse and challenge our previous understanding of the way objects exist. We create the object before we describe it. It is then extremely dangerous to make assumptions about the subsequent effects of calculated causes, because the effects are undefined even once they are identified. Naming and classification usually leads to understanding, but without the cause to support the event it is not possible to understand reality in the usual way. We have to look at it backwards, that is to say we must continue to search for events even once we think we have identified them, as persisting evidence of persisting cause. A name is therefore no longer proof of existence.

Of course, we are used to this, because this is a normal creative process, even though it is not a normal scientific one. In a creative process, a name always makes a thing, and the opposite is never true. Art is always the collision of previously unconnected ideas. If it exhibits a clear cause then it is not art. Quantum science therefore describes a typical process of invention.