Such popular usage sometimes tries to capitalize on the suggestions of depth, precision and fundamentality associated with science. Often, as in Lady Gaga’s case, the usage may seem inapt. (In quantum physics, atoms and particles, unlike memories, can lose their individuality, for any two of the same kind cannot be distinguished from each other.) For many scientists, these appropriations are lamentable — at best pretentious, at worst wacky and inexact.

But nothing is intrinsically wrong with applying scientific language metaphorically to human experience. Metaphors are valuable when our experiences are enigmatic or difficult to capture, when existing words don’t fit the situation at hand. Even the incorrect use of technical terms can meaningfully express what we intuit but cannot otherwise say.

Every major scientific development has served this function, delivering a stock of new tools for describing aspects of human life. Newtonian mechanics offered novel images of causality and attraction; evolutionary theory gave us ways of discussing survival and fitness. So what does quantum physics provide that today’s culture finds so useful?

The quantum world behaves in ways that are mysterious and exotic (at least in contrast to the smoothness and predictability of the Newtonian world), and as a result, quantum metaphors are often used to capture the oddities and marvels of life. “Quantum leap” has been applied to a huge discontinuous transition of anything. “Wave-particle duality” has been used as a metaphor for schizophrenia. The uncertainty principle can be a shorthand (as in President Obama’s case) for the observer effect (i.e., how the act of looking can change what is being looked at). Schrödinger’s cat has been an allegory for an uncertain reality.

Of course, there are better and worse ways of using metaphors, and playwrights and novelists have turned to quantum imagery with perhaps the highest degree of success. Michael Frayn’s play “Copenhagen,” for example, skillfully uses Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to raise questions about truth and memory.