In2-MeC

Prague, Czech Republic
13 June 2004

Worry About Adam, Not the Atom

Part 2

Today we will see what some physicists have to say about consciousness vis-a-vis the quantum "immateriality" of the material world.

The view that consciousness, instead of being merely a detached receptor, is an active agent that shapes the way we perceive matter, is not only to be found in recent paperbacks, displayed on the Esotera shelf of your local Walden's bookshop, authored by New-Agey scientists famous for being famous like Fritjof Capra.

One of my favorite books elucidating this view, Physics and Philosophy, was written back in 1948 by Sir James Jeans. In the first half of the twentieth century Jeans was a big name in astrophysics. On page 145 he lists what he calls six important consequences of the discoveries of post-Newtonian physics.

(1) So far as the phenomena are concerned, the uniformity of nature disappears.

I'll just step in here a moment to note that by "the uniformity of nature," Jeans means the definition of nature as having an unvarying character that is of and by itself: that, objectively speaking, nature means this or that uniform set of qualities, always. The micro-phenomena observed by quantum physicists have at least as much to do with our act of observing them as they do with "the way things are out there. " At a fundamental level the act of observation brings consciousness into an involvement with nature. Thus the alleged uniformity of nature disappears as soon as we look at it. We cannot claim that what we observe is simply nature, really nature. . . just laying there, passively open to our powers of inspection. All we can say positively is that we know what we perceive by our method of observation. We cannot determine where our perception ends and nature begins. We have no entrance into what nature is when we are not looking at it. In conclusion, the microworld--where scientists go to find the tiny building-blocks of our macroworld--is appearance only. Why that is will become clearer as we progress down Jeans' list.

(2) Precise knowledge of the outer world becomes impossible for us.

(3) The processes of nature cannot be adequately represented within a framework of space and time.

This point is a summary of an explanation given on page 144 of Physics and Philosophy, that the result of observing an atom, in Jeans' own words,

is practically a new atom.

This is because the scientific means of observing an atom is disruptive to its existence. We will naturally ask, "What separates the new, 'observed' atom from what was there before the act of observation began?" The answer--"a break in the continuity of the atom's motion"--is easy to say but rather challenging to comprehend. As far as physics can tell, that break is a break of all atomic motion, which is so fundamental it entails a break in the continuity of the atom itself. Recall the explanation of "the quantum leap" given yesterday. The only way we can observe an atom is to set off leaps of quanta from inside it, an act that appears to interrupt the atom's very existence as a physical entity. Except by dislocating an atom from the fabric of reality, the "motion" of an atom is completely closed to us. We can only assume that atoms "move" when we are not observing them. Thus the "motion" of an atom as we know it can't be represented within space and time like the motion of, say, a billiard ball rolling across the green felt of a pool table. At least, we don't conceive the rolling of a ball to mean that, at the instant it advances, it is replaced by a new ball at the next position! (We'll consider the Vedic version of this in Part Three. )

(4) The division between subject and object is no longer definite or precise; complete precision can only be regained by uniting subject and object into a single whole.

(5) So far as our knowledge is concerned, causality becomes meaningless.

This point refers to the quantum leap again, that the "motion" of an atom is a break in its very continuity as "a physical thing"--which, to begin with, is a most questionable way of describing the atom! If, when I push on a ball to set it rolling, the ball vanishes at the instant I touch it, to be replaced by another ball that vanishes, to be replaced by another ball that vanishes, and so on and so on, all along the path of its direction . . . then nothing of our common-sense understanding of causality remains.

(6) If we still wish to think of the happenings in the phenomenal world as governed by a causal law, we must suppose that these happenings are determined in some substratum of the world which lies beyond the world of phenomena, and so beyond our access.

We might ruminate on point 6 by asking the following questions: Where does an atom go when its existence is interrupted by "motion"? Where does its successor atom come from? What is the economy that insures that as an atom "moves", its interrupted existence is taken over by a new atom at the probable next location?

Perplexed yet?

The way that scientists have seen fit to relieve the perplexity of quantum mechanics is to factor in consciousness. Jeans introduces us to this on page 169 of Physics and Philosophy.

. . . Bohr was the first to point out. . . the clue to the whole situation [that] lets the secret out--different kinds of wavepacket ["wavepacket" is another way of talking about a quantum, or a micro-unit of energy] must not be supposed to represent different kinds of electrons, or electrons in different states, or electrons in different conditions [all ways of trying to explain what happens when an electron "moves"], but the different kinds of knowledge we can have about electrons.

This, in a nutshell, is the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (Niels Bohr was from Copenhagen). What we know of atomic and subatomic motion says nothing about material nature itself. It says something only about the mind-picture installed in our heads of material nature.

Jeans again:

the waves of the wave mechanics [i. e. the "paths" along which quanta "move"] are now seen to represent our knowledge. . . [they are] mental constructs of our own. "

He goes on to explain that the plotting the "paths" of quanta like electrons obliged scientists to conceive of higher-dimensional space.

a single electron can also be represented in a space of three dimensions, but the waves of two electrons need a space of six dimensions, three for each electron, while the waves of a million electrons need a space of three million dimensions.

On page 171 of Physics and Philosophy, Jeans brings this logic to a startling conclusion.

If the waves of a free electron or photon represent human knowledge, what happens when there is no human knowledge to represent? For we must suppose that electrons were in existence while there was still no human consciousness to observe them, and that there are free electrons in Sirius where there are no physicists to observe them.

The simple and surprising answer would seem to be that when there is no human knowledge there are no waves; we must always remember that the waves are not part of nature, but of our efforts to understand nature. . . . Energy may be transferred from place to place, but the waves and the electric and magnetic forces are not part of the mechanism of transfer; they are part simply of our efforts to understand this mechanism and picture it to ourselves. Before man appeared on the scene, there were neither waves nor electric nor magnetic forces; these were not made by God, but by Huyghens, Fresnel, Faraday and Maxwell.

The point he makes here becomes much clearer as, on pages 193-194, Jeans brings in the philosophy of the ancient world.

We may picture the world of reality as a deep-flowing stream; the world of appearance is its surface, below which we cannot see. Events deep down in the stream throw up bubbles and eddies on to the surface of the stream. These are the transfers of energy and radiation of our common life, which affect our senses and so activate our minds; below these lie deep waters which we can only know by inference. These bubbles and eddies show atomicity in the currents, but we know of no corresponding atomicity in the currents below.

Note it well--atoms as known to modern science belong to the realm of surface appearance, not deep reality. James Jeans continues:

This duality of appearance and reality pervades the history of philosophy, again dating back to Plato. In a famous parable, Plato depicts mankind as chained in a cave in such a way that they cannot see the busy life outside, but only the shadows--the appearances--which objects moving in the sunshine cast on the walls of the cave. For the captives in the cave, the shadows constitute the whole world of appearance--the phenomenal world--while the world of reality lies for ever beyond their ken.

Our phenomenal world consists of the activities of matter and photons; the theatre of this activity is space and time. Thus the walls of the cave in which we are imprisoned are space and time; the shadows of reality which we see projected on the walls by the sunshine outside are the material particles which we see moving against a background of space and time, while the reality outside the cave which produces these shadows is outside space and time.

As the new physics has shown, all earlier systems of physics, from the Newtonian mechanics down to the old quantum theory, fell into the error of identifying appearance with reality; they confined their attention to the walls of the cave, without even being conscious of a deeper reality beyond. The new quantum theory has shown that we must probe the deeper substratum of reality before we can understand the world of appearance, even to the extent of predicting the results of experiment.

For whatever happens in reality, there is no reason why the shadows on the wall should change in accordance with a causal law.

I'll step in to assure the reader that Jeans does not mean here that a cause in the sense of a reality behind the appearance is unreasonable. That would be in complete contradiction to what we read earlier and what we will read next. He is talking about a causal law, a fixed train of pushings, like a toppling line of dominos: that a particular physical event we are able observe is set into motion by a prior succession of physical events linked one to another by cause and effect. What science knows about quantum events does not logically give rise to such a mechanistic theory of causation. Back to Jeans.

There will be many different arrangements of the figures out in the sunshine; these many arrangements will be followed by new arrangements which will not only be different in themselves but are likely to produce different shadows on the wall. It is the same with happenings in the world of appearance; experiments that are precisely identical so far as the phenomena go may produce entirely different results. In this way phenomena disappears from the world of phenomena.

I want to close the door to any doubt that what we've read from Jeans til now amounts to a argument that the world is just an illusion. Not at all. On page 194 he writes, "The phenomena are seen to be just as much a part of the real world as the causes which produce them, being simply those parts of the real world which affect our senses. "

The problem is not that what appears to our senses is unreal, but that we are ignorant of what stands behind appearance. He makes that clear by citing Plato's cave analogy. We have seen that among the ingredients of appearance, the human mind is prominent. It is a mistake to conclude that Jeans is therefore arguing that human beings create out of nothing the world by their observation and speculation. As Jeans made clear earlier, the world is whatever it is, some process of energy transference. But the "mechanics" that scientists tell us the process follows belong to human knowledge. By bringing in Plato's cave analogy, Jeans forces us to see that such human-level knowledge of the process is enshrouded by ignorance. Complex scientific explanations of shadows, even though replete with highfalutin terms like "quanta", "wavepacket", "electron", "atom", even "higher dimensions", only serve to lock our attention to the shadows. Such shadow-knowledge fails to reveal the substance upon which the existence of shadow depends.

It is an eye-opening admission for a scientist to say, as Jeans does in the last-quoted paragraph from Physics and Philosophy, that experimental proofs never actually establish certainty in the material world. Therefore the famous "uncertainty principle" of physicist Werner Heisenberg, for which Jeans elsewhere in his book offers a detailed explanation that I think is out of place in this essay. Srila Prabhupada gives a pithy summation in his purport to Srimad-Bhagavatam 4. 24. 42: "Modern scientists have stopped their brainwork by discovering the theory of uncertainty. "

After discussing the appearance-reality dualism that philosophy has proposed since ancient times, James Jeans moves to another duality, on page 195.

In addition to the dualism of appearance and reality, many pictures of the world have exhibited a second dualism, that of mind and matter or of body and soul.

This also, so far as our knowledge carries us, started with Plato. We have seen how his picture of the world consists of forms, which exist only in our minds, and of sensible objects which, on Plato's view, display the imprint of the forms and so exemplify the qualities embodied in the forms. Plato maintained that the forms possessed a higher degree of reality than the material objects which exemplify them, so that the world was primarily a world of ideas and only secondarily a world of material objects.

Page 200:

. . . the physical theory of relativity has now shown that electric and magnetic forces are not real at all; they are merely mental constructs of our own, resulting from our rather misguided efforts to understand the motions of the particles. It is the same with the Newtonian force of gravitation, and with energy, momentum and other concepts which were introduced to help us understand the activities of the world--all prove to be mere mental constructs, and do not pass the test of objectivity. If the materialists are pressed to say how much of the world they now claim as material, their only possible answer would seem to be: Matter itself. Thus their whole philosophy is reduced to a tautology, for obviously matter must be material. But the fact that so much of what used to be thought to possess an objective physical existence now proves to consist only of subjective mental constructs must surely be counted a pronounced step in the direction of mentalism.

Page 202:

. . . the new quantum theory was brought into existence to make good the defects [of quantum theory before the contributions of Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, Max Born and others during the 1920s]. It discovered what we believe to be the true pattern of events, with the wave-picture of matter as its pictorial representation. The particle-picture of radiation had already given place to a wave-picture; it now appeared that the particle-picture of matter must also be replaced by a wave picture. The result was complete agreement with experiment. In this progress towards the truth, let us notice that each step was from particles to waves, or from the material to the mental; the final picture consists wholly of waves, and its ingredients are wholly mental constructs.

Again, lest we think Jeans is contradicting things he said earlier, let us take careful note what he states next.

We must remember that this picture is not a picture of reality, it is a picture we draw to help us imagine the course of events in reality. Thus we are not entitled to argue that reality is like the ingredients of the picture, although there is a certain presumption that the two are not altogether dissimilar in their natures.

In other words, the interpretation of the universe as a mental process (as an oft-quoted phrase puts it, "as a great thought instead of a great machine") seems to best reflect the nature of reality. One of the most influential quantum physicists after Niels Bohr, John Archibald Wheeler, developed this theme from the '50s into the '90s. He condensed it into the aphorism, "the it from bit"--which means that "the its" (things) of our world of appearance are representations of root information, which in computerese is rendered as "bits" (binary digits). Hence truth in the higher sense cannot be the perception of "the its. " It must the pure, original knowledge that gives appearance to "the its. " Commensurate with this knowledge is choice. That's why another significance of "the it from bit" is that a binary digit is a yes or no answer to a query. It follows that the world exists as an answer to a question . . . it is the object of a desire, in other words. It follows further that a change of desire elicits a change in the answer--hence a change in the world. In short, we participate in creation. (Prabhupada famously said, "Krsna doesn't create maya--you do!") Jeans put it this way on pages 215-216 of Physics and Philosophy:

. . . as we pass from the phenomenal world of space and time to [the] substratum, we seem, in some way we do not understand, to be passing from materialism to mentalism, and so possibly also from matter to mind. It may be then that the spring of events in this substratum includes our own mental activities, so that the future course of events may depend in part on these mental activities.

"[T]he future course of events may depend in part on these mental activities" means we have free will, but it is limited.

The old physics showed us a universe which looked more like a prison than a dwelling-place. The new physics shows us a universe which looks as though it might conceivably form a suitable dwelling-place for free men, and not a mere shelter for brutes--a home in which it may at least be possible for us to mould events to our desires and live lives of endeavour and achievement.

The nature of reality may be, Jeans is suggesting, that a free man--a liberated person--can change the world for the better by his very desire.

Yes indeed.

tomara iccha-matre habe brahmanda-mocana
sarva mukta karite krsnera nahi kichu srama

Because of your honest desire, all living entities within the universe will be delivered, for Krsna does not have to do anything to deliver all the living entities of the universe.

--Lord Caitanya to Sri Vasudeva Datta, Cc Madhya 15. 171

On page 203 of Physics and Philosophy, James Jeans explains how the so-called observer principle in quantum physics suggests a universal, absolute mind (Paramatma).

. . . some answer must be found to the problem of how objects can continue to exist when they are not being perceived by any human mind. There must, as Berkeley says, be 'some other mind in which they exist. ' Some will wish to describe this, with Berkeley, as the mind of God; others with Hegel as a universal or Absolute mind in which all our individual minds are comprised. The new quantum mechanics may perhaps give a hint, although nothing more than a hint, as to how this can be.

It doesn't seem that James Jeans was aware of Vedic wisdom; in Physics and Philosophy he looks toward the ancient Greek philosopher Plato for guidance. In Plato's writings we find quite a few ideas that closely resemble Vedic teachings. Furthermore, some of the leading lights of atomic physics were directly inspired by the Vedas. In an essay he wrote in 1925, Erwin Schrodinger formulated the quantum mechanical account of the linkage of the human mind to the appearance of the world in this way.

This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of this entire existence, but is in a certain sense the "whole"; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed at one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: tat tvam asi, this is you.

It seems Schrodinger understood tat tvam asi in the advaitist sense of Sankaracarya. As a counter to that we have a letter of 68-03-12 in which Srila Prabhupada wrote:

Tattvam asi means you are that. You are that, means you are also Brahman. That means qualitatively you are one with the Supreme Absolute. The Mayavadi philosophers interpret this Tattvam asi that the living entity is the same Supreme Absolute Truth. They do not make any difference of quality and quantity, but Vaisnava philosophers are very accurate in their estimation of the Absolute Truth. Therefore, we interpret this Vedic verse as Tattvam asi means that the living entity is qualitatively one, as much as a particle of gold is also gold.

The Oxford historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto suggests that the influence of Eastern philosophy upon atomic physics was not inconsiderable. This from Truth--A History (1997, pg. 212):

The man who led American A-bomb research, J. Robert Oppenheimer, became a spokesman for the [eastward] tendency, seeking in Hindu writings 'one world . . . vast domains of mystery, if not unknowable, imperfectly known, open', in contrast to the project of which he had formed a part--to rule knowledge by dividing it. He looked to Indian philosophies and disciplines of contemplation and meditation to induce peaceful habits, in contrast with the aggression and power-hunger characteristic of western history, which seemed to him to have culminated in the ultimate abuse: the bomb he helped to build.

In the next passage, Fernandez-Armesto begins by telling us of Niels Bohr's fascination with the ancient Chinese symbol of Tao (pgs 212-213).

The circle, divided into interpenetrated moieties by a wave-like double curve, seemed to him to prefigure his own scientific thinking and, in particular, his key notion of 'complementarity', which resolved one of the baffling contradictions thrown up by experiments with light. The wave-like and particle-like properties of the light we experience, Bohr reasoned, are both contrary and complementary. Now western scientific thought, after its brief period of acknowledged supremacy, was recolonized by concepts from Hindu, Taoist and Buddhist traditions. The identity of mass and energy seemed to be pre-expressed in the Taoist doctrine of a single cosmic force of which all observable phenomena are effects. The restless, random world of quantum mechanics seemed like the 'cosmic dance' of Shiva.

In the final Part Three, I'll look back at Parts One and Two through sastra caksusa.

 

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