Quantum politics and a world turned upside down

By John Thornhill

The world laughed at Donald Trump this week. When the bombastic US president boasted at the UN of his achievements, he was greeted with a ripple of derision. But rather than sneering at Mr Trump, we should perhaps be studying him. He may be one of the first leaders to have grasped the essence of quantum politics.
That arresting phrase has been developed by another president, Armen Sarkissian of Armenia, to explain how politics now works. Mr Sarkissian has been studying this phenomenon in practice and in theory. Since being elected president in March, he has tried to calm political turmoil in Armenia. He is also one of the very few heads of state to be a theoretical physicist.
The 65-year-old was a winner of the Lenin prize for science back in Soviet times and a former colleague of the late Stephen Hawking at Cambridge university. For good measure, he was also one of the inventors of the Tetris computer game.
In his view, our interpretation of how politics traditionally works should be updated to reflect the way that physics has been reimagined. The classical world of post-Newtonian physics was linear, predictable, even deterministic. By contrast, the quantum world is highly uncertain and interconnected and can change depending on the position of the observer.