A LIFE OF POWER AND FREEDOM Begins Here…
From The Turning Point, Science, Society & the Rising Culture
by Fritjof Capra
Bantam Books
Copyright 1982 by Fritjof Capra
ISBN: 0-553-34572-9
{NOTE: This material is presented as an introduction to the ideas explored by Fritjof Capra in THE TURNING POINT. For further reading and access to illustrations, notes and bibliography, original work will have to be referenced.}
Chapter Two (Pages 53-74)
THE NEWTONIAN WORLD-MACHINE
The world view and value systems that lie at the basis of our culture and that have to be carefully reexamined were formulated in their essential outlines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Between 1500 and 1700 there was a dramatic shift in the way people pictured the world and in their whole way of thinking. The new mentality and the new perception of the cosmos gave our Western civilization the features that are characteristic of the modern era. They became the basis of the paradigm that has dominated our culture for the past three hundred years and is now about to change.
Before 1500 the dominant world view in Europe, as well as in most other civilizations, was organic. People lived in small, cohesive communities and experienced nature in terms of organic relationships, characterized by the interdependence of spiritual and material phenomena and the subordination of individual needs to those of the community. The scientific framework of this organic world view rested on two authorities—Aristotle and the Church. In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas combined Aristotle’s comprehensive system of nature with Christian theology and ethics and, in doing so, established the conceptual framework that remained unquestioned throughout the Middle Ages. The nature of medieval science was very different from that of contemporary science. It was based on both reason and faith and its main goal was to understand the meaning and significant of things, rather than prediction and control. Medieval scientists, looking for the purposes underlying various natural phenomena, considered questions relating to God, the human soul, and ethics to be of the highest significance.
The medieval outlook changed radically in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The notion of an organic, living, and spiritual universe was replaced by that of the world as a machine, and the world-machine became the dominant metaphor of the modern era. This development was brought about by revolutionary changes in physics and astronomy, culminating in the achievements of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. The science of the seventeenth century was based on a new method of inquiry, advocated forcefully by Francis bacon, which involved the mathematical description of nature and the analytic method of reasoning conceived by the genius of Descartes. Acknowledging the crucial role of science in bringing about these far-reaching changes, historians have called the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Age of the Scientific Revolution.
The Scientific Revolution began with Nicolas Copernicus, who overthrew the geocentric view of Ptolemy and the Bible that had been accepted dogma for more than a thousand years. After Copernicus, the earth was no longer the center of the universe but merely one of the many planets circling a minor star at the edge of the galaxy, and man was robbed of his proud position as the central figure of God’s creation. Copernicus was fully aware that his view would deeply offend the religious consciousness of his time; he delayed its publication until 1543, the year of his death, and even then he presented the heliocentric view merely as a hypothesis.
Copernicus was followed by Johannes Kepler, a scientist and mystic who searched for the harmony of the spheres and was able, through painstaking work with astronomical tables, to formulate his celebrated empirical laws of planetary motion, which gave further support to the Copernican system. But the real change in scientific opinion was brought about by Galileo Galilei, who was already famous for discovering the laws of falling bodies when he turned his attention to astronomy. Directing the newly invented telescope to the skies and applying his extraordinary gift for scientific observation to celestial phenomena, Galileo was able to discredit the old cosmology beyond any doubt and to establish the Copernican hypothesis as a valid scientific theory.
The role of Galileo in the Scientific Revolution goes far beyond his achievements in astronomy, although these are the most widely known because of his clash with the Church. Galileo was the first to combine scientific experimentation with the use of mathematical language to formulate the laws of nature he discovered, and is therefore considered the father of modern science. “Philosophy,”* he believed, “is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes; but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and characters in which it is written. *[From the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century the term “philosophy” was used in a very bread sense and included what we now call “science.”] This language is mathematics, and the characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures.”1 The two aspects of Galileo’s pioneering work – his empirical approach and his use of a mathematical description of nature – became the dominant features of science in the seventeenth century and have remained important criteria of scientific theories up to the present day.
To make it possible for scientists to describe nature mathematically, Galileo postulated that they should restrict themselves to studying the essential properties of material bodies – shapes, numbers, and movement – which could be measured and quantified. Other properties, like color, sound, taste, or smell, were merely subjective mental projections which should be excluded from the domain of science.2 Galileo’s strategy of directing the scientist’s attention to the quantifiable properties of matter has proved extremely successful throughout modern science, but it has also exacted a heavy toll, as the psychiatrist R. D. Laing emphatically reminds us: “Out go sight, sound, taste, touch and smell and along with them has since gone aesthetics and ethical sensibility, values, quality, form; all feelings, motives, intentions, soul, consciousness, spirit. Experience as such is cast out of the realm of scientific discourse.”3 According to Laing, hardly anything has changed our world more during the past four hundred years than the obsession of scientists with measurement and quantification.
While Galileo devised ingenious experiments in Italy, Francis Bacon set forth the empirical method of science explicitly in England. Bacon was the first to formulate a clear theory of the inductive procedure – the make experiments and to draw general conclusions from them, to be tested in further experiments – and he became extremely influential by vigorously advocating the new method. He boldly attacked traditional schools of thought and developed a veritable passion for scientific experimentation.
The “Baconian spirit” profoundly changed the nature and purpose of the scientific quest. From the time of the ancients the goals of science had been wisdom, understanding the natural order and living in harmony with it. Science was pursued “for the glory of God,” or, as the Chinese put it, to “follow the natural order” and “flow in the current of the Tao.”4 These were yin, or integrative, purposes; the basic attitude of scientists was ecological, as we would say in today’s language. In the seventeenth century this attitude changed into its polar opposite; from yin to yang, from integration to self-assertion. Since Bacon, the goal of science has been knowledge that can be used to dominate and control nature, and today both science and technology are used predominantly for purposes that are profoundly antiecological.
The terms in which Bacon advocated his new empirical method of investigation were not only passionate but often outright vicious. Nature, in his view, had to be “hounded in her wanderings,” “bound into service,” and made a “slave.” She was to be “put in constraint,” and the aim of the scientist was to “torture nature’s secrets from her.”5 Much of this violent imagery seems to have been inspired by the witch trials that were held frequently in Bacon’s time. As attorney general for King James I, Bacon was intimately familiar with such prosecutions, and because nature was commonly seen as female, it is not surprising that he should carry over the metaphors used in the courtroom into his scientific writings. Indeed, his view of nature as a female whose secrets have to be tortured from her with the help of mechanical devices is strongly suggestive of the widespread torture of women in the witch trials of the early seventeenth century.6 Bacon’s work thus represents an outstanding example of the influence of patriarchal attitudes on scientific thought.
The ancient concept of the earth as nurturing mother was radically transformed in Bacon’s writings, and it disappeared completely as the Scientific Revolution proceeded to replace the organic view of nature with the metaphor of the world as a machine. This shift, which was to become of overwhelming importance for the further development of Western civilization, was initiated and completed by two towering figures of the seventeenth century, Descartes and Newton.
René Descartes is usually regarded as the founder of modern philosophy. He was a brilliant mathematician and his philosophical outlook was profoundly affected by the new physics and astronomy. He did not accept any traditional knowledge, but set out to build a whole new system of thought. According to Bertrand Russell, “This had not happened since Aristotle, and is a sign of the new self-confidence that resulted form the progress of science. There is a freshness about his work that is not to be found in any eminent previous philosopher since Plato.”
At the age of twenty-three, Descartes experienced an illuminating vision that was to shape his entire life.8 After several hours of intense concentration, during which he reviewed systematically all the knowledge he had accumulated, he perceived, in a sudden flash of intuition, the “foundations of a marvelous science” which promised the unification of all knowledge. This intuition had been foreshadowed in a letter to a friend in which Descartes announced his ambition aim: “And so as to not hide anything from you about the nature of my work, I would like to give the public … a completely new science which would resolve generally all questions of quantity, continuous or discontinuous.”9 In his vision Descartes perceived how he could realize this plan. He saw a method that would allow him to construct a complete science of nature about which he could have absolute certainty; a science based, like mathematics, on self-evident first principles. Descartes was overwhelmed by this revelation. He felt that he had made the supreme discovery of his life and had no doubt that his vision came from divine inspiration. This conviction was enforced by an extraordinary dream the following night in which the new science was presented to him in symbolic form. Descartes was now certain that God had shown him his mission, and he set out to build a new scientific philosophy.
Descartes’ vision had implanted in him the firm belief in the certainty of scientific knowledge, and his vocation in life was to distinguish truth from error in all fields of learning. “All science is certain, evident knowledge,” he wrote. “We reject all knowledge which is merely probable and judge that only those things should be believed which are perfectly known and about which there can be no doubts.”
The belief in the certainty of scientific knowledge lies at the very basis of Cartesian philosophy and out of the world view derived from it, and it was here, at the very outset, that Descartes went wrong. Twentieth-century physics has shown us very forcefully that there is no absolute truth in science, that all our concepts and theories are limited and approximate. The Cartesian belief in scientific truth is still widespread today and is reflected in the scientism that has become typical of our Western culture. Many people in our society, scientists as well as non-scientists, are convinced that the scientific method is the only valid way of understanding the universe. Descartes’ method of thought and his view of nature have influenced all branches of modern science and can still be very useful today. But they will be useful only if their limitations are recognized. The acceptance of the Cartesian view as absolute truth and of Descartes’ method as the only valid way to knowledge has played an important role in bringing about our current cultural imbalance.
Cartesian certainty is mathematical in its essential nature. Descartes believed that the key to the universe was its mathematical structure, and in his mind science was synonymous with mathematics. Thus he wrote, regarding the properties of physical objects, “I admit nothing as true of them that is not deduced, with the clarity of a mathematical demonstration, from common notions whose truth we cannot doubt. Because all the phenomena of nature can be explained in this way, I think that no other principles of physics need be admitted, nor are to be desired.”
Like Galileo, Descartes believed that the language of nature – “that great book which ever lies before our eyes” – was mathematics, and his desire to describe nature in mathematical terms led him to his most celebrated discovery. By applying numerical relations to geometrical figures, he was able to correlate algebra and geometry and, in doing so, founded a new branch of mathematics, now known as analytic geometry. This included the representation of curves by algebraic equations whose solutions he studied in a systematic way. His new method allowed Descartes to apply a very general type of mathematical analysis to the study of moving bodies, in accordance with his grand scheme of reducing all physical phenomena to exact mathematical relationships. Thus he could say, with great pride, “My entire physics is nothing other than geometry.”12
Descartes’ genius was that of a mathematician, and his is apparent also in his philosophy. To carry out his plan of building a complete and exact natural science, he developed a new method of reasoning which he presented in his most famous book, Discourse on Method. Although this text has become one of the great philosophical classics, its original purpose was not to teach philosophy but to serve as an introduction to science. Descartes’ method was designed to reach scientific truth, as is evident from the book’s full title, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Searching the Truth in the Sciences.
The crux of Descartes’ method is radical doubt. He doubts everything he can manage to doubt – all traditional knowledge, the impressions of his senses, and even the fact that he has a body – until he reaches one thing he cannot doubt, the existence of himself as a thinker. Thus he arrives at his celebrated statement, “Cogito, ergo sum,” “I think, therefore I exist.” From this Descartes deduces that the essence of human nature lies in thought, and that all the things we conceive clearly and distinctly are true. Such clear and distinct conception – “the conception of the pure and attentive mind”13 – he calls “intuition,” and he affirms that “there are no paths to the certain knowledge of truth open to man except evident intuition and necessary deduction.”14 Certain knowledge, then, is achieved through intuition and deduction, and these are the tools Descartes uses in his attempt to rebuild the edifice of knowledge on firm foundations.
Descartes’ method is analytic. It consists in breaking up thoughts and problems into pieces and in arranging these in their logical order. This analytic method of reasoning is probably Descartes’ greatest contribution to science. It has become an essential characteristic of modern scientific thought and has proved extremely useful in the development of scientific theories and the realization of complex technological projects. It was Descartes’ method that made it possible for NASA to put a man on the moon. On the other hand, overemphasis on the Cartesian method has led to the fragmentations that is characteristic of both our general thinking and our academic disciplines, and to the widespread attitude of reductionism in science – the belief that all aspects of complex phenomena can be understood by reducing them to their constituent parts.
Descartes’ cogito, as it has come to be called, made mind more certain for him than matter and led him to the conclusion that the two were separate and fundamentally different. Thus he asserted that “there is nothing included in the concept of body that belongs to the mind; and nothing in that of mind that belongs to the body”15 The Cartesian division between mind and matter has had a profound effect on Western thought. It has taught us to be aware of ourselves as isolated egos existing “inside” our bodies; it has led us to set a higher value on mental than manual work; it has enabled huge industries to sell products – especially to women- that would make us owners of the “ideal body”; it has kept doctors from seriously considering the psychological dimensions of illness, and psychotherapists from dealing with their patients’ bodies. In the life sciences, the Cartesian division has led to endless confusion about the relation between mind and brain, and in physics it made it extremely difficult for the founders of quantum theory to interpret their observations of atomic phenomena. According to Heisenberg, who struggled with the problem for many years, “This partition has penetrated deeply into the human mind during the three centuries following Descartes and it will take a long time for it to be replaced by a really different attitude toward the problem of reality.”16
Descartes based his whole view of nature on this fundamental division between two independent and separate realms; that of mind, or res cogitans, the “thinking thing,” and that of matter, or res extensa, the “extended thing.” Both mind and matter were the creations of God, who represented their common point of reference, being the source of the exact natural order and of the light of reason that enabled the human mind to recognize this order. For Descartes, the existence of God was essential to his scientific philosophy, but in subsequent centuries scientists omitted any explicit reference to God and developed their theories according to the Cartesian division, the humanities concentrating on the res cogitans and the natural sciences on the res extensa.
To Descartes the material universe was a machine and nothing but a machine. There was no purpose, life, or spirituality in matter. Nature worked according to mechanical laws, and everything in the material world could be explained in terms of the arrangement and movement of its parts. This mechanical picture of nature became the dominant paradigm of science in the period following Descartes. It guided all scientific observation and the formulation of all theories of natural phenomena until twentieth-century physics brought about radical change. The whole elaboration of mechanistic science in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Newton’s grand synthesis, was but the development of the Cartesian idea. Descartes gave scientific thought its general framework – the view of nature as a perfect machine, governed by exact mathematical laws.
The drastic change in the image of nature from organism to machine had a strong effect on people’s attitudes toward the natural environment. The organic world view of the Middle Ages had implied a value system conducive to ecological behavior. In the words of Carolyn Merchant:
The image of the earth as a living organism and nurturing mother served as a cultural constraint restricting the actions of human beings. One does not readily slay a mother, dig into her entrails for gold, or mutilate her body… As long as the earth was considered to be alive and sensitive, it could be considered a breach of human ethical behavior to carry out destructive acts against it. 17
These cultural constraints disappeared as the mechanization of science took place. The Cartesian view of the universe as a mechanical system provided a “scientific” sanction for the manipulation and exploitation of nature that has become typical of Western culture. In fact, Descartes himself shared Bacon’s view that the aim of science was the domination and control of nature, affirming that scientific knowledge could be used to “render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.”18
In his attempt to build a complete natural science, Descartes extended his mechanistic view of matter to living organisms. Plants and animals were considered simply machines; human beings were inhabited by a rational soul that was connected with the body through the pineal gland in the center of the brain. As far as the human body was concerned, it was indistinguishable from the animal-machine. Descartes explained at great length how the motions and various biological functions of the body could be reduced to mechanical operations, in order to show that living organisms were nothing but automata. In doing so he was strongly influenced by the preoccupation of the baroque seventeenth century with artful, “lifelike” machinery that delighted people with the magic of its seemingly spontaneous movements. Like most of his contemporaries, Descartes was fascinated by these automata and even constructed a few of them himself. Inevitably, he compared their functioning to that of living organisms: “We see clocks, artificial fountains, mills and other similar machines which, though merely man-made, have nonetheless the power to move by themselves in several different ways … I do not recognize any difference between the machines made by craftsmen and the various bodies that nature alone composes.”19
Clockmaking in particular had attained a high degree of perfection by Descartes’ time, and the clock was thus a privileged model for other automatic machines. Descartes compared animals to a “clock… composed… of wheels and springs,” and he extended this comparison to the human body: “I consider the human body as a machine … My thought … compares a sick man and an ill-made clock with my idea of a healthy man and a well-made clock.”20
Descartes’ view of living organisms has had a decisive influence on the development of the life sciences. The careful description of the mechanisms that make up living organisms has been the major task of biologists, physicians, and psychologists for the past three hundred years. The Cartesian approach has been very successful, especially in biology, but it has also limited the directions of scientific research. The problem is that scientists, encouraged by their success in treating living organisms as machines, tend to believe that they are nothing but machines. The adverse consequences of this reductionist fallacy have become especially apparent in medicine, where the adherence to the Cartesian model of the human body as a clockwork has prevented doctors form understanding many of today’s major illnesses.
This, then, was Descartes’ “marvelous science.” Using his method of analytic thought, he attempted to give a precise account of all natural phenomena in one single system of mechanical principles. His science was to be complete, and the knowledge it gave was to provide absolute mathematical certainty. Descartes, of course, was not able to carry out this ambitious plan, and he himself recognized that his science was incomplete. But this method of reasoning and the general outline of the theory of natural phenomena he provided have shaped Western scientific thought for three centuries.
Today, although the severe limitations of the Cartesian world view are becoming apparent in all the sciences, Descartes’ general method of approaching intellectual problems and his clarity of thought remain immensely valuable. I was vividly reminded of this after a lecture on modern physics in which I emphasized the limitations of the mechanistic world view in quantum theory and the necessity of overcoming this view in other fields, when a Frenchwoman complimented me on my “Cartesian clarity.” As Montesquieu wrote in the eighteenth century, “Descartes has taught those who came after him how to discover his own errors.”
* * *
Descartes created the conceptual framework for seventeenth-century science, but his view of nature as a perfect machine, governed by exact mathematical laws, had to remain a vision during his lifetime. He could not do more than sketch the outlines of his theory of natural phenomena. The man who realized the Cartesian dream and completed the Scientific Revolution was Isaac Newton, born in England in 1642, the year of Galileo’s death. Newton developed a complete mathematical formulation of the mechanistic view of nature, and thus accomplished a grand synthesis of the works of Copernicus and Kepler, Bacon, Galileo and Descartes. Newtonian physics, the crowning achievement of seventeenth-century science, provided a consistent mathematical theory of the world that remained the solid foundation of scientific thought well into the twentieth century. Newton’s grasp of mathematics was far more powerful than that of his contemporaries He invented a completely new method, known today as differential calculus, to describe the motion of solid bodies; a method that went far beyond the mathematical techniques of Galileo and Descartes. This tremendous intellectual achievement has been praised by Einstein as “perhaps the greatest advance in thought that a single individual was ever privileged to make.”22
Kepler had derived empirical laws of planetary motion by studying astronomical tables, and Galileo had performed ingenious experiments to discover the laws of falling bodies. Newton combined those two discoveries by formulating the general laws of motion governing all objects in the solar system, from stones to planets.
According to legend, the decisive insight occurred to Newton in a sudden flash of inspiration when he saw an apple fall from a tree. He realized that the apple was pulled toward the earth by the same force that pulled the planets toward the sun, and thus found the key to his grand synthesis. He then used his new mathematical method to formulate the exact laws of motion for all bodies under the influence of the force of gravity. The significance of these laws lay in their universal application. They were found to be valid throughout the solar system and thus seemed to confirm the Cartesian view of nature. The Newtonian universe was, indeed, one huge mechanical system, operating according to exact mathematical laws.
Newton presented his theory of the world in great detail in his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. The Principia, as the work is usually called for short after its original Latin title, comprises a comprehensive system of definitions, propositions, and proofs which scientists regarded as the correct description of nature for more than two hundred years. It also contains an explicit discussion of Newton’s experimental method, which he saw as a systematic procedure whereby the mathematical description is based, at every step, on critical evaluation of experimental evidence:
Whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis; and
hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or
mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy,
by induction.23
Before Newton there had been two opposing trends in seventeenth-century science; the empirical, inductive method represented by Bacon and the rational, deductive method represented by Descartes. Newton, in his Principia, introduced the proper mixture of both methods, emphasizing that neither experiments without systematic interpretation nor deduction from first principles without experimental evidence will lead to a reliable theory. Going beyond Bacon in his systematic experimentations and beyond Descartes in his mathematical analysis, Newton unified the two trends and developed the methodology upon which natural science has been based ever since.
Isaac Newton was a much more complex personality than one would think form a reading of his scientific writings. He excelled not only as a scientist and mathematician but also, at various stages of his life, as a lawyer, historian, and theologian, and he was deeply involved in research into occult and esoteric knowledge. He looked at the world as a riddle and believed that its clues could be found not only through scientific experiments but also in the cryptic revelations of esoteric traditions. Newton was tempted to think, like Descartes, that is powerful mind could unravel all the secrets of the universe, and he applied it with equal intensity to the study of natural and esoteric science. While working at Trinity College, Cambridge, on the Principia, he accumulated, during the very same years, voluminous notes on alchemy, apocalyptic texts, unorthodox theological theories, and various occult matters. Most of these esoteric writings have never been published, but what is known of them indicates that Newton, the great genius of the Scientific Revolution, was at the same time the “last of the magicians.”24
The stage of the Newtonian universe, on which all physical phenomena took place, was the three-dimensional space of classical Euclidian geometry. It was an absolute space, and empty container that was independent of the physical phenomena occurring in it. In Newton’s own words, “Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, remains always similar and immovable.”25 All changes in the physical world were described in terms of a separate dimension, time, which again was absolute, having no connection with the material world and flowing smoothly from the past through the present to the future. “Absolute, true, and mathematical time,” wrote Newton, “of itself and by its own nature, flows uniformly, without regard to anything external.”26
The elements of the Newtonian world which moved in this absolute space and absolute time were material particles; small, solid and indestructible objects out of which all matter was made. The Newtonian model of matter was atomistic, but it differed from the modern notion of atoms in that the Newtonian particles were all thought to be made of the same material substance. Newton assumed matter to be homogeneous; he explained the difference between one type of matter and another not in terms of atoms of different weights or densities but in terms of more or less dense packing or atoms. The basic building blocks of matter could be of different sizes but consisted of the same “stuff,” and the total amount of material substance in an object was given by the object’s mass.
The motion of the particles was caused by the force of gravity, which, in Newton’s view, acted instantaneously over a distance. The material particles and the forces between them were of a fundamentally different nature, the inner constitution of the particles being independent of their mutual interaction. Newton saw both the particles and the force of gravity as created by God and thus not subject to further analysis. In his Optiks, Newton gave a clear picture of how he imagined God’s creation of the material world:
It seems probable to me that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy,
hard, impenetrable, movable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such
other properties, and in such proportion to space, as most conduced to the end for
which he formed them; and that these primitive particles being solids, are
incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them; even so very
hard, as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide
what God himself made on in the first creation.
In Newtonian mechanics all physical phenomena are reduced to the motion of material particles, caused by their mutual attraction, that is, by the force of gravity. The effect of this force on a particle or any other material object is described mathematically by Newton’s equations of motion, which form the basis of classical mechanics. These were considered fixed laws according to which material objects moved, and were thought to account for all changes observed in the physical world. In the Newtonian view, God created in the beginning the material particles, the forces between them, and the fundamental laws of motion. In this ay the whole universe was set in motion, and it has continued to run ever since, like a machine, governed by immutable laws. The mechanistic view of nature is thus closely related to a rigorous determinism, with the giant cosmic machine completely causal to a definite effect, and the future of any part of the system could – in principle – be predicted with absolute certainty if its state at any time was known in all details.
This picture of a perfect world-machine implied an external creator; a monarchical god who ruled the world from above by imposing his divine law on it. The physical phenomena themselves were not thought to be divine in any sense, and when science made it more and more difficult to believe in such a god, the divine disappeared completely from the scientific world view, leaving behind the spiritual vacuum that has become characteristic of the mainstream of our culture. The philosophical basis of this secularization of nature was the Cartesian division between spirit and matter. As a consequence of this division, the world was believed to be a mechanical system that could be described objectively, without ever mentioning the human observer, and such an objective description of nature became the ideal of all science.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used Newtonian mechanics with tremendous success. The Newtonian theory was able to explain the motion of the planets, moons, and comets down to the smallest details, as well as the flow of the tides and various other phenomena related to gravity. Newton’s mathematical system of the world established itself quickly as the correct theory of reality and generated enormous enthusiasm among scientists and the lay public alike. The picture of the world as a perfect machine, which had been introduced by Descartes, was now considered a proved fact and Newton became its symbol. During the last twenty years of his life Sir Isaac Newton reigned in eighteenth-century London as the most famous man of his time, the great white-haired sage of the Scientific Revolution. Accounts of this period of Newton’s life sound quite familiar to us because of our memories and photographs of Albert Einstein, who played a very similar role in our century.
Encouraged by the brilliant success of Newtonian mechanics in astronomy, physicists extended it to the continuous motion of fluids and to the vibrations of elastic bodies, and again it worked. Finally, even the theory of heat could be reduced to mechanics when it was realized that heat was the energy generated by a complicated “jiggling” motion of atoms and molecules. Thus many thermal phenomena, such as the evaporation of a liquid, or the temperature and pressure of a gas, could be understood quite well form a purely mechanistic point of view.
The study of the physical behavior of gases led John Dalton to the formulation of his celebrated atomic hypothesis, which was probably the most important step in the entire history of chemistry. Dalton had a vivid pictorial imagination and tried to explain the properties of gas mixtures with the help of elaborate drawings of geometric and mechanical models of atoms. His main assumptions were that all chemical elements are made up of atoms, and that the atoms of a given element are all alike but differ from those of every other element in mass, size, and properties. Using Dalton’s hypothesis, chemists of the nineteenth century developed a precise atomic theory of chemistry which paved the way for the conceptual unification of physics and chemistry in the twentieth century. Thus Newtonian mechanics was extended far beyond the description of macroscopic bodies. The behavior of solids, liquids, and gases, including the phenomena of heat and sound, was explained successfully in terms of the motion of elementary material particles. For the scientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this tremendous success of the mechanistic model confirmed their belief that the universe was indeed a huge mechanical system, running according to the Newtonian laws of motion, and that Newton’s mechanics was the ultimate theory of natural phenomena.
Although the properties of atoms were studied by chemists rather than physicists throughout the nineteenth century, classical physics was based on the Newtonian idea of atoms as hard and solid building blocks of matter. This image no doubt contributed to the reputation of physics as a “hard science,” and to the development of the “hard technology” based upon it. The overwhelming success of Newtonian physics and the Cartesian belief in the certainty of scientific knowledge led directly to the emphasis on hard science and hard technology in our culture. Not until the mid-twentieth century would it become clear that the idea of a hard science was part of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, a paradigm that would be transcended.
With the firm establishment of the mechanistic world view in the eighteenth century, physics naturally became the basis of all the sciences. If the world really is a machine, the best way to find out how it works is to turn to Newtonian mechanics. It was thus an inevitable consequence of the Cartesian world view that the sciences of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries modeled themselves after Newtonian physics. In fact, Descartes as well aware of the basic role of physics in his view of nature. “all philosophy,” he wrote, “is like a tree. The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches are all the other sciences.”28
Descartes himself had sketched the outlines of a mechanistic approach to physics, astronomy, biology, psychology, and medicine. The thinkers of the eighteenth century carried this program further by applying the principles of Newtonian mechanics to the sciences of human nature and human society. The newly created social sciences generated great enthusiasm, and some of their proponents even claimed to have discovered a “social physics.” The Newtonian theory of the universe and the belief in the rational approach to human problems spread so rapidly among the middle classes of the eighteenth century that the whole era became the “Age of Enlightenment.” The dominant figure in this development was the philosopher John Locke, whose most important writings were published late in the seventeenth century. Strongly influenced by Descartes and Newton, Locke’s work had a decisive impact on eighteenth-century thought.
Following Newtonian physics, Locke developed an atomistic view of society, describing it in terms of its basic building block, the human being. As physicists reduced the properties of gases to the motion of their atoms, or molecules, so Locke attempted to reduce the patterns observed in society to the behavior of its individuals. Thus he proceeded to study first the nature of the individual human being, and then tried to apply the principles of human nature to economic and political problems. Locke’s analysis of human nature was based on that of an earlier philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, who had declared that all knowledge was based on sensory perception. Locke adopted this theory of knowledge and, in a famous metaphor, compared the human mind at birth to a tabula rasa, a completely blank tablet on which knowledge is imprinted once it is acquired through sensory experience. This image was to have a strong influence on two major schools of classical psychology, behaviorism and psychoanalysis, as well as on political philosophy. According to Locke, all human beings – “all men,” as he would say – were equal at birth and depended in their development entirely on their environment. Their actions, Locke believed, were always motivated by what they assumed to be their own interest.
When Locke applied his theory of human nature to social phenomena, he was guided by the belief that there were laws of nature governing human society similar to those governing the physical universe. As the atoms in a gas would establish a balanced state, so human individuals would settle down in a society in a “state of nature.” Thus the function of government was not to impose its laws on the people, but rather to discover and enforce the natural laws that existed before any government was formed. According to Locke, these natural laws included the freedom and equality of all individuals as well as the right to property, which represented the fruits of one’s labor.
Locke’s ideas became the basis for the value system of the Enlightenment and had a strong influence on the development of modern economic and political thought. The ideals of individualism, property rights, free markets, and representative government, all of which can be traced back to Locke, contributed significantly to the thinking of Thomas Jefferson and are reflected in the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution.
During the nineteenth century scientists continued to elaborate the mechanistic model of the universe in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and the social sciences. As a result the Newtonian world-machine became a much more complex and subtle structure. At the same time, new discoveries and new ways of thinking made the limitations of the Newtonian model apparent and prepared the way for the scientific revolutions of the twentieth century.
One of these nineteenth-century developments was the discovery and investigation of electric and magnetic phenomena that involved a new type of force and could not be described appropriately by the mechanistic model. The important step was taken my Michael Faraday and completed by Clerk Maxwell – the first one of the greatest experimenters in the history of science, the second a brilliant theorist. Faraday and Maxwell not only studied the effects of the electric and magnetic forces, but made the forces themselves the primary object of their investigation. By replacing the concept of a force with the much subtler concept of a force field they were the first to go beyond Newtonian physics,29 showing that the fields had their own reality and could be studied without any reference to material bodies. This theory, called electrodynamics, culminated in the realization that light was in fact a rabidly alternating electromagnetic field traveling through space in the form of waves.
In spite of these far-reaching changes, Newtonian mechanics still held its position as the basis of all physics. Maxwell himself tried to explain his results in mechanical terms, interpreting the fields as states of mechanical stress in a very light, all-pervasive medium, called ether, and the electromagnetic waves as elastic waves of this ether. However, he used several mechanical interpretations of his theory at the same time and apparently took none of them really seriously, knowing intuitively that the fundamental entities in his theory were the fields and not the mechanical models. It remained for Einstein to clearly recognize this fact in our century, when he declared that no ether existed, and that the electromagnetic fields were physical entities in their own right which could travel through empty space and could not be explained mechanically.
While electromagnetism dethroned Newtonian mechanics as the ultimate theory of natural phenomena, a new trend of thinking arose that went beyond the image of the Newtonian world-machine and was to dominate not only the nineteenth century but all future scientific thinking. It involved the idea of evolution; of change, growth, and development. The notion of evolution had arisen in geology, where careful studies of fossils led scientists to the idea that the present state of the earth was the result of a continuous development caused by the action of natural forces over immense periods of time. But geologists were not the only ones who thought in those terms. The theory of the solar system proposed by both Immanuel Kant and Pierre Laplace was based on evolutionary, or developmental, thinking; evolutionary concepts were crucial to the political philosophies of Hegel and Engels; poets and philosophers alike, throughout the nineteenth century, were deeply concerned with the problem of becoming.
These ideas formed the intellectual background to the most precise and most far-reaching formulation of evolutionary thought – the theory of the evolution of species in biology. Ever since antiquity natural philosophers had entertained the idea of a “great chain of being.” This chain, however, was conceived as a static hierarchy, starting with God at the top and descending through angels, human beings, and animals, to even lower forms of life. The number of species was fixed; it had not changed since the day of their creation. As Linnaeus, the great botanist and classifier, put it: “We reckon as many species as issued in pairs from the hands of the Creator.”30 This view of biological species was in complete agreement with Judeo-Christian doctrine and was well suited for the Newtonian world.
The decisive change came with Jean Baptiste Lamarck, at the beginning of the nineteenth century; a change that was so dramatic that Gregory Bateson, one of the deepest and broadest thinkers of our time, has compared it to the Copernican Revolution:
Lamarck, probably the greatest biologist in history, turned that ladder of explanation upside down. He was the man who said it starts with the infusoria and that there were changes leading up to man. His turning the taxonomy upside down is one of the most astonishing feats that has ever happened. It was the equivalent in biology of the Copernican revolution in astronomy.31
Lamarck was the first to propose a coherent theory of evolution, according to which all living beings have evolved form earlier, simpler forms under the pressure of their environment. Although the details of the Lamarckian theory had to be abandoned later on, it was nevertheless the important first step.
Several decades later Charles Darwin presented an overwhelming mass of evidence in favor of biological evolution, establishing the phenomenon for scientists beyond any doubt. He also proposed an explanation, based on the concepts of chance variation – now known as random mutation – and natural selection, which were to remain the cornerstones of modern evolutionary thought. Darwin’s monumental Origin of Species synthesized the ideas of previous thinkers and has shaped all subsequent biological thought. Its role in the life sciences was similar to that of Newton’s Principia in physics and astronomy two centuries earlier.
The discovery of evolution in biology forced scientists to abandon the Cartesian conception of the world as a machine that had emerged fully constructed from the hands of its Creator. Instead, the universe had to be pictured as an evolving and ever changing system in which complex structures developed from simpler forms. While this new way of thinking was elaborated in the life sciences, evolutionary concepts also emerged in physics. However, whereas in biology evolution meant a movement toward increasing order and complexity, in physics in came to mean just the opposite – a movement toward increasing disorder.
The application of Newtonian mechanics to the study of thermal phenomena, which involved treating liquids and gases as complicated mechanical systems, led physicists to the formulation of thermodynamics, the “science of complexity.” The first great achievement of this new science was the discovery of one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the law of the conservation of energy. It states that the total energy involved in a process is always conserved. It may change its form in the most complicated way, but none of it is lost. His law, which physicists discovered in their study of steam engines and other heat-producing machines, is also known as the first law of thermodynamics.
It was followed by the second law of thermodynamics, that of the dissipation of energy. While the total energy involved in a process is always constant, the amount of useful energy is diminishing, dissipating into heat, friction, and so on. The second law was formulated first by Sadi Carnot in terms of the technology of thermal engines, but was soon recognized to be of much broader significance. It introduced into physics the idea of irreversible processes, of an “arrow of time.” According to the second law, there is a certain trend in physical phenomena. Mechanical energy is dissipated into heat and cannot be completely recovered; when hot and cold water are brought together, the result will be lukewarm water and the two liquids will not separate. Similarly, when a bag of while sand and a bag of black sand are mixed, the result will be gray sand, and the more we shake the mixture the more uniform the gray will be; we will not see the two kinds of sand separate spontaneously.
What all these processes have in common is that hey proceed in a certain direction – from order to disorder – and this is the most general formulation of the second law of thermodynamics: Any isolated physical system will proceed spontaneously in the direction of ever increasing disorder. In mid-century, to express this direction in the evolution of physical systems in precise mathematical form, Rudolf Clausius introduced a new quantity which he called “entropy.” The term represents a combination of “energy” and “tropos,” the Greek word for transformation, or evolution. Thus entropy is a quantity that measures the degree of evolution of a physical system. According to the second law, the entropy of an isolated physical system will keep increasing, and because this evolution is accompanied by increasing disorder, entropy can also be seen as a measure of disorder.
The formulation of the concept of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics was one of the most important contributions to physics in the nineteenth century. The increase of entropy in physical systems, which marks the direction of time, could not e explained by the laws of Newtonian mechanics and remained mysterious until Ludwig Boltzmann clarified the situation by introducing an additional idea, the concept of probability. With the help of probability theory, the behavior of complex mechanical systems could be described in terms of statistical laws, and thermodynamics could be put on a solid Newtonian basis, known as statistical mechanics.
Boltzmann showed that the second law of thermodynamics is a statistical law. Its affirmation that certain processes do not occur – for example, the spontaneous conversion of heat energy into mechanical energy – does not mean that they are impossible but merely that they are extremely unlikely. In microscopic systems, consisting of only a few molecules, the second law is violated regularly, but in macroscopic systems, which consist of vast numbers of molecules,* the probability that the total entropy of the system will increase becomes virtual certainty. *[For example, every cubic centimeter of air contains some ten billion billion (1019) molecules.]Thus in any isolated system, made up of a large number of molecules, the entropy – or disorder – will keep increasing until, eventually, the system reaches a state of maximum entropy, also known as “heat death”; in this state all activity has ceased, all material being evenly distributed and at the same temperature. According to classical physics, the universe as a whole is going toward such a state of maximum entropy; it is running down and will eventually grind to a halt.
This grim picture of cosmic evolution is in sharp contrast to the evolutionary idea held by biologists, who observe that the living universe evolves from disorder to order, toward states of ever increasing complexity. The emergence of the concept of evolution in physics thus brought to light another limitation of the Newtonian theory. The mechanistic conception of the universe as a system of small billiard balls in random motion is far too simplistic to deal with the evolution of life.
At the end of the nineteenth century Newtonian mechanics had lost its role as the fundamental theory of natural phenomena. Maxwell’s electrodynamics and Darwin’s theory of evolution involved concepts that clearly went beyond the Newtonian model and indicated that the universe was far more complex than Descartes and Newton had imagined. Nevertheless, the basic ideas underlying Newtonian physics, though insufficient to explain all natural phenomena, were still believed to be correct. The first three decades of our century changed this situation radically. Two developments in physics, culminating in relativity theory and in quantum theory, shattered all the principal concepts of the Cartesian world view and Newtonian mechanics. The notion of absolute space and time, the elementary solid particles, the fundamental material substance, the strictly causal nature of physical phenomena, and the objective description of nature – none of these concepts could be extended to the new domains into which physics was now penetrating.
Chapter Three (pgs 75-97)
THE NEW PHYSICS
{NOTE: This material is presented as an introduction to the ideas explored by Fritjof Capra in THE TURNING POINT. For further reading and access to illustrations, notes and bibliography, original work will have to be referenced.}
At the beginning of modern physics stands the extraordinary iintellectual feat of one man—Albert Einstein. In two articles, both published in 1905, Einstein initiated two revolutionary trends in scientific thought. One was his special theory of relativity; the other was a new way of looking at electromagnetic radiation which was to become characteristic of quantum theory, the theory of atomic phenomena. The complete quantum theory was worked out twenty years later by a whole team of physicists. Relativity theory, however, was constructed in its complete form almost entirely by Einstein himself. Einstein’s scientific papers are intellectual monuments that mark the beginning of twentieth-century thought.
Einstein strongly believed in nature's inherent harmony, and throughout his scientific life his deepest concern was to find a unified foundation of physics. He began to move toward this goal by constructing a common framework for electrodynamics and mechanics, the two separate theories of classical physics. This framework is known as the special theory of relativity. It unified and completed the structure of classical physics, but at the same time it involved radical changes in the traditional concepts of space and time and thus undermined one of the foundations of the Newtonian world view. Ten years later Einstein proposed his general theory of relativity, in which the framework of the special theory is extended to include gravity. This is achieved by further drastic modifications of the concepts of space and time.
The other major development in twentieth-century physics was a consequence of the experimental investigation of atoms. At the turn of the century physicists discovered several phenomena connected with the structure of atoms, such as X-rays and radioactivity, which were inexplicable in terms of classical physics. Besides being objects of intense study, these phenomena were used, in most ingenious ways, as new tools to probe deeper into matter than had ever been possible before. For example, the so-called alpha particles emanating from radioactive substances were perceived to be high-speed projectiles of subatomic size that could be used to explore the interior of the atom. They could be fired at atoms, and from the way they were deflected one could draw conclusions about the atoms' structure.
This exploration of the atomic and subatomic world brought scientists in contact with a strange and unexpected reality that shattered the foundations of their world view and forced them to think in entirely new ways. Nothing like that had ever happened before in science. Revolutions like those of Copernicus and Darwin had introduced profound changes in the general conception of the universe, changes that were shocking to many people, but the new concepts themselves were not difficult to grasp. In the twentieth century, however, physicists were faced, for the first time, a serious challenge to their ability to understand the universe. Every time they asked nature a question in an atomic experiment, nature answered with a paradox, and the more they tried to clarify the situation, the sharper t e paradoxes became. In their struggle to grasp this new realty, scientists became painfully aware that their basic concepts, their language, and their whole way of thinking were inadequate to describe atomic phenomena. Their problem was not only intellectual but involved an intense emotional and existential experience, vividly described by Werner Heisenberg: "I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighboring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiment?” 1
lt took these physicists a long time to accept the fact that the paradoxes they encountered are an essential aspect of atomic physics, and to realize that they arise whenever one tries to describe atomic phenomena in terms of classical concepts. Once this was perceived, the physicists began to learn to ask the right questions and to avoid contradictions. As Heisenberg says, "They somehow got into the spirit of the quantum theory." 2 And finally they found the precise and consistent mathematical formulation for that theory. Quantum theory, or quantum mechanics as it is also called, was formulated during the first three decades of the century by an international group of physicists including Max Planck, AlbertEinstein, Niels Bohr, Louis De Broglie, Erwin Schrodinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, and Paul Dirac. These men joined forces across national borders to shape one of the most exciting periods of modern science, one that saw not only brilliant intellectual exchanges but also dramatic human conflicts, as well as deep personal friendships, among the scientists.
Even after the mathematical formulation of quantum theory was completed, its conceptual framework was by no means easy to accept. Its effect on the physicists' view of reality was truly shattering. The new physics necessitated profound changes in concepts of space, time, matter, object, and cause and effect; and because these concepts are so fundamental to our way of experiencing the world, their transformation came as a great shock. To quote Heisenberg again, "The violent reaction to the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realizes that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science." 3
Einstein experienced the same shock when he was confronted with the new concepts of physics, and he described his feelings in terms very similar to Heisenberg's: "All my attempts to adapt the theoretical foundation of physics to this [new type of] knowledge failed completely. It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built.” 4
Out of the revolutionary changes in our concepts of reality that were brought about by modern physics, a consistent world view is now emerging. This view is not shared by the entire physics community, but is being discussed and elaborated by many leading physicists whose interest in their science goes beyond the technical aspects of their research. These scientists are deeply interested in the philosophical implications of modern physics and are trying in an open-minded way to improve their understanding of the nature of reality.
In contrast to the mechanistic Cartesian view of the world, the world view emerging from modern physics can be characterized bywords like organic, holistic, and ecological. It might also be called a systems view, in the sense of general systems theory. 5 The universe is no longer seen as a machine, made up of a multitude of objects, but has to be pictured as one indivisible, dynamic whole whose parts are essentially interrelated and can be understood only as patterns of cosmic process.
The basic concepts underlying this world view of modern physics are discussed in the following pages. I described this world view in detail in The Tao of Physics, showing how it is related to the views held in mystical traditions, especially those of Eastern mysticism. Many physicists, brought up, as I was, in a tradition that associates mysticism with things vague, mysterious, and highly unscientific, were shocked at having their ideas compared to those of mystics. 6 Fortunately, this attitude is now changing. As Eastern thought has begun to interest a significant number of people, and meditation is no longer viewed with ridicule or suspicion, mysticism is being taken seriously even within the scientific community. An increasing number of scientists are aware that mystical thought provides a consistent and relevant philosophical background to the theories of contemporary science, a conception of the world in which the scientific discoveries of men and women can be in perfect harmony with their spiritual aims and religious beliefs.
The experimental investigation of atoms at the beginning of the century yielded sensational and totally unexpected results. Far from being the hard, solid particles of time-honored theory, atoms turned out to consist of vast regions of space in which extremely small particles—the electrons—moved around the nucleus. A few years later quantum theory made it clear that even the subatomic particles—the electrons and the protons and neutrons in the nucleus—were nothing like the solid objects of classical physics. These subatomic units of matter are very abstract entities which have a dual aspect. Depending on how we look at them, they appear sometimes as particles, sometimes as waves; and this dual nature is also exhibited by light, which can take the form of electromagnetic waves or particles. The particles of light were first called "quanta" by Einstein-hence the origin of the term "quantum theory"-and are now known as photons.
This dual nature of matter and of light is very strange. It seems impossible to accept that something can be, at the same time, a particle, and entity confined to a very small volume, and a wave, which is spread out over a large region of space. And yet this is exactly what physicists had to accept. The situation seemed hopelessly paradoxical until was realized that the terms "particle" and "wave" refer to classical concepts which are not fully adequate to describe atomic phenomena. An electron is neither a particle nor a wave, but it may show particle-like aspects in some situations and wave-like aspects in others. While it acts like a particle, it is capable of developing its wave nature at the expense of its particle nature, and vice versa, thus undergoing continual transformations from particle to wave and from wave to particle. This means that neither the electron nor any other atomic “object” has any intrinsic properties independent of its environment. The properties it shows-particle—like or wave like—will depend on the experimental situation, that is, on the apparatus it is forced to interact with.7
It was Heisenberg’s great achievement to express the limitations of classical concepts in precise mathematical form, which is known as the uncertainty principle. It consists of a set of mathematical relations that determine the extent to which c1assical concepts can be applied to atomic phenomena; these relations stake out the limits of human imagination in the atomic world. Whenever we use c1assical terms—particle, wave, position, velocity—to describe atomic phenomena, we find that there are pairs of concepts, or aspects, which are interrelated and cannot be defined simultaneously in a precise way. The more we emphasize one aspect in our description the more the other aspect becomes uncertain, and the precise relation between the two is given by the uncertainty principle.
For a better understanding of this relation between pairs of classical concepts, Niels Bohr introduced the notion of complementarity. He considered the particle picture and the wave picture two complementary descriptions of the same reality, each of them only partly correct and having a limited range of application. Both pictures are needed to give a full account of the atomic reality, and both are to be applied within the limitations set by the uncertainty principle. The notion of complementarity has become an essential part of the way physicists think about nature, and Bohr has often suggested that it might also be a useful concept outside the field physics. Indeed, this seems to be true, and we shall come back to it in discussions of biological and psychological phenomena. Complementarity has already been used extensively in our survey of the Chinese yin/yang terminology, since the yin and yang opposites are interrelated in a polar, or complementary, way. Clearly the modern concept of complementarity is reflected in ancient Chinese thought, a fact that made a deep impression on Niels Bohr.8 The resolution of the particle/wave paradox forced physicists to accept an aspect of reality that called into question the very foundation of the mechanistic world view—the concept of the reality of matter. At the subatomic level, matter does not exist with certainty at certain places, but rather shows “tendencies to exist,” and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show "tendencies to occur.” ln the formalism of quantum mechanics, these tendencies are expressed as probabilities and are associated with quantities that take the form of waves; they are similar to the mathematical forms used to describe, say, a vibrating guitar string, or sound wave. This is how particles can be waves at the same time. They are not "real" three-dimensional waves like water waves or sound waves. They are "probability waves"—abstract mathematical quantities with all the characteristic properties of waves—that are related to the probabilities of finding the particles at particular points in space and at particular times. All the laws of atomic physics are expressed in terms of these probabilities. We can never predict an atomic event with certainty; we can only predict the likelihood of its happening.
The discovery of the dual aspect of matter and of the fundamental role of probability has demolished the classical notion of solid objects. At the subatomic lever, the solid material objects of classical physics dissolve into wave-like patterns of probabilities. These patterns, furthermore, do not represent probabilities of things, but rather probabilities of interconnections. A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics shows that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities but can be understood only as interconnections, or correlations, between various processes of observation and measurement. As Niels Bohr wrote, “Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.” 9
Subatomic particles, then, are not “things” but are interconnections between “things,” and these “things,” in turn, are interconnections between other “things,” and so on. In quantum theory you never end up with “things”; you always deal with interconnections.
This is how modern physics reveals the basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated basic building blocks, but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of a unified whole. As Heisenberg expresses it, “The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.” 10
The universe, then is a unified whole that can to some extent be divided into separate parts, into objects made of molecules and atoms, themselves made of particles. But here, at the level of particles, the notion of separate parts breaks down. The subatomic particles—and therefore, ultimately, all parts of the universe—cannot be understood as isolated entities but must be defined through their interrelations. Henry Stapp, of the University of California, writes, “An elementary particle is not an independently existing unanalyzable entity. It is in essence, a set of relationships that reach outward to other things.” 11
This shift from objects to relationship has far-reaching implications for science as a whole. Gregory Bateson even argued that relationships should be used as a basis for all definitions, and that this should be taught to our children in elementary school. 12 Any thing, he believed, should be defined no by what it is in itself, but by its relations to other things.
In quantum theory the fact that atomic phenomena are determined by their connections to the whole is closely related to the fundamental role of probability. 13 In classical physics, probability is used whenever the mechanical details involved in an event are unknown. For example, when we throw a die, we could—in principle—predict the outcome if we knew all the details of the objects involved: the exact composition of the die, the surface on which it falls, and so on. These details are called local variables because they reside within the objects involved. Local variables are important in atomic and subatomic physics too. Here they are represented by connections between spatially separated events through signals—particles and networks of particles—that respect the usual laws of spatial separation. For example, no signal can be transmitted faster than the speed of light. But beyond these local connections are other, nonlocal connections that are instantaneous and cannot be predicted, at present, in a precise mathematical way. These nonlocal connections are the essence of quantum reality. Each even is influenced by the whole universe, and although we cannot describe this influence in detail, we recognize some order that can be expressed in statistical laws.
Thus probability is used in classical and quantum physics for similar reasons. In both cases there are “hidden” variables, unknown to us, and this ignorance prevents us from making exact predictions. There is a crucial difference, however. Whereas the hidden variables in classical physics are local mechanisms, those in quantum physics are nonlocal; they are instantaneous connections to the universe as a whole. In the ordinary, macroscopic world nonlocal connections are relatively unimportant, and thus we can speak of separate objects and formulate the laws of physics in terms of certainties. But as we go to smaller dimensions, the influence of nonlocal connections becomes stronger; here the laws of physics can be formulated only in terms of probabilities, and it becomes more and more difficult to separate any part of the universe from the whole.
Einstein could never accept the existence of nonlocal connections and the resulting fundamental nature of probability. This was the subject of the historic debate in the 1920s with Bohr, in which Einstein expressed his opposition to Bohr’s interpretation of quantum theory in the famous metaphor “God does not play dice.” 14 At the end of the debate, Einstein had to admit that quantum theory, as interpreted by Bohr and Heisenberg, formed a consistent system of thought, but he remained convinced that a deterministic interpretation in terms of local hidden variables would be found some time in the future.
Einstein’s unwillingness to accept the consequences of the theory that his earlier work had helped to establish is one of the most fascinating episodes in the history of science. The essence of his disagreement with Bohr was his firm belief in some external reality, consisting of independent spatially separated elements. This shows that Einstein’s philosophy was essentially Cartesian. Although he initiated the revolution of twentieth-century science and went far beyond Newton in his theory of relativity, it seems that Einstein, somehow, could not bring himself to go beyond Descartes. This kinship between Einstein and Descartes is even more intriguing in view of Einstein’s attempts, toward the end of his life, to construct a unified field theory by geometrizing physics along the lines of his general theory of relativity. Had these attempts been successful, Einstein could well have said, like Descartes, that his entire physics was nothing other than geometry.
In his attempt to show that Bohr’s interpretation of quantum theory was inconsistent, Einstein devised a thought experiment that has become known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) experiment. 15 Three decades later John Bell derived a theorem, based on the EPR experiment, which proves that the existence of local hidden variables is inconsistent with the statistical predictions of quantum mechanics. 16 Bell’s theorem dealt a shattering blow to Einstein’s position by showing that the Cartesian conception of reality as consisting of separate parts, joined by local connections, is incompatible with quantum theory.
The EPR experiment provides a fine example of a situation in which a quantum phenomenon clashes with our deepest intuition of reality. It is thus ideally suited to show the difference between classical and quantum concepts. A simplified version of the experiment involves two spinning electrons, and, if we are to grasp the essence of the situation, it is necessary to understand some properties of electron spin. 17 The classical image of a spinning tennis ball is not fully adequate to describe a spinning subatomic particle. Particle spin is in a sense a rotation about the particle’s own axis, but, as always in subatomic physics, this classical concept is limited. In the case of an electron, the particle’s spin is restricted to two values: the amount of spin is always the same, but the particle can spin in one or the other direction, for a given axis of rotation. Physicists often denote these two values of spin by “up” or “down,” assuming the electron’s axis of rotation, in this case, to be vertical. [illustrations from book missing here]
The crucial property of a spinning electron, which cannot be understood in terms of classical ideas, is the fact that its axis of rotation cannot always be defined with certainty. Just as electrons show tendencies to exist in certain places, they also show tendencies to spin about certain axis. In other words, the particle acquires a definite axis of rotation in the process of measurement, but before the measurement is taken, it cannot generally be said to spin about a definite axis; it merely has a certain tendency, or potentiality, to do so.
With this understanding of electron spin we can now examine the EPR experiment and Bell’s theorem. To set up the experiment, any one of several methods is used to put two electrons in a state in which their total spin is zero. That is, they are spinning in opposite directions. Now suppose the two particles in this system of total spin zero are made to drift apart by some process that does not affect their spins. As they go off in opposite directions, their combined spin will still be zero, and once they are separated by a large distance, their individual spins are measured. An important aspect of the experiment is the fact that the distance between the two particles at the time of the measurement is macroscopic. It can be arbitrarily large; one particle may be in Los Angeles and the other in New York, or one on the earth and the other on the moon.
Suppose now that the spin of particle 1 is measured along a vertical axis and is found to be “up.” Because the combined spin of the two particles is zero, this measurement tells us that the spin of particle 2 is “down.” Similarly, if we choose to measure the spin of particle 1 along a horizontal axis and find it to be “right,” we know that in that case the spin of particle 2 must be “left.” Quantum theory tells us that in a system of two particles having total spin zero, the spins of the particles about any axis will always be correlated—will be opposite—even though they exist only as tendencies, or potentialities, before the measurement is taken. This correlation means that the measurement of the spin of particle 1, along any axis, provides an indirect measurement of the spin of particle 2 without in any way disturbing that particle.
The paradoxical aspect of the EPR experiment arises from the fact that the observer is free to choose the axis of measurement. Once this choice is made, the measurement transforms the tendencies of the particles to spin about various axes into certainties. The crucial point is that we can shoes our axis of measurement at the last minute, when the particles are already far apart. At the instant we perform our measurement on particle 1, particle 2, which may be thousands of miles away, will acquire a definite spin—“up” or “Down” if we have chosen a vertical axis, “left” or “right” if we have chosen a horizontal axis. How does particle 2 know which axis we have chosen? There is no time for it to receive that information by any conventional signal.
This is the crux of the EPR experiment, and this is where Einstein disagreed with Bohr. According to Einstein, since no signal can travel faster than the speed of light, it is therefore impossible that the measurement performed on one particle will instantly determine the direction of the other particle’s spin, thousands of miles away. According to Bohr, the two-particle system is an indivisible whole, even if the particles are separated by a great distance; the system cannot be analyzed in terms of independent parts. In other words, the Cartesian view of reality cannot be applied to the two electrons. Even though they are far apart in space, they are nevertheless linked by instantaneous, nonlocal connections. These connections are not signals in the Einsteinian sense; they transcend our conventional notions of information transfer. Bell’s theorem supports Bohr’s interpretation of the two particles as an indivisible whole and proves rigorously that Einstein’s Cartesian view is incompatible with the laws of quantum theory. As Stapp sums up the situation, “The theorem of Bell proves, in effect, the profound truth that the world is either fundamentally lawless or fundamentally inseparable. 18
The fundamental role of nonlocal connections and of probability in atomic physics implies a new notion of causality that is likely to have profound implications for all fields of science. Classical science was constructed by the Cartesian method of analyzing the world into parts and arranging those parts according to causal laws. The resulting deterministic picture of the universe was closely related to the image of nature as clockwork. In atomic physics, such a mechanical and deterministic picture is no longer possible. Quantum theory has shown us that the world cannot be analyzed into independently existing isolated elements. The notion of separate parts—like atoms, or subatomic particles—is an idealization with only approximate validity; these parts are not connected by causal laws in the classical sense.
In quantum theory individual events do not always have a well-defined cause. For example, the jump of an electron from one atomic orbit to another, or the disintegration of a subatomic particle, may occur spontaneously without any single event causing it. We can never predict its probability. This does not mean that atomic events occur in completely arbitrary fashion; it means only that they are not brought about by local causes. The behavior of any part is determined by its nonlocal connections to the whole, and since we do not know these connections precisely, we have to replace the narrow classical notion of cause and effect by the wider concept of statistical causality. The laws of atomic physics are statistical laws, according to which the probabilities for atomic events are determined by the dynamics of the whole system. Whereas in classical mechanics the properties and behavior of the parts determine those of the whole, the situation is reversed in quantum mechanics: it is the whole that determines the behavior of the parts.
The concepts of nonlocality and statistical causality imply quite clearly that the structure of matter is not mechanical. Hence the term “quantum mechanics” is very much a misnomer, as David Bohm has pointed out. 19 In his 1951 textbook on quantum theory Bohm offered some interesting speculations on the analogies between quantum processes and thought processes, 20 thus carrying further the celebrated statement made by James Jeans two decades earlier: “today there is a wide measure of agreement…that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.” 21
The apparent similarities between the structure of matter and the structure of mind should not surprise us too much, since human consciousness plays a crucial role in the process of observation, and in atomic physics determines to a large extent the properties of the observed phenomena. This is another important insight of quantum theory that is likely to have far-reaching consequences. In atomic physics the observed phenomena can be understood only as correlations between various processes of observation and measurement, and the end of this chain of processes lies always in the consciousness of the human observer. The crucial feature of quantum theory is that the observer is not only necessary to observe then properties of an atomic phenomenon, but is necessary even to bring about these properties. My conscious decision about how to observe, say, an electron will determine the electron’s properties to some extent. If I ask it a particle question, it will give me a particle answer; if I ask it a wave question, it will give me a wave answer. The electron does not have objective properties independent of my mind. In atomic physics the sharp Cartesian division between mind and matter, between the observer and the observed, can no longer be maintained. We can never speak about nature without, at the same time, speaking about ourselves.
In transcending the Cartesian division, modern physics has not only invalidated the classical ideal of an objective description of nature but has also challenged the myth of value-free science. The patterns scientists observe in nature are intimately connected with the patterns of their minds; with their concepts, thoughts, and values. Thus the scientific results they obtain and the technological applications they investigate will be conditioned by their frame of mind. Although much of their detailed research will not depend explicitly on their value system, the larger paradigm within which this research is pursued will never be value- free. Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research not only intellectually but also morally. This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today’ sciences, but especially so in physics, in which the results of quantum mechanics and relativity theory have opened up two very different paths for physicists to pursue. They may lead us—to put it in extreme terms—to the Buddha or to the Bomb, and it is up to each of us to decide which path to take.
The conception of the universe as an interconnected web of relations is one of two major themes that recur throughout modern physics. The other theme is the realization that the cosmic web is intrinsically dynamic. The dynamic aspect of matter arises in quantum theory as a consequence of the wave nature of subatomic particles, and is even more central in relativity theory, which has shown us that the being of matter cannot be separated from its activity. The properties of its basic patterns, the subatomic particles, can be understood only in a dynamic context, in terms of movement, interaction, and transformation.
The fact that particles are not isolated entities but wave-like probability patterns implies that they behave in a very peculiar way. Whenever a particle is confined to a small region of space, it reacts to this confinement by moving around. The smaller the region of confinement, the faster the particle will “jiggle” around in it. This behavior is a typical “quantum effect,” a feature of the subatomic world which has no analogy in macroscopic physics: the more a particle is confined, the faster it will move around. 22 This tendency of particles to react to confinement with motion implies a fundamental “restlessness” of matter which is characteristic of the subatomic world. In this world most of the material particles are confined; they are bound to the molecular, atomic, and nuclear structures, and therefore are not at rest but have an inherent tendency to move about. According to quantum theory, matter is always restless, never quiescent. To the extent that things can be pictured to be made of smaller constituents—molecules, atoms, and particles—these constituents are in a state of continual motion. Macroscopically, the material objects around us may seem passive and inert, but when we magnify such a “dead” piece of stone or metal, we see that it is full of activity. The closer we look at it, the more alive it appears. All the material objects in our environment are made of atoms that link up with each other in various ways to form an enormous variety of molecular structures which are not rigid and motionless but vibrate according to their temperature and in harmony with the thermal vibrations of their environment. Inside the vibrating atoms the electrons are bound to the atomic nuclei by electric forces that try to keep them as close as possible, and they respond to this confinement by whirling around extremely fast. In the nuclei, finally, protons and neutrons are pressed into a minute volume by the strong nuclear forces, and consequently race about at unimaginable velocities.
Modern physics thus pictures matter not at all as passive and inert but as being in a continuous dancing and vibrating motion whose rhythmic patterns are determined by the molecular, atomic, and nuclear configurations. We have come to realize that there are no static structures in nature. There is stability, but this stability is one of dynamic balance, and the further we penetrate into matter the more we need to understand its dynamic nature to understand its patterns.
In this penetration into the world of submicroscopic dimensions, a decisive point is reached in the study of atomic nuclei in which the velocities of protons and neutrons are often so high that they come close to the speed of light. This fact is crucial for the description of their interactions, because any description of natural phenomena involving such high velocities has to take the theory of relativity into account. To understand the properties and interactions of subatomic particles we need a framework that incorporates not only quantum theory but also relativity theory; and it is relativity theory that reveals the dynamic nature of matter to its fullest extent.
Einstein’s theory of relativity has brought about a drastic change in our concepts of space and time. It has forced us to abandon the classical ideas of an absolute space as the stage of physical phenomena and absolute time as a dimension separate from space. According to Einstein’s theory, both space and time are relative concepts, reduced to the subjective role of elements of the language a particular observer uses to describe natural phenomena. To provide an accurate description of phenomena involving velocities close to the speed of light, a “relativistic” framework has to be used, one that incorporates time with the three space coordinates, making it a fourth coordinate to be specified relative to the observer. In such a framework space and time are intimately and inseparable connected and form a four-dimensional continuum called “space-time.” In relativistic physics, we can never talk about space without talking about time, and vice versa.
Physicists have now lived with relativity theory for many years and have become thoroughly familiar with its mathematical formalism. Nevertheless, this has not helped our intuition very much. We have no direct sensory experience of the four-dimensional space-time, and whenever this relativistic reality manifests itself—that is, in all situations where high velocities are involved—we find it very hard to deal with it at the level of intuition and ordinary language. An extreme example of such a situation occurs in quantum electrodynamics, one of the most successful relativistic theories of particle physics, in which antiparticles may be interpreted as particles moving backward in time. According to this theory, the same mathematical expression describes either a positron—the antiparticle of the electron—moving from the past to the future, or an electron moving form the future to the past. Particle interactions can stretch in any direction of four-dimensional space-time, moving backward and forward in time just as they move left and right in space. To picture these interactions we need four-dimensional maps covering the whole span of time as well as the whole region of space. These maps, known as space-time diagrams, have no definite attachment of time to them. Consequently there is no “before” and “after” in the processes they picture, and thus no linear relation of cause and effect. All events are interconnected, but the connections are not causal in the classical sense.
Mathematically there are no problems with this interpretation of particle interactions, but when we want to express it in ordinary language we run into serious difficulties, since all our words refer to the conventional notions of time and are inappropriate to describe relativistic phenomena. Thus relativity theory has taught us the same lesson as quantum mechanics. It has shown us that our common notions of reality are limited to our ordinary experience of the physical world and have to be abandoned whenever we extend this experience.
The concepts of space and time are so basic for our description of natural phenomena that their radical modification in relativity theory entailed a modification of the whole framework we use in physics to describe nature. The most important consequence of the new relativistic framework has been the realization that mass is nothing but a form of energy. Even an object at rest has energy stored in its mass, and the relation between the two is given by Einstein’s famous equation E=m c2, c being the speed of light.
Once it is seen to be a form of energy, mass is no longer required to be indestructible, but can be transformed into other forms of energy. This happens continually in the collision processes of high-energy physics, in which material particles are created and destroyed, their masses being transformed into energy of motion and vice versa. The collisions of subatomic particles are our main tool for studying their properties, and the relation between mass and energy is essential for their description. The equivalence of mass and energy has been verified innumerable times and physicist have become completely familiar with it—so familiar, in fact, that they measure the masses of particles in the corresponding energy units.
The discovery that mass is a form of energy has had a profound influence on our picture of matter and has forced us to modify our concept of a particle in an essential way. In modern physics, mass is no longer associated with a material substance, and hence particles are not seen as consisting of any basic “stuff” but as bundles of energy. Energy, however, is associated with activity, with processes, and this implies that the nature of subatomic particles is intrinsically dynamic. To understand this better we must remember that these particles can be conceived only in relativistic terms, that is, in terms of a framework where space and time are fused into a four-dimensional continuum. In such a framework the particles can no longer be pictured as small billiard balls, or small grains of sand. These images are inappropriate not only because they represent particles as separate objects, but also because they are static, three-dimensional images. Subatomic particles must be conceived as four-dimensional entities in space-time. Their forms have to be understood dynamically, as forms in space and time. Particles are dynamic patterns, patterns of activity which have a space aspect and a time aspect. Their space aspect makes them appear as objects with a certain mass, their time aspect as processes involving the equivalent energy. Thus the being of matter and its activity cannot be separated; they are but different aspects of the same space-time reality.
The relativistic view of matter has drastically affected not only our conception of particles, but also our picture of the forces between these particles. In a relativistic description of particle interactions, the forces between the particles – their mutual attraction or repulsion – are pictured as the exchange of other particles. This concept is very difficult to visualize, but it is needed for an understanding of subatomic phenomena. It links the forces between constituents of matter to the properties of other constituents of matter, and thus unifies the two concepts, force and matter, which had seemed to be fundamentally different in Newtonian physics. Both force and matter are now seen to have their common origin in the dynamic patterns that we call particles. These energy patterns of the subatomic world form the stable nuclear, atomic, and molecular structures which build up matter and give it its macroscopic solid aspect, thus making us believe that it is made of some material substance. At the macroscopic level this notion of substance is a useful approximation, but at the atomic level it no longer makes sense. Atoms consist of particles, and these particles are not made of any material stuff. When we observe them we never see any substance; what we observe are dynamic patterns continually changing into one another – the continuous dance of energy.
The two basic theories of modern physics have thus transcended the principle aspects of the Cartesian world view and of Newtonian physics. Quantum theory has shown that subatomic particles are not isolated grains of matter but are probability patterns, interconnections in an inseparable cosmic web that includes the human observer and her* consciousness. [*The feminine pronoun is used here as a general reference to a person who may be a woman or a man. Similarly, I shall occasionally use the masculine pronoun as a general reference, including both men and women. I think this is the best way to avoid being either sexist or awkward.] Relativity theory has made the cosmic web come alive, so to speak, by revealing its intrinsically dynamic character; by showing that its activity is the very essence of its being. In modern physics, the image of the universe as a machine has been transcended by a view of it as one indivisible, dynamic whole whose parts are essentially interrelated and can be understood only as patterns of a cosmic process. At the subatomic level the interrelations and interactions between the parts of the whole are more fundamental than the parts themselves. There is motion but there are, ultimately, no moving objects; there is activity but there are no actors; there are no dancers, there is only the dance.
Current research in physics aims at unifying quantum mechanics and relativity theory in a complete theory of subatomic particles. We have not yet been able to formulate such a complete theory, but we do have several partial theories, or models, which describe certain aspects of subatomic phenomena very well. At present there are two different kinds of “quantum-relativistic” theories in particle physics that have been successful in different areas. The first are a group of quantum field theories which apply to electromagnetic and weak interactions; the second is the theory known as S-matrix theory, which has been successful in describing the strong interactions.23 Of these two approaches, the S-matrix theory is more relevant to the theme of this book, since it has deep implications for science as a whole.24
The philosophical foundation of S-matrix theory is known as the bootstrap approach. Geoffrey Chew proposed it in the early 1960s, and he and other physicists have used it to develop a comprehensive theory of strongly interacting particles, together with a more general philosophy of nature. According to this bootstrap philosophy, nature cannot be reduced to fundamental entities, like fundamental building blocks of matter, but has to be understood entirely through self-consistency. All of physics has to follow uniquely from the requirement that its components be consistent with one another and with themselves. This idea constitutes a radical departure from the traditional spirit of basic research in physics which had always been bent on finding the fundamental constituents of matter. At the same time it is the culmination of the conception of the material world as an interconnected web of relations that emerged from quantum theory. The bootstrap philosophy not only abandons the idea of fundamental building blocks of matter, but accepts no fundamental entities whatsoever – no fundamental constants, laws, or equations. The universe is seen as a dynamic web of interrelated events. None of the properties or any part of this web is fundamental; they all follow from the properties of the other parts, and the overall consistency of their interrelations determines the structure of the entire web.
The fact that the bootstrap approach does not accept any fundamental entities makes it, in my opinion, one of the most profound systems of Western thought, raising it to the level of Buddhist or Taoist philosophy.25 At the same time it is a very difficult approach to physics, one that has been pursued by only a small minority of physicists. The bootstrap philosophy is too foreign to traditional ways of thinking to be seriously appreciated yet, and this lack of appreciation extends also to S-matrix theory. It is curious that although the basic concepts of the theory are used by all particle physicists whenever they analyze the results of particle collisions and compare them to their theoretical predictions, not a single Nobel prize has so far been awarded to any of the outstanding physicists who contributed to the development of S-matrix theory over the past two decades.
In the framework of S-matrix theory, the bootstrap approach attempts to derive all properties of particles and their interactions uniquely from the requirement of self-consistency. The only “fundamental” laws accepted are a few very general principles that are required by the methods of observation and are essential parts of the scientific framework. All other aspects of particle physics are expected to emerge as a necessary consequence of self-consistency. If this approach can be carried out successfully, the philosophical implications will be very profound. The fact that all the properties of particles are determined by principles closely related to the methods of observation would mean that the basic structures of the material world are determined, ultimately, by the way we look at this world; that the observed patterns of matter are reflections of patterns of mind.
The phenomena of the subatomic world are so complex that it is by no means certain whether a complete, self-consistent theory will ever be constructed, but one can envisage a series of partly successful models of smaller scope. Each of them would be intended to cover only a part of the observed phenomena and would contain some unexplained aspects, or parameters, but the parameters of one model might be explained by another. Thus more and more phenomena could gradually be covered with ever increasing accuracy by a mosaic of interlocking models whose net number of unexplained parameters keeps decreasing. The adjective “bootstrap” is thus never appropriate for any individual model, but can be applied only to a combination of mutually consistent models, none of which is any more fundamental than the others. Chew explains succinctly: “A physicist who is able to view any number of different partially successful models without favoritism is automatically a bootstrapper.”26
Progress in S-matrix theory was steady but slow until several important developments of recent years resulted in a major breakthrough, which made it quite likely that the bootstrap program for the strong interactions will be completed in the near future, and that it may also be extended successfully to the electromagnetic and weak interactions.27 These results have generated great enthusiasm among S-matrix theorists and are likely to force the rest of the physics community to reevaluate its attitudes toward the bootstrap approach.
The key element of the new bootstrap theory of subatomic particles is the notion of order as a new and important aspect of particle physics. Order, in this context, means order in the interconnectedness of subatomic processes. Since there are various ways in which subatomic events can interconnect, one can define various categories of order. The language of topology – well known to mathematicians but never before applied to particle physics – is used to classify these categories of order. When this concept of order is incorporated into the mathematical framework of S-matrix theory, only a few special categories of ordered relationships turn out to be consistent with that framework. The resulting patterns of particle interactions are precisely those observed in nature.
The picture of subatomic particles that emerges from the bootstrap theory can be summed up in the provocative phrase “Every particle consists of all other particles.” It must not be imagined, however, that each of them contains all the others in a classical, static sense. Subatomic particles are not separate entities but interrelated energy patterns in an ongoing dynamic process. These patterns do not “contain” one another but rather “involve” one another in a way that can be given a precise mathematical meaning but cannot easily be expressed in words.
The emergence of order as a new and central concept in particle physics has not only led to a major breakthrough in S-matrix theory, but may well have great implications for science as a whole. The significance of order in subatomic physics is still obscure, and the extent to which it can be incorporated in to the S-matrix framework is not yet fully known, but it is intriguing to remind ourselves that the notion of order plays a very basic role in the scientific approach to reality and is a crucial aspect of all methods of observation. The ability to recognize order seems to be an essential aspect of the rational mind; every perception of a pattern is, in a sense, a perception of order. The clarification of the concept of order in a field of research where patterns of matter and patterns of mind are increasingly being recognized as reflections of one another promises to open fascinating frontiers of knowledge.
Further extensions of the bootstrap approach in subatomic physics will eventually have to go beyond the present framework of S-matrix theory, which has been developed specifically to describe the strong interactions. To enlarge the bootstrap program a more general framework will have to be found, in which some of the concepts that are now accepted without explanation will have to be “bootstrapped,” derived from overall self-consistency. These may include our conception of macroscopic space-time and, perhaps, even our conception of human consciousness. Increased use of the bootstrap approach opens up the unprecedented possibility of being forced to include the study of human consciousness explicitly in future theories of matter. The question of consciousness has already arisen in quantum theory in connection with the problem of observation and measurement, but the pragmatic formulation of the theory scientists use in their research does not refer to consciousness explicitly. Some physicists argue that consciousness may be an essential aspect of the universe, and that we may be blocked from further understanding of natural phenomena if we insist on excluding it.
At present there are two approaches in physics that come very close to dealing with consciousness explicitly. One is the notion of order in Chew’s S-matrix theory; the other is a theory developed by David Bohm, who follows a much more general and more ambitious approach.28 Bohm’s starting point is the notion of “unbroken wholeness,” and his aim is to explore the order he believes to be inherent in the cosmic web of relations at a deeper, “nonmanifest” level. He calls this order “implicate,” or “enfolded,” and describes it with the analogy of a hologram, in which each part, in some sense, contains the whole.29 If any part of a hologram is illuminated, the entire image will be reconstructed, although it will show less detail than the image obtained from the complete hologram. In Bohm’s view the real world is structured according to the same general principles, with the whole enfolded in each of its parts.
Bohm realizes that the hologram is too static to be used as a scientific model for the implicate order at the subatomic level. To express the essentially dynamic nature of reality at this level ha has coined the term “holomovement.” In his view the holomovement is a dynamic phenomenon out of which all forms of the material universe flow. The aim of his approach is to study the order enfolded in this holomovement, not by dealing with the structure of objects, but rather with the structure of movement, thus taking into account both the unity and the dynamic nature of the universe. To understand the implicate order Bohm has found it necessary to regard consciousness as an essential feature of the holomovement and to take it into account explicitly in his theory. He sees mind and matter as being interdependent and correlated, but not causally connected. They are mutually enfolding projections of a higher reality which is neither matter nor consciousness.
Bohm’s theory is still tentative, but there seems to be an intriguing kinship, even at this preliminary stage, between his theory of the implicate order and Chew’s S-matrix theory. Both approaches are based on a view of the world as a dynamic web of relations; both attribute a central role to the notion of order; both use matrices to represent change and transformation, and topology to classify categories of order. Finally, both theories recognize that consciousness may well be an essential aspect of the universe that will have to be included in a future theory of physical phenomena. Such a future theory may well arise from the merging of Bohm’s and Chew’s theories, which represent two of the most imaginative and philosophically profound contemporary approaches to physical reality.
My presentation of modern physics in this chapter has been influenced by my personal beliefs and allegiances. I have emphasized certain concepts and theories that are not yet accepted by the majority of physicists, but that I consider significant philosophically, of great importance for the other sciences and for our culture as a whole. Every contemporary physicist, however, will accept the main theme of the presentation – that modern physics has transcended the mechanistic Cartesian view of the world and is leading us to a holistic and intrinsically dynamic conception of the universe.
This world view of modern physics is a systems view, and it is consistent with the systems approaches that are now emerging in other fields, although the phenomena studied by these disciplines are generally of a different nature and require different concepts. In transcending the metaphor of the world as a machine, we also have to abandon the idea of physics as the basis of all science. According to the bootstrap or systems view of the world, different but mutually consistent concepts may be used to describe different aspects and levels of reality, without the need to reduce the phenomena of any level to those of another.
Before I describe the conceptual framework for such a multidisciplinary, holistic approach to reality, we may find it useful to see how the other sciences have adopted the Cartesian world view and have modeled their concepts and theories after those of classical physics. The limitations of the Cartesian paradigm in the natural and social sciences can also be brought to light, and their exposure is intended to help scientists and nonscientists change their underlying philosophies in order to participate in the current cultural transformation.