Increasingly life is experienced as a cloud-like superposition of states, all apparently possible, until collapsed by dogmatic assertion, a word from a powerful narcissist, a despairing acceptance of the unlikely - even the impossible - or a bullet, depending on where you live. In realms from Large Language Models to treaties and physics everything is destabilised, in a cloud of unknowing until 'negotiated' into meaning.

Quantum physics, a hundred years old, is currently celebrated, used and misused all over the art world. It's had more or less revolutionary cultural effects as well as scientific ones (we hardly need to rehearse the latter these days). But many, perhaps most, collisions or happy meetings between quantum and art are relatively superficial, often curated by those who lack much knowledge of one or the other, not infrequently both. It is often used as metaphor: entanglement, superposition and probabilistic clouds are surely irresistible to many artists.

But Paul Thomas, Honorary Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, starts by arguing that our understanding and diagramming of quantum science is actually distorted by the classical frameworks that still deeply influence us, risking the confining of thought in classical paradigms. Art, surely, should go deeper. Unworried by probabilities instead of concrete certainties, indeed thriving on them, it might help us go beyond the superficial.

As part of this, he has to consider how aspects of quantum phenomena have influenced artists and art itself, without necessarily adopting the tropes of analogue and metaphor all the time.

On the other hand art and quantum physics might be perceived as entirely separate things, sealed off culturally and logically from each other, but… that already feels wrong, doesn't it? In situations like this I sometimes have recourse to the Major-General and the Devil as interlocutors. The former, in Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Pirates of Penzance, and the latter in The Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil, both introduce themselves. The Devil speaks of knowledge as history and encounter, where the observer is implicated; the Major-General of knowledge as classification, and the observer stands outside the system. For the Major-General, the universe of “animal, vegetable and mineral” is indexed. With the horned one, the universe speaks back. The Stones’ Devil speaks with permission: “Please allow me…”. The Major-General begins with assertion: “I am…”

In this context we might think that science introduces the universe by listing what's in it. “Here is what it seems to be”, often abbreviated to “Here is what it is”. Art lets the universe speak, and says “Here is what it's a bit like”. One declares authority, the other negotiates entry (neither to be trusted really of course) and it is between those two modes that much of the tension between quantum description and artistic articulation lies. Each contains seeds of the other, naturally. The Devil is in the detail and vice versa. Art at its most rigorous can become rule-bound, combinatorial, quasi-mathematical. Quantum science at its most advanced becomes uncanny, paradoxical, almost metaphysical (certainly pataphysical). Probabilities collapsing, vacuum fluctuations… it begins to sound like poetry. I say this not really to elucidate differences but in an attempt to describe the cloud of jittering, counter-intuitive tokens and indices that emerge once we begin to scratch the surface of art 'n' quantum.

Thomas writes that “artistic representation can constructively challenge and expand on our sensory and non-artistic representation strategies by incorporating both critical and imaginative elements”. Specifically, with respect to the robust scientific theory of quantum phenomena, he sees a paradoxical mission of incorporating counterintuitive ideas towards a more intuitive understanding.

This he does over 16 short chapters each starting with the word Quantum followed by, in order, Drawing, Blackness, Failure, Imaging, Duration, Intuition, Future, Symbiosis, Chaos, Computing, Scarring, Conceptualised, Immateriality, Mirror, Immortality and Unknown. You can begin to sense both scope and tightness. Sections are often illustrated by his own and others' artworks.

Thomas is not a physicist, but he well understands what it means to negotiate the porous but chancy, fuzzy frontiers between the domains he considers. It is this process that appeals in the book, more than any assertion about what art or quantum physics is.

In Quantum Drawing he describes making a first mark on the tabula rasa of white paper as transforming a void, not in the sense of George Spencer-Brown's 'distinction' I suppose, because it doesn't separate, rather it changes the whole. This formed part of various Quantum Drawing workshops he ran for physicists and others. From the associated Manifesto: “The first mark approximates an intervention in the cosmic void, both bringing space into existence and referencing the observer… the first meaningful mark is the perturbance of all the possible states”. The artist becomes “entangled with the object and its environment, intuitively engaging in a form of coexistence with the material world”.

Here and in late sections the text is not saying art is a bit like quantum physics or vice versa, but using terminology describing effects in one of the fields to open up thinking about the other. Unlike at the start of the 20th century, when physics expanded artistic comprehension, now artists can engage with scientific outcomes, not as retrospective reflections, but in a parallel synchronous process visualising quantum phenomena as part of their practice.

In the short chapter on quantum failure he talks about attributing success to a quantum theory that embraces unpredictability and uncertainty. In art, I join with him in believing that failure plays an essential role: art proceeds by a kind of failure. The certainty of some who would think quantitatively about art and quantum (and indeed AI seen with certainty as this or that) is surely an over-positive, over-determined disgrace in areas where 'success' and 'failure' are not positives and negatives.

Thomas wants artists to increase uncertainty in their work, resisting the compulsion to be pulled into the safe world of classical physics, just by awareness of the above ideas. There is a sentence that I quite like: “There is a blur at the heart of our perception of the universe. The marks on paper are an accumulation of overlapping probabilities.” Thoughts about the former can overlap with thoughts on the latter.

I mentioned 'Pataphysics. It has a useful term, the pataphor. Whereas a metaphor might say “the civil servant had long been a Russian mole”, a pataphor concretises the image: the spy would wear a fur coat, dig tunnels, leave heaps of earth on peoples' lawns and risk being flattened by trucks. Can art and quantum be pataphors of each other? It's not an impossible thought-experiment. The book under review here does push one to such flights of perhaps useful fantasy.

A later chapter, Quantum Conceptualised, explores “the intersection of failure and fiction as a space for bringing new worlds into being”.  The artwork, having been “born“, continues to exist, waiting for its own fictional identity to be created in the world. In the physics of uncertainty, is an initial intuitive premise analogous to an artwork? Well, it could be, or not, but the question is made real by consideration of Michael Craig-Martin's famous 1973 conceptual work An Oak Tree in which a glass of water on a shelf is asserted to be that hardwood member of the Quercus genus. Thomas writes that the original exhibition, in which an explanatory question and answer panel was only available as a separate leaflet, presented “a unique expression of superposition and entanglement between the observer and observed”. I have always found the questions and answers to be the most interesting part of it. For example, Question: “Haven’t you simply called this glass of water an oak tree?”Answer: “Absolutely not. It is not a glass of water anymore. I have changed its actual substance. It would no longer be accurate to call it a glass of water. One could call if anything one wished, but that would not alter the fact that it is an oak tree.”

I see 'wave' and 'particle' jostling for inclusion in such a space. Again, they are pataphors of each other. This provokes, surely, richer thought than just what the words “n'est pas” (“is not”) mean in Magritte's pipe work La Trahison des images.

Concerning the Quantum in Art is rich in reminders that the artist's task is not to re-decorate what has already been done, but to explore and think anew of the mysterious universe which contains art, quantum phenomena and people bold enough to observe and hence interfere in both at the same time, then jump up a level and making art about the whole caboodle. The pages present artists who heroically attempt to do that, and a writer who encourages us to take a chance with uncertainty.