This Post is NOT about Quantum Mechanics

Herman Wouk, may he be ma'arich yamim ve'shanim, (who was kind enough to hand down his own childrens' baby carriage so that my wife could be proudly wheeled around the Lower East Side lo these many years ago,) has recently published a book titled The Language God Talks.  On Science and Religion.  He quotes the Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann as having said that "the gap between a person who understood quantum mechanics and one who did not was arguably wider than the difference between a human being and a great ape."    Dr. Gell-Mann is convinced that a person who knows the basic truth of reality is categorically different from one who does not.  
Assuming a bright line dichotomy between human and animal, there are two ways to understand his statement.  

• Either he meant that only those few that understand Quantum Mechanics are truly human, and he thereby cruelly consigns more than ninety nine percent of mankind to a less-than-human state, 
• or he meant that although the uninformed masses are human, those who understand Quantum Mechanics are vastly superior to them.

In any case, Dr. Gell-Mann was not making value judgments.  He was simply observing a fact: To be  Human means to understand; Homo Sapiens.  It is our specific function.  The most important truths that a human being must comprehend are those that underlie reality.  If you understand the deep truths of what the world is about, then you truly sapient.  


Even further: if you don't understand Quantum Mechanics, your world view is not merely deficient, it is delusional.  Your view of reality is not just imperfect- it is false.  


If you think you understand the basic truths of existence when you do not, if you merely skate along the two dimensional surface of the empirical evidence that can be perceived by the uneducated mind, then you have failed to fulfill the specific function of humanity, which is to comprehend truth.  You are certainly less sapient; perhaps you are less than sapient.


I don't think that Dr. Gell-Mann would say that the poor uneducated masses are less entitled to life, or that they don't deserve our love.  Although he is, nebach, a proud atheist, (whose incurable drive to assert his superiority and to demean any possible rival makes it impossible for him to recognize a Ribono shel Olam, as becomes obvious after watching this or reading this,) he is not, God forbid, a Nazi.  But he understands that Quantum Mechanics is so important, so essential, so fundamental to the meaning of reality, that those who fail to understand it are lesser beings, just as great apes are less than humans.


Also, I think that it is misleading to define "human-ness" exclusively on the basis of rationality.  There is a moral component as well.  I'm sure there are people who are conversant in Quantum Mechanics who are no better than those gentle giants of the jungle.