Quantum Leap, the Enlightenment, and “Laplace’s Demon”

Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula, left) and Al Calavicci (Dean Stockwell) in Quantum Leap

“Ziggy says…” These words became a recurring mantra in the early-1990s cult TV hit Quantum Leap. Al Calavicci, the comic relief and exposition bringer, carries a handheld computer unit which appears made of Legos, which beeps sporadically, and sometimes needs struck to work correctly. This is Al’s connection to Ziggy, a supercomputer programmed with all human knowledge through 1999, the year the series begins.

As the series progresses, it transpires that, before jumping back in time, the show’s protagonist, supergenius polymath Dr. Sam Beckett, programmed Ziggy with all known and speculated information available in the then-distant year 1999. Once Sam leaps into various characters, Al uses the iPad-like handheld unit to quickly uncover any information Sam needs to complete each week’s quest. Between Ziggy’s knowledge and Sam’s wisdom, they always ultimately restore justice.

Ziggy’s premise derives from the idea that lack of cogent data is the only impediment between judicious humanity and a fair universe. If humans only had better information and higher education, we’d all be reasonable and just. This idea didn’t begin with Quantum Leap or its creator, Donald P. Bellisario. It permeated much early American science fiction, most prominently Isaac Asimov, and derived from the philosophy of the French Enlightenment.

During the Enlightenment, self-appointed keepers of knowledge postulated that humanity was on a path toward perfection. Rejecting the Catholic doctrine of Original Sin, they asserted (with notable exceptions) that humanity began life savage and ignorant, and life was, in Hobbes’ famous phrase, “nasty, brutish, and short.” But continual improvements in knowledge and social structure continued bringing humans closer to perfection, as measured by Enlightenment philosophers’ own personal yardsticks.

This philosophy contained important blind spots. Enlightenment thinkers tacitly accepted that all past societies were mere rough drafts for the present, which was a stepping-stone to a perfected future. They also accepted that non-European societies were deviations from European greatness. The Enlightenment was inherently, but not overtly, racist; thinkers like John Locke and the Baron de Montesquieu were instrumental in European conquest of the Americas and Africa.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Okay, so. Enlightenment philosophers considered the past a rough draft, the present an edited but improved intermediary step. But they only saw time moving in one direction; “time travel” didn’t exist as a philosophical concept until H.G. Wells, in 1895. Therefore perfection existed only in the future. Our beautiful, Eurocentric Utopia remained yet to come.

After the Enlightenment, another Sam Beckett-like polymath, Pierre-Simon Laplace, postulated an idea that remains controversial in physics. If some supernatural being, Laplace suggested, could know the location and velocity of every particle in the universe, that being could compute where they’d all been, and where they were going. This being, termed “Laplace’s Demon,” had God-like knowledge of the universe’s existence, though no power to influence it.

One important consequence of Laplace’s Demon is that information, at least hypothetically, exists both forward and backward in time. Though Laplace’s speculation holds little water in contemporary physics, it remains important as philosophy, evidenced by the existence of the supercomputer Ziggy. Though Ziggy doesn’t hold all knowledge, it holds all knowledge available to humans, and therefore can map the movements of society, and transmit that information into the past.

This marks an advancement in Enlightenment philosophy. Philosophers like Voltaire and Descartes saw the past as a rough draft of the present, but they also saw it as fixed and immovable. Dr. Sam Beckett sees the past as subject to amendment and improvement, as a draft he can change. Using the perfect knowledge of the present, he can redress injustices in the past. He can spot imperfect knowledge, and use his information to make the past good again.

Series canon asserts that Sam always leaves the past improved, some injury or cruelty prevented. Sam leaps into situations and, aided by his “demon” Ziggy, patches moments of ignorance through gentle application of information. But the series occasionally acknowledges that not everybody is as beneficent as Sam. On occasion, he meets others who use future knowledge to exacerbate cruelty and inequity, to make the past measurably worse.

Therefore, although Sam attempts to do good—as, undoubtedly, Enlightenment philosophers thought of themselves as good—his actions nevertheless open doors for colonial despotism. The precept that we understand reality better than our ancestors, contains at least the possibility of seeing ignorance as a sin worthy of punishment. Sam and Al aren’t colonialists, as Voltaire and Newton weren’t. But as their philosophy held doors for the real colonialists, so too does Ziggy permit others to become cruel.