Quantum Leap of Faith

Didn't watch Quantum Leap regularly when it was on, back in the old days.

Every now and then I'd catch an episode and I'd enjoy it, thinking, Boy, I bet I'd love this show if I was twelve.

Both the Mannion guys are now around twelve, so we've started watching it on DVD, and I was right, twelve or so is the right age to truly appreciate Sam Beckett's adventures as he bounces from point to point on the looped and balled string of that part of the universe that is his life.  The guys have been enjoying it, but I've been perplexed.

I didn't remember the show being this overtly religious.

Dr. Sam Beckett---the Dr. is thanks to his MD, one of six advanced degrees he holds, four of the others being in quantum physics and related sciences, the last in ancient languages!---finding that his time travel experiment has gone haywire and he's leaping, seeming randomly, through time, and into other people's lives and...well, not their bodies, exactly.   Their auras or something.  Apparently matter, at least matter that takes the shape we know as human and is inhabited by a soul generates a 3-D image of itself around itself and somehow when Sam leaps into someone's life his body displaces that person's body from within the image and sends it and his own image back into the future to Sam's starting point.  When Sam leaps out, that person leaps back.  It's never explained how that person copes upon their return to find out that their life has been lived without them.

We do know that they don't know that Sam has improved their life while they've been gone.  They can't know because Sam has changed their futures, fixing problems and rescuing them from dangers they didn't know they were going to face by making choices they wouldn't have known to make or by bringing to bear knowledge, sometimes fore-knowledge, and skills they didn't possess themselves.

So they have to deal with some rather confusing issues arising from their very recent past when they come back.

For example, the test pilot whose life Sam's just leaped out of is going to have to explain to his wife how he's forgotten how to dance and a college literature professor is going to have to explain to one of his students, whose life's course Sam altered by befriending her as the professor, why he's forgotten all the quantum mechanics he used to impress her and gain her trust and affection.

At any rate, Sam figures out in the first episode that while his leaps from life to life, and time to time, may appear random, they have purpose.  His job is the opposite of what happens in many time travel adventures in which the time-travelers have to change the past to put the future back to what it was after some accident or villain has changed it.  His job is to deliberately alter the future.

Why doesn't all this messing around with time ever result in something like Sam never building his time machine, you ask?  Good question.  For instance, that student Sam as the college professor befriends is Sam's own future ex-fiancee and she's scheduled to jilt him at the altar in ten years.  Sam's plan is to change her attitude towards men for the better so that she isn't commitment-phobic when they meet.  It's pointed out to him that if he does a good enough job it's possible that they won't ever meet because, thanks to her new, more trusting attitude, she might very well marry the man she was engaged to and dumped before Sam, Sam in her future, came along.  As I pointed out to the guys, it's also possible that if she marries Sam she might divert him from the research that led him to figure out how to leap and if he never leaped he never changed her attitude and she would have left him at the altar all over again so he would have continued his research so he'd have leaped so he'd have changed her attitude so she'd have married him so...etc.

The reason Sam's leaps don't change his own future or, apparently, anyone else's except that of the person whose life he's leaped into and the people immediately around them, is that he can't change the future as a totality or even in part, if that's the way things were meant to be.

He can only correct small flaws that result from something that was/is supposed to happen not happening in exactly the way it was supposed to happen.

He goes about plugging tiny holes and filling imperceptible fissures that are threatening to knock the future, Sam's future's future, what will happen after the point in time from which Sam leaped backwards, off course.

Or maybe it's not the future Sam's fixing, directly.  Maybe the past is like an old house that settles over time.  Windows, doors, chimneys get out of plumb, cracks develop, mice get in, termites---eventually, you've got to call in the handyman, and Sam is the handyman come to put things back to right.

What this means is that there is a known right, a specific way things were/are supposed to be.  In the reality of the show, time and the universe, which are one and the same, have an intent.

There is a plan.

And it's God's plan.

As soon as Sam figures out what's happening to him, he decides that his accident wasn't an accident at all.  God, whom Sam refers to as the Big Guy, arranged it and he, Sam, is on a mission from the Big Guy.

And in case we might think this is just a passing thought on Sam's part, throughout the first several episodes Sam speaks directly to God, thanking the Big Guy, questioning Him, calling on Him for help and guidance, and he nods at Him and points Him out when His name comes up in conversations (the Big Guy is Up There).

I don't think that twenty years ago when Quantum Leap went into production it would have struck audiences as so much of an anomaly to have a scientist character who wasn't, if not an atheist, at least a bit of an agnostic.  The professional skeptic who turns out to be a believer, in his or her cranky way, is still a favorite trope of movies, television, and popular fiction, although the skeptic's more likely to be a doctor, like Doc Cochran on Deadwood, than a pure scientist.  And, in fact, with apologies to PZ Meyers, there are still plenty of real pure scientists who believe in, well, probably, not the Big Guy, but something.

But I'll bet there aren't many of them who, finding themselves in Sam's situation, would decide that the best and most satisfying explanation for what's happening is that a personal, and personified, God has decided to use them as a tool to interfere directly in individual human lives.

But that's what God's up to on Quantum Leap, and so far the Big Guy's had Sam fix it so that the test pilot's wife and baby survives a difficult childbirth, a nun builds her planned soup kitchen, a minor league ball player finishes his career with a game winning inside-the-park home run, a seemingly incompatible young couple marry, Sam's future ex-fiancee reunites with her estranged father, and---my favorite---the cops show up at the Watergate that night in June of 1972.

Sam's happily on board with this idea, as if that was the point of his experiments all along, to catch God's attention.  He's like a 20th Century Isaac Newton, thinking the job of a scientist is to prove the Big Guy's there and that by proving it he'll somehow force His hand and cause Him to show Himself.

The reason I don't remember God bringing down Richard Nixon could be that after a short while the producers decided they didn't need to keep explaining what Sam was doing and why and how.  It could also be that I never took the religious aspect seriously because I understood that it was there as a cheat, a way to slip the pseudo-scientific nonsense past the audience.  "Hey, we can violate the laws of physics, even the ones we made up for the show, because it's the Big Guy at work here."  And it could be that I just ignored it because I didn't need it.  Not the religion.  Any explanations.  I'd watched enough TV to know what was going on.  Quantum Leap was just an updated version of Then Came Bronson and Route 66, with Sam drifting from town to town along superstrings instead of the open highway, stopping off now and then to do a good deed, and then moving on.

It could be, though, that I don't remember it because I hardly noticed it.  I took it for granted.  This is how God works on TV in the movies and I accepted it with a shrug and without thought the way I accepted Teri Hatcher in the role of a brilliant physics major who is going to grow up to be Sam Beckett's intellectual and professional equal before she dumps him at the altar.  (Yes, that Teri Hatcher, back when they were naturally spectacular. Photo might not be safe for work.)  On TV God is usually offstage, watching from the wings, but he's not there as Joyce describes, indifferently paring His fingernails.  He's eagerly waiting for his cue.  When it comes, He bounds on, crosses straight to center stage, and takes over.  He's a personal, personified, directly interfering presence.  The Big Guy.

Even in our supposedly more cynical, more skeptical time, He's still at it.  That's His role on Saving Grace.  For all its sex, drugs, and rock and roll grittiness, Saving Grace is about as sophisticated in its spirituality as Quantum Leap.  The difference between the two shows being only that Holly Hunter lets us see her naked and Teri Hatcher's spectacularness reveals itself through tight turtleneck sweaters.

(For the Scott Bakula fans among you, Bakula was in great shape back then and the producers took advantage of it whenever possible.)

Oh, and there's another difference.

Quantum Leap was aimed at twelve year olds.

PS. If any of the scientists who read this blog can explain any of the physics Quantum Leap pretended to be based on it would be much appreciated by the 11 year old here.

Comments

[Jennifer]

I was not a 12 yr-old boy and I do not remember the religious aspect, but I enjoyed Quantum Leap. I think watching Scott Bakula had something to do with that. :)

[Kevin Wolf]

As happens here sometimes, much more interested in reading what you've got to say about a show, Lance, than in watching it. Quantum Leap never did a thing for me. (Of course, I was well past the target age group.) Only saw it once or twice.

[David]

I've only seen the show sporadically, and so I didn't know he talked to God in the early episodes (and God answered back?). However, I did see the last episode. I don't know if you don't want to be spoiled, so I'll just say that the issue you bring up here is addressed in the episode in a very direct way.

[stan]

I was about 14 or so when the show premiered. I absolutely love it. Former child actor Dean Stockwell played Sam's sidekick Al.

[marciemeow]

how silly you are and contradictory, how can you say its directed at 12 year olds, THEN proceed to say you had to explain to your sons (who are 12) thats obvious that QL WASNOT directed to 12 year olds, it was directed to ANYONE. Plus you say the producers took advantage of Scott being in great shape WELL what 12 year old would appreciate that as much as what older females would ????? Not to mention all the topics that were raised, bigotry, pregnancy, religion etc etc all that goes over the head of a 12 year old, THEY just love the aspect of the leaping. THATs the only part that is directed to the 12 year olds. Many teens who saw the show back then and loved it, appreciate it more now that they are older and I am one of them. You dont know what you are talking about!!!!

[SV]

Have you seen the entire series? I mean, all the way to the final episode of the final season? The week-to-week "theology" (if you can even call it that) was pretty juvenile, you're right. But the ending? Mind-blowing. Some people complain that it was a rush job and didn't make sense - I think it was beautiful, couldn't have been done more perfectly. (My sister and I have been arguing about what it meant for years.)

[Batocchio]

As David and SV note, the final episode is really pretty interesting, and directly brings up the god issue. I know some people who were infuriated by the end, or disappointed, and others such as SV who really liked it.

One of the best episodes, involving a death row inmate, also brings in god, but it's mainly for Sam to experience terror and doubt.

As for all the god stuff in Quantum Leap - it never bothered me because the show was mostly pretty light fare (but yes, I always wind up thinking about the underlying premises, too).

I've got a stronger reaction to Saving Grace, although admittedly I only saw the first episode. It was a weird mix, and I'm not sure who the audience is supposed to be - hard-drinking, failed catholics who want more religion in their cable cop dramas? The god-intervenes theme is central there, and just didn't work for me.

I find the general theme and its execution interesting. I've got an informal list of atheist Christ figures in film. Then there's films like Becket (speaking of Beckets!), based on Anouilh's play. Anouilh's play, whatever its flaws, keeps a nice balance between Henry II and Becket, and is ambiguous about Becket himself — has he undergone a genuine religious conversion, is he making a power grab, or both? The film removes that ambiguity. God exists, and Becket (played by Richard Burton) is doing His Will — which includes preventing a criminal church worker from facing justice from secular government. Divine intervention of some sort is an old narrative device, but the general idea that Everything Turns Out the Way It's Meant To is pretty damn pervasive. As an antidote, there's always King Lear and Ran. And Brecht.

[Dan Coyle]

As for Sam changing things in terms of making the time machine, while the third season finale reveals that it likely wouldn't matter, Sam does something in the final episode that alters Al's past entirely to the point where he probably never became involved in the Quantum Leap project.

The finale makes the religious overtones complete, with Sam at one point being compared to a Priest.

[Obstreperous B]

Ah, Quantum Leap. My roommate and I used to watch the show in reruns and joke that Sam's purpose was to leap from time to time making women cry.

Seriously, he made a woman cry in practically every damn episode.

Oh, and don't forget he's also a Carnegie Hall-quality concert pianist. Hee hee hee.

[marjo]

My husband and I always liked the show, but because it was entertaining to see Scott Bakula in so many different situations. Though I like sci-fi generally, one could never think too much about QL because your brain would hurt. You had to just accept the premise. I don't remember the god thing that much, but QL like so many other "spiritual-lite" shows (I'm thinking Touched by an angel, Ghost Whisperer, etc. -- you know, all the bad ones) always fell back on a very uninspired good vs. evil mindset which did make me uncomfortable, esp. when the evitable Satan-stand-in would show up.

I never "got" the Dean Stockwell character or his stupid little remote control gadget, I watched it only for Bakula and the light entertainment of it.

[Ken Muldrew]

"If any of the scientists who read this blog can explain any of the physics Quantum Leap pretended to be based on..."

Are you asking about the physics of time machines?

[Lance]

Ken,

String theory and quantum mechanics. He's got time travel figured out. Has something to do with taking your star ship to the far side of the solar system and using the sun's gravitational pull to create a slingshot effect...

[Ken Muldrew]

Quantum mechanics is physics, but string theory isn't (not yet, anyway, and back when this show ran only Green, Schwartz, and Witten (and perhaps a few other eggheads) were working on strings). Time travel, of course, is pure imagination and only vaguely connects to physics through exotic solutions to the Einstein field equations. Those solutions certainly have no relevance to anything in our solar system.

I can't explain quantum mechanics here, but it should be remembered that "understanding" a physical theory means that you can solve problems using that theory (i.e. you can map an experimental system onto a set of equations, solve those equations, and predict the final state of your experimental system given some specified initial conditions (with the understanding that your prediction is correct). It doesn't mean that you can make sense of the metaphysical or philosophical questions that might arise when you pretend that the theory can be applied to systems that are not as well characterized as an experimental system that is actually used to test assumptions of the theory. So "understanding" quantum mechanics will not provide the satisfaction that I think you are looking for. Probably quite the opposite, I imagine. I kind of doubt that you would be pacified by the ability to solve problems in QM (actual textbook problems) and you would probably become more and more exasperated by your progressive discovery of how far removed the physical theory is from being applied to real life situations.

A good way to think about QM is to consider the informatic aspects of the theory. This isn't as good as statistical mechanics, where the informatic viewpoint changes the topic from beastly to pleasantly difficult, but at least if you think this way (that physics only tells you about what you know about a system, it says nothing about what a system actually is) you're less likely to say incredibly stupid things of the sort that come from that "quantum healing" joker.

OK, let's say you have some apparatus that ejects a particle and you want to predict where the particle will go and how fast it will get there. You do a bunch of math and arrive at a wavefunction. This is a probability density that describes the likelihood of finding the particle if you were to put a detector at some particular location and at a particular time. The detector might find the particle and it might not, but if you run the experiment over and over, the ratio of detected/experimental runs will converge on your predicted likelihood. Now you can also make this wavefunction evolve with time using your clever mathematical machinery. The beauty of QM is that the wavefunction evolves linearly, so you can actually solve the equations. But again, the theory doesn't specify where the particle is, it just gives you a way to calculate the likelihood of a detector finding the particle if you set up your experiment in a very particular way. In no way should this be taken to mean that the particle has no existence between measurements or that it exists in some smudge of partly here, partly over there, quasi-ghost-like conformation, or that it goes back and forth in time, following all possible paths to get from one detector to another. Those are all possible assumptions that can be used to derive quantum mechanics, but they are metaphysical ideas; they are not part of the theory. The theory really just takes the minimum possible amount of information that can be used to describe the linear evolution of the wavefunction and gives rules for that evolution. There could easily be more information hiding in these particles (so-called hidden variables), but it is unnecessary for determining the wavefunction. It may be possible to create a theory that gives the same predictions as QM (and hopefully more) by constructing a more complicated universe with more complicated particles (in fact, David Bohm did so, though it's less satisfying than standard QM due to other factors), but nobody has found a way to do so and keep locality and causation in the theory such that we find it satisfying. The best attempt that I have seen is by Saul Youssef who postulated that probability theory needs to be changed (to make probability go from -1 to +1; a negative probability would correspond to an artifact of the experiment that erases information from our knowledge of the system). But not many physicists are bothered by these considerations because QM does what they want it to do; and damn few of them work on it because it's not physics unless you can get new predictions and almost nobody thinks that will happen.

So we should really think of science fiction writers as philosophers (and really, who would argue that Stanislaw Lem isn't one of the 20th century's outstanding philosophers) who are cursed with the necessity of having spaceships with laser beams imprinted on all their books. Their speculations are not based on physics, but rather the assumptions that physicists use to derive a theory. So when de Maupertuis speculated that God tries all possible paths for light to travel and used that assumption to derive the principle of least action (which Feynman later used to derive QM in a new and extremely useful form), a sci-fi writer would speculate on God directing light beams all over the place in order to base a story on the "science" of least action in optics. This is similar to what sci-fi writers do when they introduce indeterminacy or some such on macroscopic beings and objects under the guise of extrapolating from the science. It is a mistake to take the experimental confirmation of QM as evidence to support such speculations, or even to support the notion that the assumptions that went into QM should have some ontological content. As philosophy, these speculations should allow us to sharpen our questions, and with luck and hard work, find new consequences of the assumptions that can be tested empirically. Without luck and hard work, then we may have to settle for mere entertainment.

Hope this is helpful in some way...

[Rana]

I liked the show too, and I don't remember the religious part all that well. Perhaps because I wasn't so sensitized to it?

Now, though... I was watching Eureka the other night, which is perhaps a similar show in terms of demographic, and the theme was reason vs. faith - and I ended up cringing. Now, most times I'm able to shut off my overly-educated, nit-picky brain and suspend my disbelief, and just enjoy the show. But this was too simplistic, too aggressive even in its happy-go-lucky way, and the suspension of disbelief just collapsed. The nits, they demanded to be picked!

And yet - how much of it is the show, and how much is me having been chafed raw by aggressive religious activity and hostitility to rationalism? One thing the last decade has done to me is to make it impossible for me to view overt religiousity - even watered down, generic religiousity - without suspicion and irritated wariness. I wonder if something like that might be operating with regard to Quantum Leap?

[Tom K]

I enjoyed the show a lot, and I was in my late 20s-early 30's when it was on. I demur on whether that suggests that the show was not pitched only to the mentality of 12-year-old boys, or that I am very immature. Not that they're mutually exclusive.

There's one very fundamental thing about it that I recall evolving -- the pilot, at least, and perhaps some of the early episodes, were clearly ripped from movie plots. (The pilot in the pilot and "The Right Stuff" springs to mind, but all the stories in the pilot had this quality.) That fell away pretty quickly.

I always felt the show's religious sensibility was very clear, and straining to transcend its network- & format-imposed restrains. Came close to doing that in the finale -- which I found disappointing. Maybe religion, like sex, is more interesting on film when presented subject to restraints.

[Dan Coyle]

My issue with the finale is that I can't decide if Donald Bellisario thought that final on screen message was appropriate or he was just being an asshole. He seemed to take great- too much- pleasure in baiting JAG viewers for a decade over Harm and Mac's relationship, ending it on a cliffhanger.

[Martin Wisse]

I still think it's a shame Scott Bakula didn't go "oh boy" the first time he showed up on screen in Star Trek: Enterprise.

[Dan Coyle]

He probably said it when he read the script for the pilot.

[macsnafu]

Quantum Leap wasn't religious when it started, but it developed that way over time. While I kind of liked the overall story arc, it seemed to become a little too stereotypical for my tastes.