If you walk down the main street of Middlebury, VT, you may encounter a dear surprise. Dearer yet, likely, if you were born before the year 2000. It is a payphone. It was offered to the town as a gift. A little sign reads, “Put a quarter in if you’d like, but all calls are free.”
The first time Geo and I encountered this marvel was about a month ago. I felt that I was stepping into a parallel universe. I had to explain to my seven-year-old what it was, as he had no recognition of such a machine. And the nostalgia just immediately took over. The weight of the handset, the shiny indented spot for quarters, and the lovable resistance provided from each number button when pressed!
Geo seized a unique opportunity to prank his dad, pretending to be a person interested in getting his house painted (his dad’s profession). This prank has since become a ritual.
Anyway, we encountered the phone again yesterday with some friends, and I was able to share the nostalgia all over again. Memories come back, and admiration lingers on this machine as if it is a work of fine art.
What is this nostalgia really centered on?
Physicist Neil Turok says that we are fundamentally analogue beings, meaning we experience the world smoothly and continuously through nature, emotion, art, music, etc. He says, “We are analog beings living in a digital world, facing a quantum future” (from his book The Universe Within: From Quantum to Cosmos.)
Through his view, the nostalgia we feel for something like a payphone reflects modern societal unhappiness with the flood of rigid digital data that feels alien to our natural analog biology (hence those strange loving sentiments toward the physical feel of the phone, the fullness of your voice in the receiver, and the location of the phone in a fixed and central space).
Digital, on an experiential level, is a downgrade. It reduces everything to binary bits, zeros and ones, pixels, and data points. This is not the way we enjoy experiences. The digital world, according to Turok, is a clumsy stepping stone on the way to a quantum era. Quantum computers and quantum communication operate on a vastly richer level of information that mirrors the true probabilistic nature of the universe (which, as I have written about, is also the romantic nature of the universe.)
It fills me with a feeling of romance to hear Turok say that the coming quantum future will actually restore and empower our continuous, analog way of living. At the smallest scales, the universe runs on continuous quantum waves rather than rigid digital switches. Human consciousness and creativity are the highest expression of this smooth and continuous world.
Turok argues that what makes humans special is not raw calculation and that machines will always beat us in that department. What makes us special is our analog capacity for imagination, empathy, and asking bold questions about the universe.
And maybe, occasionally, pranking dad…
Featured Art: Pay phone, San Diego by Henry Balzer, 2017.
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