The Dancing Wu Li Masters

by Gary Zukav

  The Chinese language does not use an alphabet like western languages. Each word in Chinese is depicted by a character, which is a line drawing. (Sometimes two or more characters are combined to form different meanings.) This is why it is difficult to translate Chinese into English. Good translations require a translator who is both a poet and a linguist.

  For example, “Wu” can mean either “matter” or “energy.” “Li” is a richly poetic word. It means “universal order” or “universal law.” It also means “organic patterns.” The grain in a panel of wood is Li. The organic pattern on the surface of a leaf is also Li, and so is the texture of a rose petal. In short, Wu Li, the Chinese word for physics, means “patterns of organic energy” (“matter/energy” [Wu] + “universal order/organic patterns” [Li]. This is remarkable since it reflects a world view which the founders of western science (Galileo and Newton) simply did not comprehend, but toward which virtually every physical theory of import in the twentieth century is pointing! The question is not, “Do they know something that we don’t?” The question is, “How do they know it?”

  English words can be pronounced almost any way without changing their meanings. I was five years a college graduate before I learned to pronounce “consummate” as an adjective (con-SUM-mate). (It means “carried to the utmost extent or degree; perfect”). I live in anguish when I think of the times that I have spoken of consummate linguists, consummate scholars, etc. Someone always seemed to be holding back a smile, almost. I learned later that these were the people who read dictionaries. Nonetheless, my bad pronunciation never prevented me from being understood. That is because inflections do not change the denotation of an English word. “No” spoken with a rising inflection (“No?”), with a downward inflection (“No!”), and with no inflection (“No…”) all mean (according to the dictionary) “a denial, a refusal, negative.”

  This is not so in Chinese. Most Chinese syllables can be pronounced several different ways. Each different pronunciation is a different word which is written differently and which has a meaning of its own. Therefore, the same syllable, pronounced with different inflections, which unaccustomed western listeners scarcely can distinguish, constitutes distinctly separate words, each with its own ideogram and meaning, to a Chinese listener. In English, which is an atonal language, these different ideograms are all written and pronounced the same way.

  For example, there are over eighty different “Wu”s in Chinese, all of which are spelled and pronounced the same way in English. Al Huang has taken five of these “Wu”s, each of which, when combined with “Li,” produces a different “Wu Li,” each with the same English spelling, and each pronounced (in English) “Woo Lee.”

  The first Wu Li means “Patterns of Organic Energy.” This is the Chinese way of saying “physics.” (Wu means “matter” or “energy”).

  The second Wu Li means “My Way.” (Wu means “mine” or “self.”)

  The third Wu Li means “Nonsense.” (Wu means “void” or “nonbeing.”)

  The fourth Wu Li means “I Clutch My Ideas.” (Wu means “to make a fist” or “clutch with a closed hand.”)

  The fifth Wu Li means “Enlightenment.” (Wu means “enlightenment” or “my heart/my mind.”)

  If we were to stand behind a master weaver as he begins to work his loom, we would see, at first, not cloth, but a multitude of brightly colored threads from which he picks and chooses with his expert eye, and feeds into the moving shuttle. As we continue to watch, the threads blend one into the other, a fabric appears, and on the fabric, behold! A pattern emerges.

  In a similar manner, Al Huang has created a beautiful tapestry from his own epistemological loom:

  PHYSICS = WU LI

  Wu Li = Patterns of Organic Energy

  Wu Li = My Way

  Wu Li = Nonsense

  Wu Li = I Clutch My Ideas

  Wu Li = Enlightenment

  Each of the physicists at the conference, to a person, reported a resonance with this rich metaphor. Here, at last, was the vehicle through which we could present the seminal elements of advanced physics. By the end of the week, everyone at Esalen was talking about Wu Li.

  At the same time that this was happening, I was trying to find out what a “Master” is. The dictionary was no help. All of its definitions involved an element of control. This did not fit easily into our image of the Dancing Wu Li Masters. Since Al Huang is a T’ai Chi Master, I asked him.

  “That is the word that other people use to describe me,” he said. To Al Huang, Al Huang was just Al Huang.

  Later in the week, I asked him the same question again, hoping to get a more tangible answer.

  “A Master is someone who started before you did,” was what I got that time.

  My western education left me unable to accept a nondefinition for my definition of a “Master,” so I began to read Huang’s book, Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain. There, in the foreword by Alan Watts, in a paragraph describing Al Huang, I found what I sought. Said Alan Watts of Al Huang:

  He begins from the center and not from the fringe. He imparts an understanding of the basic principles of the art before going on to the meticulous details, and he refuses to break down the t’ai chi movements into a one-two-three drill so as to make the student into a robot. The traditional way…is to teach by rote, and to give the impression that long periods of boredom are the most essential part of training. In that way a student may go on for years and years without ever getting the feel of what he is doing.1

  Here was just the definition of a Master that I sought. A Master teaches essence. When the essence is perceived, he teaches what is necessary to expand the perception. The Wu Li Master does not speak of gravity until the student stands in wonder at the flower petal falling to the ground. He does not speak of laws until the student, of his own, says, “How strange! I drop two stones simultaneously, one heavy and one light, and both of them reach the earth at the same moment!” He does not speak of mathematics until the student says, “There must be a way to express this more simply.”

  In this way, the Wu Li Master dances with his student. The Wu Li Master does not teach, but the student learns. The Wu Li Master always begins at the center, at the heart of the matter. This is the approach that we take in this book. It is written for intelligent people who want to know about advanced physics but who are ignorant of its terminology and, perhaps, of its mathematics. The Dancing Wu Li Masters is a book of essence; the essence of quantum mechanics, quantum logic, special relativity, general relativity, and some new ideas that indicate the direction that physics seems to be moving. Of course, who can know where the future goes? The only surety is that what we think today will be a part of the past tomorrow. Therefore, this book deals not with knowledge, which is always past tense anyway, but with imagination, which is physics come alive, which is Wu Li.

  One of the greatest physicists of all, Albert Einstein, was perhaps a Wu Li Master. In 1938 he wrote:

  Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison.2

  Most people believe that physicists are explaining the world. Some physicists even believe that, but the Wu Li Masters know that they are only dancing with it.

  I asked Huang how he structures his classes.

  “Every lesson is the first lesson,” he told me. “Every time we dance, we do it for the first time.”

  “But surely you cannot be starting new eac
h lesson,” I said. “Lesson number two must be built on what you taught in lesson number one, and lesson three likewise must be built on lessons one and two, and so on.”

  “When I say that every lesson is the first lesson,” he replied, “it does not mean that we forget what we already know. It means that what we are doing is always new, because we are always doing it for the first time.”

  This is another characteristic of a Master. Whatever he does, he does with the enthusiasm of doing it for the first time. This is the source of his unlimited energy. Every lesson that he teaches (or learns) is a first lesson. Every dance that he dances, he dances for the first time. It is always new, personal, and alive.

  Isidor I. Rabi, Nobel Prize winner in Physics and the former Chairman of the Physics Department at Columbia University, wrote:

  We don’t teach our students enough of the intellectual content of experiments—their novelty and their capacity for opening new fields…. My own view is that you take these things personally. You do an experiment because your own philosophy makes you want to know the result. It’s too hard, and life is too short, to spend your time doing something because someone else has said it’s important. You must feel the thing yourself…3

  Unfortunately, most physicists are not like Rabi. The majority of them, in fact, do spend their lives doing what other people have told them is important. That was the point Rabi was making.

  This brings us to a common misunderstanding. When most people say “scientist,” they mean “technician.” A technician is a highly trained person whose job is to apply known techniques and principles. He deals with the known. A scientist is a person who seeks to know the true nature of physical reality. He deals with the unknown.

  In short, scientists discover and technicians apply. However, it is no longer evident whether scientists really discover new things or whether they create them. Many people believe that “discovery” is actually an act of creation. If this is so, then the distinction between scientists, poets, painters, and writers is not clear. In fact, it is possible that scientists, poets, painters, and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call commonplace and to re-present them to us in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded. Those people in whom this gift is especially pronounced, we call geniuses.

  The fact is that most “scientists” are technicians. They are not interested in the essentially new. Their field of vision is relatively narrow; their energies are directed toward applying what is already known. Because their noses often are buried in the bark of a particular tree, it is difficult to speak meaningfully to them of forests. The case of the mysterious hydrogen spectrum illustrates the difference between scientists and technicians.

  When a white light, such as sunlight, enters a glass prism, one of the most beautiful of phenomena occurs. Out the other side of the prism comes not white light, but every color in the rainbow from dark red to light violet, with orange, yellow, green, and blue in between. This is because white light is made of all these different colors. It is a combination, whereas red light contains only red light, green light contains only green light, etc. Isaac Newton wrote his famous Optiks about this phenomenon three hundred years ago. This display of colors is called a white-light spectrum. The spectral analysis of white light shows a complete spectrum because white light contains all of the colors that our eyes can see (and some that they cannot see, like infrared and ultraviolet).

  However, not every spectral analysis produces a complete spectrum. If we take one of the chemical elements, for example, like sodium, cause it to emit light, and shine that light through a glass prism, we get only part of a complete spectrum.

  If an object is visible in a dark room, it is emitting light. If it appears red, for example, it is emitting red light. Light is emitted by “excited” objects. Exciting a piece of sodium does not mean offering it tickets to the Super Bowl. Exciting a piece of sodium means adding some energy to it. One way of doing this is to heat it. When we shine the light emitted by excited (incandescent) sodium through a prism, or spectroscope, we do not obtain the full array of colors characteristic of white light, but only parts of it. In the case of sodium, we obtain two thin yellow lines.

  We also can produce a negative image of the sodium spectrum by shining white light through sodium vapor to see what parts of the white light the sodium vapor absorbs. White light passing through sodium vapor and then through a spectroscope produces the whole rainbow of colors minus the two yellow lines emitted by incandescent sodium.

  Either way, the sodium spectrum always produces the same distinct pattern. It may be composed of black lines on an otherwise complete spectrum of colors, or it may be composed of colored lines without the rest of the spectrum, but it always remains the same.* This pattern is the fingerprint of the element sodium. Each element emits (or absorbs) only specific colors. Likewise, each element produces a specific spectroscopic pattern which never varies.

  Hydrogen is the simplest element. It seems to have only two components; a proton, which has a positive charge, and an electron, which has a negative charge. We must say “it seems to have” because there is not one person alive who has ever seen a hydrogen atom. If hydrogen atoms exist, millions of them can exist on a pinhead, so small are they calculated to be. “Hydrogen atoms” is a speculation about what is inside of the watch. We can say only that the existence of such entities nicely explains certain observations that would be very difficult to explain otherwise, barring explanations such as “the devil did it,” which still may prove to be correct. (It is this kind of explanation that drove Galileo, Newton, and Descartes to create what is now modern science.)

  At one time physicists thought that atoms were constructed in the following way: At the center of an atom is a nucleus, just as the sun is at the center of our solar system. In the nucleus is located almost all of the mass of the atom in the form of positively charged particles (protons) and particles about the same size as protons but without a charge (neutrons). (Only hydrogen has no neutrons in its nucleus.) Orbiting about the nucleus, as the planets orbit the sun, are electrons, which have almost no mass compared with the nucleus. Each electron has one negative charge. The number of electrons is always the same as the number of protons, so that the positive and negative charges cancel each other and the atom, as a whole, has no charge.

  The problem with comparing this model of the atom with our solar system is that the distances between an atomic nucleus and its electrons are enormously greater than we picture the distances between the sun and its planets. The space occupied by an atom is so huge, compared with the mass of its particles (almost all of which is in the nucleus), that the electrons orbiting the nucleus are “like a few flies in a cathedral” according to Ernest Rutherford, who created this model of the atom in 1911.

  This is the familiar picture of the atom that most of us learned in school, usually under duress. Unfortunately, this picture is obsolete, so you can forget the whole thing. We will discuss later how physicists currently think of an atom. The point here is that the planetary model of the atom formed the background against which a most puzzling problem was solved.

  The spectrum of hydrogen, the simplest of the atoms, contains over one hundred lines! The patterns of the other elements are even more complicated. When we shine the light from excited hydrogen gas through a spectroscope, we get over one hundred different lines of color in a distinct pattern.* The question is, “How can such a simple thing like a hydrogen atom, which has only two components, a proton and an electron, account for such a complex spectrum?”

  One way of thinking about light is to ascribe wave-like properties to it, and then to say that different colors have different frequencies, just as different sounds, which also are waves, have different frequencies. Arnold Sommerfield, a German physicist who also was an accomplished pianist, observed, tongue-in-cheek, that hydrogen atoms, which emit over one hundred different frequencies, must be more com
plicated than grand pianos, which emit only eighty-eight different frequencies!

  It was a Danish physicist named Niels Bohr who came up with an explanation (in 1913) that made so much sense that it won him a Nobel Prize. Like most ideas in physics, it is essentially simple. Bohr did not start with what was theoretically “known” abut the structure of atoms. He started with what he really knew about atoms, that is, he started with raw spectroscopic data. Bohr speculated that electrons revolve around the nucleus of an atom not at just any distance, but in orbits, or shells, which are specific distances from the nucleus. Each of these shells (theoretically there are an infinite number of them), contains up to a certain number of electrons, but no more.

  If the atom has more electrons than the first shell can accommodate, the electrons begin to fill up the second shell. If the atom has more electrons than the first and second shells combined can hold, the third shell begins to fill, and so on, like this:

  Shell number

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5…

  Numbers of electrons

  2

  8

  18

  32

  50…

  His calculations were based on the hydrogen atom, which has only one electron. According to Bohr’s theory, the electron in the hydrogen atom stays as close to the nucleus as it can get. In other words, it usually is in the first shell. This is the lowest energy state of a hydrogen atom. (Physicists call the lowest energy state of any atom its “ground state.”) If we excite an atom of hydrogen we cause its electron to jump to one of the outer shells. How far it jumps depends upon how much energy we give it. If we really heat the atom up (thermal energy), we cause its electron to make a very large jump all the way to one of the outer shells. Smaller amounts of energy make the electron jump less far. However, as soon as it can (when we stop heating it), the electron returns to a shell closer in. Eventually it returns all the way back to shell number one. Whenever the electron jumps from an outer shell to an inner shell, it emits energy in the form of light. The energy that the electron emits is exactly the amount of energy that it absorbed when it jumped outward in the first place. Bohr discovered that all of the possible combinations of jumps that the hydrogen electron can make on its journeys back to the ground state (the first shell) equals the number of lines in the hydrogen spectrum!