In2-MeC

Prague, Czech Republic
12 June 2004

Worry About Adam, Not the Atom

Part 1

The title to this essay is my paraphrase of a statement made by a noted American gentleman not long after the atomic bomb was dropped over Japan. At that time people all around the globe were anxious about the future of civilization in this new Atom Age. But it's not the atom that should worry us, the gentleman pointed out. The atom is merely Adam's plaything. It's what Adam is doing--us, the human race--that we should be worried about.

I hasten to make plain that my essay today isn't about atomic warfare. It's about science, specifically the science of atomic physics. And it's about that science as an all-too-human social construction, a consensus reality (a notion I've discussed at other times). The point of my title is that atoms are only what the family of Man, the Adams family, supposes atoms to be. That supposition is installed into our heads as an accepted, established, agreed-upon tenet of the paradigm.

Hey buddy, can you paradigm?

Before Thomas Kuhn published his influential Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, the word "paradigm" was one of those obscure cognates from the Greek that seems to exist in the English language only to keep Webster's in business. Without intending to, Kuhn made "paradigm" the trendy relativistic bon mot that it is today.

John Horgan, in The End of Science (1997), quotes Kuhn as conceding that the word has become "hopelessly overused" and "out of control. " Kuhn blamed himself for not defining paradigm as crisply as he might have. It seems he basically meant two things: an archetypal scientific experiment that establishes something very important, and "the entire constellation of beliefs" that binds a scientific community together.

The "scientific revolutions" that Kuhn's book proposes to analyze are historic shifts of the paradigm. Horgan (pg. 43) explains:

Most scientists yield to a new paradigm reluctantly. They often do not understand it, and they have no objective rules by which to judge it. Different paradigms have no common standard for comparison; they are "incommensurable," to use Kuhn's word. Proponents of different paradigms can argue forever about resolving their differences because they invest basic terms--motion, particle, space, time--with different meanings. The conversion of scientists [from one paradigm to another] is thus both a subjective process and a political process.

Horgan (pgs. 42, 43-44) relates how Kuhn came to this realization, and introduces us to what Kuhn's insights into the paradigm shift say about so-called scientific progress.

He. . . traced his view of science to an epiphany he experienced in 1947, when he was working toward a doctorate in physics at Harvard. While reading Aristotle's Physics, Kuhn had become astonished at how "wrong" it was. How could someone who wrote so brilliantly on so many topics be so misguided when he came to physics?

Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out his dormitory window ("I can still see the vines and the shade two-thirds of the way down"), when suddenly Aristotle "made sense. " Kuhn realized that Aristotle invested basic concepts with different meanings than did modern physicists. Aristotle used the term motion, for example, to refer not just to change in position but to change in general--the reddening of the sun as well as its descent toward the horizon. Aristotle's physics, understood on its own terms, was simply different from, rather than inferior to, Newtonian physics.

. . . . .

A new paradigm may solve puzzles better than the old one does, and it may yield more practical applications. "But you cannot simply describe the other science as false," Kuhn said. Just because modern physics has spawned computers, nuclear power, and CD players does not mean it is truer, in an absolute sense, than Aristotle's physics. Similarly, Kuhn denied that science is constantly approaching the truth. At the end of Structure he asserted that science, like life on earth, does not evolve toward anything, but only away from something.

. . . Kuhn argued that our paradigms keep changing as our culture changes. "Different groups, and the same group at different times," Kuhn told me, "can have different experiences and therefore in some sense live in different worlds. " Obviously all humans share some responses to experience, simply because of their shared biological heritage, Kuhn added. But whatever is universal in human experience, whatever transcends culture and history, is also "ineffable," beyond the reach of language. Language, Kuhn said, "is not a universal tool. It's not the case that you can say anything in one language that you can say in another. "

Postmodernism: the thrill is gone

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions remains as controversial as it is influential; many in the scientific establishment have tried to dismiss it as "much ado about very little" (as Scientific American yawned in its review of Kuhn's book). Structures did rouse second thoughts in many minds about modern man's abiding faith in science. It's doubtful that Kuhn intended Structure to be a stimulus for postmodernism, but that's what it turned out to be.

Oh. . . and what is postmodernism, pray tell? Well, Western intellectuals look upon the twentieth century and see that around 1960--just about the same time Kuhn's book came out--there was a change in our attitude toward modernity. Before the '60's we took our modern culture very seriously, even religiously. We believed wholeheartedly in the promises of science, technology, and progress. But since the '60's and right up to the present, we've grown ironic. Sure, science, technology, progress, they're all still there. But they're no longer so holy to us. This is what postmodernism is about--a creeping recognition that the modern paradigm lacks significance. It's just planned obsolescence. So how can you care deeply about it? Here today, gone tomorrow.

Given that it is pretty much accepted everywhere today that this shift in the Zeitgeist has taken place, I'd agree that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is on to something. I'd agree that the palpable passing of modernism into postmodernism demonstrates that our own paradigm of the present era is undergoing a revolution. Though I am no scientist, I find that I gravitate toward agreement with the many experts who observe that a vital root of the new paradigm is the atomic physics that dawned on the horizon of science at the end of the nineteenth century.

In his book Quantum--A Guide for the Perplexed (2003), Jim Al-Khalili writes (pgs. 28-29):

by the time the 19th century came to a close, there were so many issues to resolve and strange phenomena to explain that clearly something had to give. Physicists and chemists could not even agree on whether matter was ultimately composed of indivisible atoms or whether it was continuous and infinitely divisible. Nor could they decide on whether or not Newton's mechanics (equations that governed how macroscopic objects interacted and moved under the influence of forces) could be cast in terms of Maxwell's more fundamental theory of electromagnetism. . . . [R]elatively new fields of physics, such as thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, were generating heated debate. . . . Basically, physics was in a glorious mess.

Maxed-out Physics

A new direction was needed, and it came in December of 1900 when Max Planck presented a paper on black body radiation to the German Physical Society. Oh. . . and what is black body radiation, pray tell?

Well, suppose we have a small cube of solid iron that we heat with an intense flame. Before too long the cube will glow red-hot. That means it is emitting light and heat. If we take the flame away, the glow will quickly fade. That means the light emitted by the cube has become too weak for us to see. In its darkened state the cube would be called a black (i. e. giving off no visible light) body. Though the glow has faded, the cube will continue to radiate a great deal of heat for a long time. That's called black body radiation.

Planck's paper described the black body and its radiation in a new way: as vibration. There was no talk of atoms, since at that time the very concept of atoms was debatable. Rather, Planck spoke of "oscillators" in the black body that vibrated at a frequency that determined the "quanta" of heat energy coming off the body. Quanta is the plural form of quantum, defined as a discrete unit of energy. Discrete unit is another way of saying "distinct entity. " Thus Planck described the heat coming off a black body not as a continuous wave, as might be expected. After all he had formulated heat as a vibration. Vibrations move as waves, right? Fine; but what Planck did was to give a new account of the structure of the wave. He said it is made up of many individual "jumps" of energy. Think of a marble rolling down a set of stairs--as it descends, it jumps. A black body gives up its heat energy in a similar fashion. But this wasn't just a dreamy idea. Planck had done experiments. His quantum theory explained black body radiation with predictable accuracy. In science, predictable accuracy is the nearest thing to truth itself.

Don't worry, this essay is not turning into a physics paper. My purpose is to trace out the philosophical consequences of quantum theory on the collective world-conception (the paradigm). But before we go into that, we should have a rudimentary understanding what quantum theory is. Just by considering Planck's explanation of black body radiation, you can already detect the key items of quantum theory that have seized the imagination of the modern world.

1) Planck's theory of black body radiation was, in his own words, "a purely formal assumption and I did not give it much thought except that, no matter what the cost, I must bring about a positive result. " Years later, when quantum theory had matured into quantum mechanics (i. e. the scientific method of putting the theory to work), Niels Bohr made his oft-quoted declaration that quantum mechanics is not about what Nature is, it is about what we can say about Nature. This tells us nothing more of substance than what Max Planck said about the theory in its seed form. We like to think of physics as the "hardest of the hard sciences" because it brings into our hands the stuff of the world--good old solid, dependable matter and energy. But in quantum physics, matter and energy are translated into an idea. It's an idea that scientists are getting an amazing amount of work out of. But what's going on with matter and energy while they put out all that work is purely conceptual. A quantum of heat energy, for example, has never been seen. Nor will it ever be seen, because it is not something that happens, it is an idea of something that happens.

2) Planck's depiction of atoms as oscillators emitting frequencies of vibration in discrete units suggests the famous, paradoxical, wave-particle duality. Which must be the one thing that everybody's heard about quantum theory.

3) Many people use the phrase "quantum leap" in ordinary speech. But what is it? It's one of those little jumps of energy that make up the wave. . . or I should say the wavefunction--because if the "wave" is really the pattern of propagation of a bunch of jumps, then it can't be a real physical wave, can it? The wavefunction turns out to be the probability that there will be a jump in energy at a certain point in time. The jump is abrupt: energy at one level vanishes. At a new level, energy appears. Quantum units of energy do not "ascend" or "descend" along a gradual arc. They seem to jump out of physical reality and pop back into it at other points along the probability wave.

4) What follows from the three points above is an inkling of the perplexing gulf of difference that the arrival of quantum theory opened between the microworld (the world of atoms and subatomic units of energy) and the macroworld (the world as we humans perceive it with our organic senses. ) As quantum theory developed into quantum mechanics, scientists were faced with much stranger events than the simple quantum leap. There's quantum nonlocality, for example, seen when two microparticles stay in synch even when separated from one other by a vast distance. What links them together? Scientists don't know. Whatever it is, nonlocality seems to function instantaneously, faster than the speed of light--which according to Einstein is impossible. But there you have it. What is clear is that such "spooky action at a distance," a regular feature of the microworld, is most irregular in the macroworld. Now, if that makes up this, then why are the two worlds so different?

After the quantum, what really "matters" anymore?

That's quite enough scientific detail. Now let's go back to the philosophical concept of the paradigm. Max Planck commented that "over the entrance to the temple of science are written the words: 'Ye must have faith. '" So when we consider the shift of the scientific paradigm, we are first and foremost considering a shift of faith.

What was the faith of science like before the arrival of quantum theory? Writing in The End of Physics (1993), David Lindley describes it thus (pg. 17):

Does this look like an atom to you? Welcome to the nineteenth century!

A hundred years ago, classical physics seemed to be approaching a state of perfection that offered to contain an explanation for every phenomenon in the natural world; but there were a couple flaws in classical physics, and out of those flaws sprang quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. Classical physics was the physics of atoms perceived as miniature billiard balls, interacting with each other by means of tangible forces, such as electrical and magnetic attraction.

(The reader may have noted that Lindley's version of what nineteenth-century science was like is somewhat at odds with how Al-Khalili presented it earlier. That's a debate that is off the target of this essay. )

Classical physics means the physics begun by Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Newton's physics is an important component of the "modern" paradigm that gave us the Industrial Revolution and the great strides in technology that came after it. It is a paradigm of objective reality: that there is a concrete, physical world "out there," and it conforms to laws of nature that are wholly rational. The physics of that paradigm, and indeed the paradigm itself, are no doubt still with us. But in our postmodern present we sense an emptiness within this conception of the world. And for that sense we have a lot to owe to quantum physics. Lindley again:

. . . quantum mechanics turned the imaginary billiard balls into tiny, fizzy patches of uncertainty, and general relativity turned paper-flat space into curved space, and time into something variable and personal instead of universal and constant.

In The Matter Myth (1991), Paul Davies and John Gribben tell us more (pg. 8):

An extension of the quantum theory, known as quantum field theory, goes beyond even this; it paints a picture in which solid matter dissolves away, to be replaced by weird excitations and vibrations of invisible field energy. In this theory, little distinction remains between material substance and apparently empty space, which itself seethes with ephemeral quantum activity. . . . Quantum physics undermines materialism because it reveals that matter has far less 'substance' than we may believe.

The logic that is unfolding here draws us inexorably into the web of consciousness: because, if good old objective science tells us the external world is empty of substance and form, then where does the substance and form that we perceive around us actually exist? In the next part of this essay, we'll look at what some representatives of the new physics have to say about consciousness--and what they say about the physical and spiritual science of the Veda.

(PS: I can't guarantee that Part 2 will appear here tomorrow, as this kind of essay is a chore to write. . . but if not tomorrow, then Monday. . . I hope!)

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