The very attempt to conjure up a picture of elementary particles and
think of them in visual terms is wholly to misinterpret them . . . [7]
Atoms are not things. The electrons which form an atom's shells are no longer things in the sense of classical physics, things which could be unambiguously described by concepts like location, velocity, energy, size. When we get down to the atomic level, the objective world in space and time no longer exists. [8]
4
Werner Heisenberg will probably be remembered as the great iconoclast who put an end to causal determinism in physics -- and thereby in philosophy -- by his celebrated 'Principle of Indeterminacy' which is as fundamental to modern physics as Newton's Laws of Motion were to classical mechanics. I have tried to convey its meaning by a rather simplistic analogy. [9] A certain static quality of many Renaissance paintings is due to the fact that the human figures in the foreground and the distant landscape in the background are both in sharp focus -- which is optically impossible: when we focus on a close object the backgrowid gets blurred, and vice versa. The Principle of Indeterminacy implies that in studying the sub-atomic panorama the physicist is confronted with a similar predicament (though of course for quite different reasons). In classical physics a particle must at any time have a definite location and velocity; on the sub-atomic level, however, the situation turns out to be radically different. The more accurately the physicist is able to determine the location of an electron, for instance, the more uncertain its velocity becomes; and vice versa, the more exactly he is able to determine the particle's velocity, the more blurred, i.e., indeterminate, its location becomes. This indeterminacy is not caused by the imperfection of our techniques of observation, but by the inherently dual nature of the electron as both 'particle' and 'wavicle', which makes it both practically and theoretically impossible to pin down. But this implies nothing less than that down on the sub-atomic level the universe at any given moment is in a quasi-undecided state, and that its state in the next moment is to some extent indeterminate or 'free'. Thus if an ideal photographer with a perfect camera took a picture of the total universe at any given moment, the picture would be to some extent fuzzy, owing to the indeterminate state of its ultimate constituents.* Because of this fuzziness, physicists' statements about sub-atomic processes can only refer to probabilities, not to certainties; in the micro-world the laws of probability supplant those of causality: 'nature is unpredictable' -- to quote Heisenberg once more.
* It can be shown that however short the exposure time, the
Indeterminacy Principle will still blur the picture.
Thus for the last fifty years, since the advent of quantum theory, it has become a commonplace among physicists of the dominant school (the so-called Copenhagen School) that the strictly deterministic, mechanistic world-view can no longer be upheld; it has become a Victorian anachronism. The nineteenth -century model of the universe as a mechanical clockwork is a shambles and since the concept of matter itself has been de-materialized, materialism can no longer claim to be a scientific philosophy.
5
I have quoted some of the giants (most of them Nobel laureates)* who were jointly responsible for dismantling the antiquated clockwork, and attempted to replace it by a more sophisticated model, sufficiently flexible to accommodate logical paradoxes and wild theories previously considered unthinkable. During this half century countless new discoveries have been made -- by radio-telescopes scanning the skies and in the bubble chambers recording the sub-atomic dance of Shiva -- but no satisfactory model and no coherent philosophy has yet emerged comparable to that of classical, Newtonian physics. One might describe this post-Newtonian era as one of the periods of 'creative anarchy' which recur in the history of every science when the old concepts have become obsolete, and the breakthrough leading to a new synthesis is not yet in sight.** At the time of writing, theoretical physics itself seems to be immersed in a bubble chamber, with the weirdest hypotheses criss-crossing each other's tracks. I shall mention a few, which seem pertinent to our theme.
* The frequent mention of Nobel awards is intended as a reassurance
that the strange theories quoted in this chapter were propounded not
by cranks but by physicists of international renown.
** Cf above, Ch. VIII.
First, there have been some eminent physicists, among them Einstein, de Brogue, Schrödinger, Vigier, and David Bohm, who were unwilling to accept the indeterminacy and acausality of sub-atomic events -- which in their opinion amounted to saying that these events were ruled by blind chance. (Einstein's famous phrase: 'God does not play dice with the world' reflects this attitude.) They were inclined to believe in the existence of a sub-stratum below the sub-atomic level, which ruled and determined those seemingly indeterminate processes. This was called the theory of 'hidden variables' -- which, however, has been abandoned even by its staunchest supporters because it seemed to lead simply nowhere.
But although unacceptable to the physicist, the 'hidden variables' provided a fertile field for metaphysical and parapsychological theorizings. Theologians proposed that Divine Providence might work from within the fuzzy gaps in the matrix of physical causality ('the god of the gaps'). Sir John Eccles, Nobel laureate in physiology, proposed that the quantum indeterminacy of 'critically poised' neurons in the brain made room for the exercise of free will:
In the active cerebral cortex within twenty milliseconds, the pattern
of discharge of even hundreds of thousands of neurons would be
modified as a result of an 'influence' that initially caused the
discharge of merely one neuron . . .
Thus, the neurophysiological hypothesis is that the 'will' modifies
the spatio-temporal activity of the neuronal network by exerting
spatio-temporal 'fields of influence' that become affected through
this unique detector function of the active cerebral cortex. [10]
The above applies to the action of individual minds on their 'own' brains. In the concluding sections of his book, however, Eccles includes ESP and PK (psychokinesis) in his theory. He accepts the experimental results of Rhine and his school as evidence for a generalized 'two-way traffic' between mind and matter, and of direct communication channels between mind and mind. He believes that ESP and PK are weak and irregular manifestations of the same principle which allows an individual's mental volition to influence his own material brain, and the material brain to give rise to conscious experiences.
The theory is not worked out in detail, but it is indicative of current trends of thought among enlightened neurophysiologists -- from the late Sir Charles Sherrington to Penfield and Gray Walter, whom I have quoted in earlier works.
It is also interesting to note that Penfield, the neurologist, revived an unduly neglected hypothesis by Eddington, the astronomer, which postulated a 'correlated behaviour of the individual particles of matter, which he [Eddington] assumed to occur for matter in liaison with mind. The behaviour of such matter would stand in sharp contrast to the uncorrelated or random behaviour of particles that is postulated in physics.' [11]
Thus matter 'in liaison with mind' displays specific properties not otherwise found in the realm of physics -- a proposition not far removed from panpsychism. Another astrononomer, V. A. Firsoff, suggested that 'mind was a universal entity or interaction of the same order as electricity or gravitation, and there must be a modulus of transformation, analogous to Einstein's famous equation E = mc².' [12]
In other words, as matter can be transformed into physical energy, so physical energy must be transformable into psychic energy, and vice versa.
In recent years, there has been a spate of such theories, intended to bridge the gap between quantum physics and parapsychology, which sound like science fiction -- but the same remark applies, as we have seen, to the basic proposition of modern physics itself. Thus the brilliant Cambridge mathematician, Adrian Dobbs, has put forward an elaborate
theory of telepathy and precognition, in which hypothetical 'psytrons', with properties similar to the neutrinos*, were regarded as the carriers of ESP phenomena, capable of impinging directly on neurons in the recipient's brain. [13] Among more recent writers, Dr E. Harris Walker, a ballistics expert, has developed an ingenious quantum-mechanical theory, in which the hypothetical 'hidden variables' are identified with consciousness as 'non-physical, but real entities', independent of space and time, and 'connected to the physical world by means of the quantum-mechanical wave function'. [14] His theory includes parapsychological phenomena, but it involves advanced mathematics and is altogether too technical to be discussed here.
* Neutrinos are particles of cosmic origin, devoid of physical
attributes (mass, weight, charge, magnetic field) traversing the
earth (and our bodies) in swarms of billions at the speed of light.
Lifting our sights from the bubble chamber to the starry skies, our commonsense notions of space, time, and causality turn out to be as inadequate as when we try to apply them to the sub-atomic domain. In the relativistic universe space is curved and the flow of time is speeded up or slowed down according to the time-keeper's state of motion. Moreover, if parts of the universe are furnished with galaxies of anti-matter,* which many astronomers believe to be the case, there is a fair chance that in these galaxies the flow of time is reversed.
* Anti-matter consists of atoms in which the electric charges of
their constituents are reversed.
Switching back from macrocosmos to microcosmos, we remember that in Feynman's diagrams, particles are supposed to move for a short while backwards in time. Heisenberg himself endorsed this hypothesis:
The only consolation [when faced with the paradoxes of quantum theory]
is the assumption that in very small regions of space-time of the
order of magnitude of the elementary particles, the notions of space
and time become unclear, i.e., in very small intervals even the
concepts 'earlier' and 'later' can no longer be properly defined. Of
course nothing is altered in space-time on the large scale, but we
must bear in mind the possibility that experiment may well prove
that small-scale space -- time processes may run in reverse to the
causal sequence. [15]
Thus our medium-sized world with its homely commonsense notions of space, time and causality appears to be sandwiched in between the macro- and micro-realms of reality, to which those parochial notions no longer apply. As Sir James Jeans wrote: 'The history of physical science in the twentieth century is one of progressive emancipation from the purely human angle of vision.' [16] On the macrocosmic scale of large distances and high speeds, relativity played havoc with that vision. On the micro-cosmic scale, relativity combined with quantum theory had the same effect. The physicist's concept of time is totally different today from what it was during Queen Victoria's reign. The most eminent among contemporary astronomers, Sir Fred Hoyle, has put it in his provocative way:
You're stuck with a grotesque and absurd illusion . . . the idea
of time as an ever-rolling stream . . . There's one thing quite
certain in this business: the idea of time as a steady progression
from past to future is wrong. I know very well we feel this way about
it subjectively. But we're the victims of a confidence trick. [17]
But if the irreversibility of time is derived from a 'confidence trick' -- that is, from a subjective illusion -- we are no longer justified in excluding on a priori grounds the theoretical possibility of precognitive phenomena such as veridical dreams. The logical paradox that predicting a future event may prevent it or alter its course, is at least partly circumvented by the indeterminateness of the future in modern physics, and the probabilistic nature of all forecasts.
6
The revolution in physics which thus transformed our world-view took place in the 1920s. But in the second half of our century it took an even more surrealistic turn. At the time of writing, the universe appears to be pock-marked with so-called 'black holes'. The term was coined by John A. Wheeler, Professor of Physics at Princeton University, and a leading figure among contemporary physicists.* Black holes are hypothetical pits or sumps in distant space into which the mass of a burnt-out star which has suffered gravitational collapse is sucked at the speed of light, to be annihilated and vanish from our universe. The loci at which these apocalyptic events take place are referred to as 'singularities' in the continuum; here, according to the equations of general relativity, the curvature of space becomes infinite, time is frozen, and the laws of physics are invalidated. The universe is turning out to be a very odd place indeed, and we do not need ghosts to make our hair stand on end.
* Wheeler's book, Geometrodynamics, published in 1962,
is considered a modern classic.
One might be tempted to ask the naive question where the matter which has fallen into the black hole 'goes' (for not all of it can have been converted into energy). Wheeler has a tentative answer to that: it might emerge in the shape of a 'white hole' somewhere in another universe, located in superspace (his italics):
The stage on which the space of the universe moves is certainly not
space itself. Nobody can be a stage for himself; he has to have a
larger arena in which to move. The arena in which space does its
changing is not even the space-time of Einstein, for space-time is
the history of space changing with time. The arena must be a larger
object: super-space . . . It is not endowed with three or
four dimensions -- it's endowed with an infinite number of
dimensions. Any single point in superspace represents an entire,
three-dimensional world; nearby points represent slightly different
three-dimensional worlds. [18]
Superspace -- or hyperspace -- has been an old stand-by of science fiction, together with the notion of parallel universes and reversed or multidimensional time. Now, thanks to radio-telescopes and particle-accelerators, they are acquiring academic respectability. The stranger the hard, experimental data, the stranger the theories which attempt to account for them.
Wheeler's version of superspace has some remarkable features:
The space of quantum geometrodynamics can be compared to a carpet of
foam spread over a slowly undulating landscape . . . The continual
microscopic changes in the carpet of foam as new bubbles appear and
old ones disappear symbolize the quantum fluctuations in the geometry
. . . [19]
Another remarkable attribute of Wheeler's superspace is multiple connectivity. This means -- put into simple and over-simplified language -- that regions which in our homespun three-dimensional world are far apart, may be brought temporarily into direct contact through tunnels or 'holes' in superspace. They are called wormholes. The universe is supposed to be criss-crossed with these wormholes, which appear and disappear in immensely rapid fluctuations, resulting in ever-changing patterns -- a cosmic kaleidoscope shaken by an invisible hand.
7
An essential feature of modern physics is its increasingly holistic trend, based on the insight that the whole is as necessary for the understanding of its parts as the parts are necessary for understanding the whole. An early expression of this trend, dating from the turn of the century, was 'Mach's Principle', endorsed by Einstein. It states that the inertial properties of terrestrial matter are determined by the total mass of the universe around us. There is no satisfactory causal explanation as to how this influence is exerted, yet Mach's Principle is an integral part of relativistic cosmology. The metaphysical implications are fundamental -- for it follows from it not only that the universe as a whole influences local, terrestrial events, but also that local events have an influence, however small, on the universe as a whole. Philosophically-minded
physicists are acutely aware of these implications -- which remind one of the ancient Chinese proverb: 'If you cut a blade of grass, you shake the Universe.'
Bertrand Russell flippantly remarked that Mach's Principle, though formally correct, 'savours of astrology', while Henry Margenau, Professor of Physics at Yale, commented in an address to the American Society for Psychical Research:
Inertia is not intrinsic in the body; it is induced by the circumstance
that the body is surrounded by the whole universe . . . We know
of no physical effect conveying this action; very few people worry
about a physical agency transmitting it. As far as I can see, Mach's
Principle is as mysterious as your unexplained psychic phenomena,
and its formulation seems to me almost as obscure . . . [20]
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