The Dancing Wu Li Masters

by Gary Zukav

  Newton’s second great contribution to science was his law of gravity. Gravity is a remarkable phenomenon, even though we take it for granted. For example, if we hold a ball off the ground, and then release it, the ball falls straight down to the ground. But how did that happen? The ground did not reach up and pull the ball down, yet the ball was pulled to the earth. The old physics called this unexplainable phenomenon “action-at-a-distance.” Newton himself was as puzzled as anyone. He wrote in his famous Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica:

  …I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses…it is enough that gravity does really exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies…4

  Newton clearly felt that a true understanding of the nature of gravity was beyond comprehension. In a letter to Richard Bently, a classical scholar, he wrote:

  …that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.5

  In short, action-at-a-distance could be described, but it could not be explained.

  Newton’s thesis was that the same force which pulls apples downward also keeps the moon in orbit around the earth and the planets in orbit around the sun. To test his idea, he calculated various movements of the moon and the planets, using his own mathematics. Then he compared his findings with the observations of astronomers. His calculations and their observations matched! In one stroke Newton set aside the assumption of an essential difference between earthly and heavenly objects by showing that both of them are governed by the same laws. He established a rational celestial mechanics. What had been the purview of the gods, or God, came now within the comprehension of mortals. Newton’s gravitational law does not explain gravity (that was done by Einstein in his general theory of relativity) but it does subject the effects of gravity to a rigorous mathematical formalism.

  Newton was the first person to discover principles in nature which unify large tracts of experience. He abstracted certain unifying concepts from the endless diversity of nature and gave those concepts mathematical expression. Because of this, more than anything else, Newton’s work has influenced us so forcefully. Newton showed us that the phenomena of the universe are structured in rationally comprehensible ways. He gave us the most powerful tool in history. In the West we have used this tool, if not wisely, certainly to the best of our ability. The results, both positive and negative, have been spectacular. The story of our enormous impact on our environment begins with the work of Newton.

  It was Galileo Galilei who, following the Middle Ages, first quantified the physical world. He measured the motion, frequency, velocity, and duration of everything from falling stones to swinging pendulums (like the chandelier in his cathedral). It was René Descartes who developed many of the fundamental techniques of modern mathematics and gave us the picture of the universe as a Great Machine. It was Isaac Newton who formulated the laws by which the Great Machine runs.

  These men struck boldly against the grip of scholasticism, the medieval thought system of the 12th to the 15th centuries. They attempted to place “man” at the center of the stage, or at least back on the stage; to prove to him that he need not be a bystander in a world governed by unfathomable forces. It is perhaps the greatest irony of history that they accomplished just the opposite.

  Joseph Weizenbaum, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote, in reference to computers:

  Science promised man power…. But, as so often happens when people are seduced by promises of power, the price is servitude and impotence. Power is nothing if it is not the power to choose.6

  How did this happen?

  Newton’s laws of motion describe what happens to a moving object. Once we know the laws of motion we can predict the future of a moving object provided that we know certain things about it initially. The more initial information that we have, the more accurate our predictions will be. We also can retrodict (predict backward in time) the past history of a given object. For example, if we know the present position and velocity of the earth, the moon, and the sun, we can predict where the earth will be in relation to the moon and the sun at any particular time in the future, giving us a foreknowledge of eclipses, seasons, and so on. In like manner, we can calculate where the earth has been in relation to the moon and the sun, and when similar phenomena occurred in the past.

  Without Newtonian physics the space program would not be possible. Moon probes are launched at the precise moment when the launch site on the earth (which simultaneously is rotating around its axis and moving forward through space) is in a position, relative to the landing zone on the moon (which also is rotating and moving) such that the path traversed by the spacecraft is the shortest possible. The calculations of the earth, moon, and spacecraft movements are done by computer, but the mechanics used are the same ones that are described in Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

  In practice, it is very difficult to know all the initial circumstances pertaining to an event. Even a simple action such as bouncing a ball off a wall is surprisingly complex. The shape, size, elasticity, and momentum of the ball, the angle at which it was thrown, the density, pressure, humidity and temperature of the air, the shape, hardness, and position of the wall, to name a few of the essential elements, are all required to know where and when the ball will land. It is increasingly difficult to obtain all of the data necessary for accurate predictions when more complex actions are involved. According to the old physics, however, it is possible, in principle, to predict exactly how a given event is going to unfold if we have enough information about it. In practice, it is only the enormity of the task that prevents us from accomplishing it.

  The ability to predict the future based on a knowledge of the present and the laws of motion gave our ancestors a power they had never known. However, these concepts carry within them a very dispiriting logic. If the laws of nature determine the future of an event, then, given enough information, we could have predicted our present at some time in the past. That time in the past also could have been predicted at a time still earlier. In short, if we are to accept the mechanistic determination of Newtonian physics—if the universe really is a great machine—then from the moment that the universe was created and set into motion, everything that was to happen in it already was determined.

  According to this philosophy, we may seem to have a will of our own and the ability to alter the course of events in our lives, but we do not. Everything, from the beginning of time, has been predetermined, including our illusion of having a free will. The universe is a prerecorded tape playing itself out in the only way that it can. The status of men is immeasurably more dismal than it was before the advent of science. The Great Machine runs blindly on, and all things in it are but cogs.

  According to quantum mechanics, however, it is not possible, even in principle, to know enough about the present to make a complete prediction about the future. Even if we have the best possible measuring devices, it is not possible. It is not a matter of the size of the task or the inefficiency of detectors. The very nature of things is such that we must choose which aspect of them we wish to know best, for we can know only one of them with precision.

  As Niels Bohr, another founder of quantum mechanics, put it:

  …in quantum mechanics, we are not dealing with an arbitrary renunciation of a more detailed analysis of atomic phenomena, but with a recognition that such an analysis is in principle excluded.7 [Italics in the original]

  For example, imagine an object moving through space. It has both a position and a momentum which we can measure. This is an example of the old (Newtonian) physics. (Momentum is a combination of how
big an object is, how fast it is going, and the direction that it is moving.) Since we can determine both the position and the momentum of the object at a particular time, it is not a very difficult affair to calculate where it will be at some point in the future. If we see an airplane flying north at two hundred miles per hour, we know that in one hour it will be two hundred miles farther north if it does not change its course or speed.

  The mind-expanding discovery of quantum mechanics is that Newtonian physics does not apply to subatomic phenomena. In the subatomic realm, we cannot know both the position and the momentum of a particle with absolute precision. We can know both, approximately, but the more we know about one, the less we know about the other. We can know either of them precisely, but in that case, we can know nothing about the other. This is Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. As incredible as it seems, it has been verified repeatedly by experiment.

  Of course, if we picture a moving particle, it is very difficult to imagine not being able to measure both its position and momentum. Not to be able to do so defies our “common sense.” This is not the only quantum mechanical phenomenon which contradicts common sense. Commonsense contradictions, in fact, are at the heart of the new physics. They tell us again and again that the world may not be what we think it is. It may be much, much more.

  Since we cannot determine both the position and momentum of subatomic particles, we cannot predict much about them. Accordingly, quantum mechanics does not and cannot predict specific events. It does, however, predict probabilities. Probabilities are the odds that something is going to happen, or that it is not going to happen. Quantum theory can predict the probability of a microscopic event with the same precision that Newtonian physics can predict the actual occurrence of a macroscopic event.

  Newtonian physics says, “If such and such is the case now, then such and such is going to happen next.” Quantum mechanics says, “If such and such is the case now, then the probability that such and such is going to happen next is…(whatever it is calculated to be).” We never can know with certainty what will happen to the particle that we are “observing.” All that we can know for sure are the probabilities for it to behave in certain ways. This is the most that we can know because the two data which must be included in a Newtonian calculation, position and momentum, cannot both be known with precision. We must choose, by the selection of our experiment, which one we want to measure most accurately.

  The lesson of Newtonian physics is that the universe is governed by laws that are susceptible to rational understanding. By applying these laws we extend our knowledge of, and therefore our influence over, our environment. Newton was a religious person. He saw his laws as manifestations of God’s perfection. Nonetheless, Newton’s laws served man’s cause well. They enhanced his dignity and vindicated his importance in the universe. Following the Middle Ages, the new field of science (“Natural Philosophy”) came like a fresh breeze to revitalize the spirit. It is ironic that, in the end, Natural Philosophy reduced the status of men to that of helpless cogs in a machine whose functioning had been preordained from the day of its creation.

  Contrary to Newtonian physics, quantum mechanics tells us that our knowledge of what governs events on the subatomic level is not nearly what we assumed it would be. It tells us that we cannot predict subatomic phenomena with any certainty. We only can predict their probabilities.

  Philosophically, however, the implications of quantum mechanics are psychedelic. Not only do we influence our reality, but, in some degree, we actually create it. Because it is the nature of things that we can know either the momentum of a particle or its position, but not both, we must choose which of these two properties we want to determine. Metaphysically, this is very close to saying that we create certain properties because we choose to measure those properties. Said another way, it is possible that we create something that has position, for example, like a particle, because we are intent on determining position and it is impossible to determine position without having some thing occupying the position that we want to determine.

  Quantum physicists ponder questions like, “Did a particle with momentum exist before we conducted an experiment to measure its momentum?”; “Did a particle with position exist before we conducted an experiment to measure its position?”; and “Did any particles exist at all before we thought about them and measured them?” “Did we create the particles that we are experimenting with?” Incredible as it sounds, this is a possibility that many physicists recognize.

  John Wheeler, a well-known physicist at Princeton, wrote:

  May the universe in some strange sense be “brought into being” by the participation of those who participate?…The vital act is the act of participation. “Participator” is the incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics. It strikes down the term “observer” of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. It can’t be done, quantum mechanics says.8

  The languages of eastern mystics and western physicists are becoming very similar.

  Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics are partners in a double irony. Newtonian physics is based upon the idea of laws which govern phenomena and the power inherent in understanding them, but it leads to impotence in the face of a Great Machine which is the universe. Quantum mechanics is based upon the idea of minimal knowledge of future phenomena (we are limited to knowing probabilities) but it leads to the possibility that our reality is what we choose to make it.

  There is another fundamental difference between the old physics and the new physics. The old physics assumes that there is an external world which exists apart from us. It further assumes that we can observe, measure, and speculate about the external world without changing it. According to the old physics, the external world is indifferent to us and to our needs.

  Galileo’s historical stature stems from his tireless (and successful) efforts to quantify (measure) the phenomena of the external world. There is great power inherent in the process of quantification. For example, once a relationship is discovered, like the rate of acceleration of a falling object, it matters not who drops the object, what object is dropped, or where the dropping takes place. The results are always the same. An experimenter in Italy gets the same results as a Russian experimenter who repeats the experiment a century later. The results are the same whether the experiment is done by a skeptic, a believer, or a curious bystander.

  Facts like these convinced philosophers that the physical universe goes unheedingly on its way, doing what it must, without regard for its inhabitants. For example, if we simultaneously drop two people from the same height, it is a verifiable (repeatable) fact that they both will hit the ground at the same time, regardless of their weights. We can measure their fall, acceleration, and impact the same way that we measure the fall, acceleration, and impact of stones. In fact, the results will be the same as if they were stones.

  “But there is a difference between people and stones!” you might say. “Stones have no opinions or emotions. People have both. One of these dropped people, for example, might be frightened by his experience and the other might be angry. Don’t their feelings have any importance in this scheme?”

  No. The feelings of our subjects matter not in the least. When we take them up the tower again (struggling this time) and drop them off again, they fall with the same acceleration and duration that they did the first time, even though now, of course, they are both fighting mad. The Great Machine is impersonal. In fact, it was precisely this impersonality that inspired scientists to strive for “absolute objectivity.”

  The concept of scientific objectivity rests upon the assumption of an external world which is “out there” as opposed to an “I” which is “in here.” (This way of perceiving, which puts other people “out there,” makes it very lonely “in here.”) According to this view, Nature, in all her diversity, is “out there.” The task of the scientist is to observe the “out there” as
objectively as possible. To observe something objectively means to see it as it would appear to an observer who has no prejudices about what he observes.

  The problem that went unnoticed for three centuries is that a person who carries such an attitude certainly is prejudiced. His prejudice is to be “objective,” that is, to be without a preformed opinion. In fact, it is impossible to be without an opinion. An opinion is a point of view. The point of view that we can be without a point of view is a point of view. The decision itself to study one segment of reality instead of another is a subjective expression of the researcher who makes it. It affects his perceptions of reality, if nothing else. Since reality is what we are studying, the matter gets very sticky here.

  The new physics, quantum mechanics, tells us clearly that it is not possible to observe reality without changing it. If we observe a certain particle collision experiment, not only do we have no way of proving that the result would have been the same if we had not been watching it, all that we know indicates that it would not have been the same, because the result that we got was affected by the fact that we were looking for it.

  Some experiments show that light is wave-like. Other experiments show equally well that light is particle-like. If we want to demonstrate that light is a particle-like phenomenon or that light is a wave-like phenomenon, we only need to select the appropriate experiment.

  According to quantum mechanics there is no such thing as objectivity. We cannot eliminate ourselves from the picture. We are a part of nature, and when we study nature there is no way around the fact that nature is studying itself. Physics has become a branch of psychology, or perhaps the other way round.