The Quantum Jump to War

Niels Bohr and the shock of last Saturday morning

(Photo: Israeli security and rescue forces at the scene of an Iranian ballistic missile strike in Tel Aviv, June 17, 2025. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90))

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In 1913, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr published his model of atomic structure, known unsurprisingly as the Bohr model. Combining Ernest Rutherford’s description of the atomic nucleus and Max Planck’s theory about quanta, Bohr’s model explained what happens inside an atom and developed a picture of atomic structure. As I understand it (and I am not a physicist) Bohr was the first to realize that electrons travel in separate orbits around the nucleus and that the number of electrons determines the properties of an element.

Bohr described atoms as being constructed of small, positively-charged nuclei surrounded by negatively-charged electrons traveling in circular orbits around them. Electrons could move from one level of orbit to another - from one state to another - and when they did so, it was instantaneous.

This model differed from and improved upon earlier models by positing that electrons move in orbits of fixed size and energy. The energy of an electron depends on the size of the orbit and is lower for smaller orbits. Radiation occurs when the electron jumps from one orbit to another - from one state to another. Instantaneously. It’s a mind bending notion even now. A quantum jump - something moving from one state to another - BLAM! In no time¹.

New York City was resplendent on the morning of September 11, 2001. Spring in the city is glorious, when everything is fresh and green and the moist mungy grime of summer hasn’t set in yet - but autumn may be even better.

The sky was the blue of Venetian glass, and there was a fresh breeze off the East River. I’d been at my desk on the 16th floor of 180 Water Street for about 45 minutes, and was wading through a database of application forms, when suddenly there was a THUD. It was a deep, heavy, muffled thump, as though something weighty and large, going fairly slowly, had slammed into the side of the building at street level. Bus crash?

I walked over to the window and looked down. Nothing to see - just the usual clot of taxis and food carts and people rushing in late to work. I went back to my desk, sat down, and instead of diving right back into my task, glanced out the window. It was like looking into a snow globe. Sprinkled everywhere in the bright blue sky were thousands and thousands of tiny specks that, when my brain was able to adjust, abruptly resolved themselves. They were 8.5” x 11” pieces of paper. Countless thousands of them high in the sky, as though a giant had tipped over a filing cabinet.

It was at this point that things began to get a little bit more frantic. Someone in a corner cube piped up, “A plane hit the World Trade Center!” Even then, the quantum state remained the same. Even then, with a swarm of resumes and intake forms and bills of lading and print-outs of emails swirling madly 16 stories up, it was a lovely morning, and everything was fine. Even then, we had no idea.

I ran to the window again, craning to see what I could see. Nothing. We were on the wrong side of the building, facing east. My boss Sunny, a cheerful, intrepid woman, said, “Hey - let’s run downstairs to Duane Reade and get a box camera!”

There’s a certain breed of New Yorker who is ever ready for an accident as a lark, and a spectacle. That kind of New Yorker runs toward danger, just to get a good look at all the excitement. So off we went down the elevator and rushed up the block to the drugstore. We bought a box camera (remember those?) and began to make our way across town, jostling through the usual crowds toward the twin towers. It couldn’t have been much more than five minutes from that initial ‘thud.’

At this stage, word on the street was that a small plane had accidentally crashed into one of the towers. There was precedent for this, of course. The Empire State Building was hit by a military plane in 1945, and there was a near-miss the very next year. A plane hitting a building could only have been an accident. Anything else was, at that point, literally unthinkable.

As we walked along snapping pictures of nothing much – all we could yet see from our angle was a faint plume of smoke and the tiniest bright spark of flame – men with transistor radios passed out information like hors d’oeuvres at a party. One guy on his cell phone was narrating what someone else was watching on TV. Most people didn’t even know anything was out of the ordinary, and were headed to work, or to get coffee.

Then the second plane hit the south tower, and everything changed. Two planes: this was no accident. Our quantum state jumped – in an instant – from a morning on which an unfortunate accident had happened and we were taking a larky walk to get a look, to a day on which the United States was under attack by an unknown enemy. It was that fast, and there was no going back.

After the jump, there was panic. People began screaming. A Vesuvius of boiling black smoke rose in the west over the towers, while a gout of fire and debris slammed down the street toward us with the trainwreck momentum of a tsunami. We ran, heading back east, toward the river.

People were flooding out of office buildings into the streets. As we passed the pay phone on the corner we saw Sunny’s assistant standing in line to make a call and grabbed her, yanking her with us as we sprinted toward Fulton Street Fish Market. From somewhere in the melee in front of our building a kindly, Humpty Dumpty face rushed toward us - a co-worker with a desperate crush on Sunny, who knew she was awaiting knee replacements and had grabbed her sneakers on his way out of the building, so she didn’t have to flee for her life in sexy girlboss pumps.

In my memory, that day inhabits two entirely separate spaces: before the quantum jump and after, when things would never be the same.

What do you worry about when you worry about climate change? I worry about a lot of things: hurricanes, wildfires, bomb cyclones, food shortages, heat waves, drought… and I also worry about quantum jumps - or at the very least, rapid acceleration.

But this post is not about climate change. It’s about the war in Iran.

The world went to bed on Friday in the midst of the swirl of Trumpian ravings about tariffs and the increasing stench of the Epstein files. Business as usual this year, in other words.

On Saturday morning, we woke to war.

To the average lay person like me, the leap seems quantum. From the already ghastly state of global affairs (the dismantling of democracy in the United States, the unraveling of NATO, crumbling alliances with European powers, cartel violence in Mexico…) to something an order of magnitude worse that might threaten the globe with annihilation, with the vast nuclear arsenals of China, Russia, Israel and the United States looming as background.

It’s not like this was entirely unexpected. The situation in the Middle East was already bloody turmoil. Wikipedia already has a page up, from which I quote:

Israel and Iranian proxies have been engaged in conflict since 1985, which escalated into a series of direct confrontations in 2024, and a 12-day war in 2025 that also saw US strikes aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities. A month and a half before the attack, Iran massacred thousands of civilians during the largest protests since the Islamic revolution, and US president Donald Trump promised that “help is on the way”. In the following weeks, Iran and the US engaged in indirect nuclear negotiations mediated by Oman, and a second round of nuclear talks had been scheduled to be held in Geneva. The attack was preceded by the largest US military buildup to have occurred in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

But the jump from tense negotiations to outright war feels like the jump we made on that sunny September morning so long ago: before the planes hit, and after.

Friday: tensions, worries, threats, street violence in Tehran, gut feelings of doom.

Saturday: massacred Iranian school children, Ali Hosseini Khamenei dead, bombs raining down on Tel Aviv, Doha, and Dubai, Iranian attacks on US military installations, and serious adults talking seriously about nuclear war.

There’s already a surge of curdled cynicism about why, exactly, Donald Trump would choose NOW to start a war against Iran. To draw attention from the Epstein files, right?

Is that it? Or is it something else? Will the public ever know? Trump is lying blithely about “liberating” the Iranian people to take back their government. That cannot possibly be the reason. I’m watching the coverage unfold and am certain that the path to this was a convoluted and perhaps impenetrable trail of money and influence that we may never unravel.

Jared Kushner has reared his empty, pampered head. The Saudi royal family is likely involved. It’s a “follow the money” story at bottom - or is it?

On 9/11, the terrorists boarded the planes hours before the attacks. They’d been plotting and training for months and years before that. And when the passenger doors closed on American Airlines Flight 11, American Airlines Flight 77, United Airlines Flight 93, and United Airlines Flight 175, the weapons were locked and loaded. The outcome was all but inevitable.

The outcome here - war - was probably also all but inevitable.

But it still feels like a terrifying quantum jump.

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1. Quantum transition times are now known to be finite. They are on the order of 10s to 100s of attoseconds. An attosecond is 10^-18 seconds. That’s ten raised to the power of minus eighteen. One attosecond is 0.000000000000000001 seconds. It’s a very very short time.