A severe toothache in December 2019 left a writer in intensive care for a week, and the search for a reason pushed them toward quantum physics—especially the idea of “quantum switch” and indefinite causality. The experience helped them reconcile conflicting vi
In December 2019, a toothache turned into the biggest health crisis of my life. It started as pain and ended with me in an intensive care unit for a week. When I finally recovered, the hardest part wasn’t the physical aftermath—it was the question that followed me like a shadow: why did it happen?
There were competing explanations, and each one left me rattled. Was it completely my fault because I avoid the dentist?. Or was it not my fault at all because I was a graduate student and couldn’t afford a dentist?. Trying to hold both possibilities at once didn’t settle me. It pulled at my sense of cause and effect, and it kept me awake.
I went looking for answers where I’ve long gone for questions that feel bigger than any one problem. I turned to quantum physics—usually treated as abstract and impersonal. grounded in mathematics and empiricism and described as if it can’t touch feelings. Physics, after all, has a way of breaking the world into pieces, analyzing them, and then putting them back together. It isn’t supposed to care about who you are.
But I had always taken it personally.
In my book, Entangled States: A life according to quantum physics, I invite readers to do the same. The argument is simple: making the objective subjective can be life-changing—not because quantum physics erases responsibility. but because it changes how you think when your understanding of reality clashes with itself.
In the aftermath of my tooth crisis, I met that clash face-to-face while speaking with physicists who study causality in the quantum realm. What helped me wasn’t a comforting slogan. It was a concept I learned through reporting for New Scientist: the “quantum switch.”
A quantum switch is a procedure that allows a system to exhibit indefinite causality—where different sequences of cause and effect could exist at the same time through the quantum phenomenon of superposition. The idea isn’t free of doubt. There are critics. Still, experiments with particles of light have added credence to it.
Some researchers have gone further, suggesting the quantum switch should be built into emerging quantum technologies—like quantum computers and batteries—to help them work better.
As a physicist, I know how far my life is from a photon. I’m macroscopic and warm; I’m unaffected by quantum laws in the way a particle of light is. Yet thinking about the photon in a quantum switch—behaving as if it were simultaneously governed by “A causes B” and “B causes A. ” in a way that seems forbidden in every other arena—did something to my tooth conundrum.
It didn’t make the world simpler. It made it bearable.
Maybe, I thought, my conflicting ideas weren’t something to force into a single neat story. Maybe, for a moment, it was possible for different sequences of cause and effect to coexist—at least long enough for me to stop tormenting myself over an answer I couldn’t yet earn.
That shift brought peace. It also shaped what I did next. I go to the dentist more now. And I believe improving graduate students’ working conditions—having dental insurance, for instance—is urgent and crucial.
Entangled States doesn’t focus only on one crisis. I describe a dozen examples like this—instances where quantum physics offered guidance for things I couldn’t understand about my life and the world. or at least nudged me into thinking differently. I write about reckoning with my queerness. the experience of being a young immigrant. the way I build relationships. and how I used to teach high school students. All of it stays in conversation with what I learned about quantum physics both as a scholar and a reporter.
Immersion in cutting-edge science has changed me in a way that’s hard to describe without admitting how personal it felt. Reporting from the border where human knowledge touches the unknown—where quantum physics shines—didn’t just broaden my mind. It altered my decisions and made me, in my view, a better person.
So I can’t offer quantum physics as mere abstraction. I recommend something more intimate: instead of treating all things quantum as absolutely abstract and odd, consider taking them personally sometimes.
quantum physics quantum switch indefinite causality superposition photons causality graduate students dental insurance intensive care science journalism photons of light experiments New Scientist reporting
So basically the tooth pain was “quantum”??
I didn’t read all that but quantum switch sounds like some dentist scam lol. Like if you just switch your timeline you don’t need anesthesia?
Wait, I thought quantum physics is all about atoms and stuff, not guilt. He says “was it my fault” and then jumps to physics, so is this saying causality is fake? Cuz my mom always said if you avoid the dentist, that’s the cause… not quantum weirdness.
Intensive care for a tooth?? That’s terrifying. But the whole “indefinite causality” part lost me—like how is there “no reason” if there’s literally an infection? I feel like this is just another way to make everything feel deep and personal. Still though, the whole cause and effect question after getting sick… yeah, that part I get. Also why does it sound like they’re blaming quantum physics for not helping with the dentist thing.