Totalitarian principle
In quantum mechanics, the totalitarian principle states: "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." Physicists including Murray Gell-Mann borrowed this expression, and its satirical reference to totalitarianism, from the popular culture of the early twentieth century.
The statement is in reference to a surprising feature of particle interactions: that any interaction that is not forbidden by a small number of simple conservation laws is not only allowed, but must be included in the sum over all "paths" that contribute to the outcome of the interaction. Hence if it is not forbidden, there is some probability amplitude for it to happen.
In the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the principle has a more literal meaning: that every possibility at every interaction that is not forbidden by such a conservation law will actually happen (in some branch of the wave function).
Origin of the phrase
Neither the phrase nor its application to quantum physics originated with Gell-Mann,[1] but a 1956 paper by him contains the first published use of the phrase as a description of quantum physics.[2] Gell-Mann used it to describe the state of particle physics around the time he was formulating the Eightfold Way, a precursor to the quark-model of hadrons. According to the second edition of Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann & the Revolution in Physics [3] Gell-Mann incorrectly attributed the quote to George Orwell in a letter to the astrophysicist Jeremiah Ostriker.
Formulations close to Gell-Mann's are used in
See also
- Everything which is not forbidden is allowed – Constitutional principle
- Modal realism – Philosophical concept
References
- arXiv:1907.04623 [physics.hist-ph].
- S2CID 121017243.
Among baryons, antibaryons, and mesons, any process which is not forbidden by a conservation law actually does take place with appreciable probability. We have made liberal and tacit use of this assumption, which is related to the state of affairs that is said to prevail in a perfect totalitarian state. Anything that is not compulsory is forbidden. Use of this principle is somewhat dangerous, since it may be that while the laws proposed in this communication are correct, there are others, yet to be discussed, which forbid some of the processes that we suppose to be allowed.
- ISBN 978-1947864498.
- ISBN 978-0441003839. The passage describes an ant-hill from the point of view of an ant: "The fortress was entered by tunnels in the rock, and, over the entrance to each tunnel, there was a notice which said: EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY." This passage does not appear in the 1938 and 1939 editions of The Sword and the Stone, but only in the 1958 revision incorporated into The Once and Future King.
- ^ Parsons, John Whiteside (1989). "II. The Sword and the State". Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword. Falcon Press. "I do not mean his potential activities. It is a sophistry, fascist in essence, that a man should be restrained because he might be dangerous. Following this argument, a man should be restrained for any reason, on anybody's judgment. This is simply placing unlimited power in the hands of the state. All that is not forbidden is compulsory. This is the ultimate conclusion of such a dogma."
- ^ Anthologized in Robert A. Heinlein, The Past Through Tomorrow, Berkley Medallion mass-market paperback edition, 1967, p. 600. "The state was thought of as a single organism with a single head, a single brain, and a single purpose. Anything not compulsory was forbidden."