In the 1920s and 1930s, when the two branches of modern physics, relativity and quantum mechanics, began to be generally known, there were still well-regarded physicists who represented a traditional philosophical idealism. Sir Arthur Eddington not only thought that a belief in God was consistent with scientific pursuits, but he reflected these ideas in his work in physics. In 1928, he published a book, The Nature of the Physical World, in which he stated that "The stuff of the world is mind stuff.......The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds...... The mind-stuff is not spread out in space and time; these are part of the cyclic scheme ultimately derived out of it. But we must presume that in some other way or aspect it can be differentiated into parts. Only here and there does it rise to the level of consciousness, but from such islands proceeds all knowledge. Besides the direct knowledge contained in each self-knowing unit, there is inferential knowledge. The latter includes our knowledge of the physical world...It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of a mental character."
Sir James Jeans, who spent many years feuding with Eddington over cosmological questions, nevertheless represented a similar philosophy. In the Mysterious Universe", published in 1930, he expressed these views very plainly. "Today, there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality." By 'non-mechanical' did he mean simply that Newtonian determinism was being replaced by the probabilities of quantum mechanics? His meaning becomes clear when he goes on to say, "Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter." He was referring to the non-material reality of 'mind'.
In a newspaper interview in London he said that he inclined "to the idealistic theory that consciousness is fundamental and that the universe is derivative from consciousness, not consciousness from the material universe."
In "The Universe Around Us", published in 1929, Jeans describes the universe as a "finite picture whose dimensions are a certain amount of space and a certain amount of time, the protons and electrons are the streaks of paint which define the picture against its space-time background. Traveling as far back in time as we can brings us not to the creation of the picture but to its edge: the creation of the picture lies as much outside the picture as the artist is outside the canvas. On this view, discussing the creation of the universe in terms of time and space is like trying to discover the artist and the action of painting by going to the edge of the canvas. This brings us very near to those philosophical systems which regard the universe as a thought in the mind of the Creator, thereby reducing all discussion of material creation to futility."
The kind of thinking that is involved here is illustrated clearly by an encounter between Eddington and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who was then studying at Cambridge and whose mathematical theories led to later work on black holes. Eddington rejected Chandrasekhar's purely mathematical derivations completely, believing that this approach was far too abstract to have any relevance to the actual physical world.
How many people were there then in physics who thought like that? Perhaps Jeans exaggerated a little when he spoke of a near unanimity of views leading to such a non-material reality, but there must have been a substantial number of scientists who generally agreed with him and Eddington. What happened to all these philosophical idealists in physics? The short answer is, of course, World War II. By the end of the 1930's, physicists were divided into two camps, one working for the Allies (what Hitler called "Jewish science", because of people like Einstein, Teller and Oppenheimer) and the other working for the Fascists (headed by Heisenberg). Idealism was forgotten in the desperate drive to develop the atom bomb before the other side managed the trick. Physics was taken over by the state and, as soon as the Nazis were defeated, the same policies were used against the Soviet scare. By the time all these political imperatives were over, physics emerged as a very different science.
For one thing, quantum mechanics was now recognized as the definitive mathematical framework for all physics. Arthur Eddington had been the great explainer and popularizer of relativity, which then was regarded without question as the greatest advance in the science since Galileo and Newton. In the later twentieth century however, quantum theory moved to the forefront of theory and research. The changes it brought to our view of the world are so deep and far-reaching that they cannot even remotely be summarized in this short article. The purpose here is the narrow one of tracing the concepts of reality in physics as they developed over this period of transition.
The physicists who represented Idealist views in the 1930s were well aware of all the developments in relativity and quantum theory which had led to the enormous changes to classical Newtonian physics earlier in the twentieth century. The solid reality of physical objects, unquestioned during the reign of Newton, had evaporated when it was discovered that the atom was not the final, indivisible matter particle. Subatomic particles did not behave at all like ordinary matter and their behavior could not be explained by classical mechanics. Scientific determinism, the philosophy of cause-and-effect causality, had to be abandoned. The new reality of nature was based on new quantum concepts that included probability and the particle-wave duality of matter.
By the 1930s, all these dramatic developments in physics were already well advanced and the Idealist physicists did not quarrel with any of these new ideas. Where they differed sharply from mainstream thought was in their views on 'mind' as the origin of matter. Clearly, mind was not an abstraction for them, it was a reality. In fact, they thought that the purely abstract mathematical approach to theoretical physics was, in some ways, too abstruse for an understanding of what was going on, especially if the mathematics dealt with more dimensions, say, than our senses were capable of perceiving. This mind reality, for Eddington, was the "substratum" behind the physical manifestations of matter within nature, which rose only 'here and there' to the level of consciousness. These 'islands' then represented visible nature, from which our consciousness could infer knowledge through our senses.
Clearly, there were two levels of reality involved in this type of thinking. One was our conscious knowledge of nature, which needed our sense perception. In platonic terms, this kind of reality was called subjective because it required our presence and participation. Plato thought the kind of knowledge that could be obtained from such a study of nature was of a very inferior kind, fleeting, transitory and derivative. The other kind of reality was the one that did not rise to the level of consciousness, the substratum behind the physical appearances. This kind of reality did not require our presence and our sense perceptions were not suitable for investigating these origins behind the appearances. Plato called this kind of reality objective: it represented the whole truth and reality of the creation, the only real knowledge that was not transitory. For Plato and for the Idealist physicists it was the reality of the "mind", that is the mind of the Creator.
As already mentioned, this kind of thinking did not survive the atom and hydrogen bombs. The purely mathematical, abstract approach, which Eddington found so unappealing in the work of Chandrasekhar, now reigned supreme. However, this approach, which led to the development of both relativity and quantum theory, has now reached some speculations which require only a slight nudge to demonstrate the need for the two kinds of reality referred to here.
Take for instance Murray Gell-Mann, one of the titans of contemporary physics, who among many other accomplishments discovered the particle which he then named the quark. Together with an associate, James Hartle, he has been working for some years now on something called 'quantum decoherence'. Quantum mathematics describes multiple universes of multiple possibilities and symmetries. Physicists like Hugh Everett, as long ago as the 1950s, argued that these must all exist as realities. However, when we make an observation, we get only one result, not a cloud of multiple quantum possibilities. According to Gell-Mann/Hartle, these multiple realities of the quantum fog condense into various chains of events, each chain approximately observing the cause-and-effect rules of classical physics. This means that people perceive the world as classical and predictable, rather than quantum and probabilistic, because they occupy a realm where predictable patterns have decohered from the coherent cloud of quantum possibilities. Each such chain of events would constitute a 'consistent history'.
For Gell-Mann, the decohered consistent history that we inhabit is the world of nature, which contains the visible physical phenomena whose behavior is very adequately explained by classical physics. These bodies are made up of particles and the wave-particle duality which, in theory, includes both large and small matter manifestations is not a practical factor in visible nature. The wave part of matter is important only when matter is of the size of particles. The waveform is not directly perceivable, so particles can be considered as the only constituents of visible matter. However, on the particle level, the waveform of matter is very important and, when the particles cross the diving line between our decohered world and the cohered quantum cloud beyond it, they seem to change into the waveform. This can be seen when matter crosses this dividing line from the other direction and the waveform instantly appears to 'collapse' into the particle form on being observed or measured.
How 'real' then are these particles that exhibit this wave-particle duality, which appears to collapse into the latter form on simple observation? Here is what Werner Heisenberg, another titan of physics in the twentieth century, had to say about particles (he was the author of the iconic Uncertainty Principle in the 1920s and later of the 'matrix mechanics' mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, based on particles, as against the 'wave mechanics' formulation, invented by Erwin Schr?dinger). "In the experiments about atomic events we have to do with things and facts, the phenomena that are just as real as any phenomena in daily life. But the atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than of things or facts."
Here it is clear what Heisenberg meant by 'reality': it was the reality of the 'phenomena in daily life'. Yet he did not say that the "world of potentialities or possibilities' was nothing. Is it really too much of a stretch to equate Heisenberg's world of potentialities or possibilities with Gell-Mann's cohered quantum fog of possibilities, as the origin behind all appearances in nature? Here, then, we have the two realities referred to: one is the subjective reality of nature and the other the objective reality of the origins and potentialities that exist (and really exist!) behind the visible phenomena.
Quantum mechanics, up to now, does not recognize any reality but that of the physical world. We, the observers, mankind, are intimately connected to this world (as we have seen) through our sense perceptions and even our observations and experiments. We have not even begun to cover the overwhelming victories which quantum mechanics has won over the proponents of a separately existing, natural world of reality, with its own history, completely independent of man. This is how most of us still perceive the world today. Even Einstein, one of the founders of quantum theory, insisted on this independent nature. This is how Steven Weinberg, yet another great one of physics, still sees the world, in spite of all evidence against it from quantum mechanics. Here is how he puts it, in a review of Stephen Hawking's latest book:"Like most people, I think there is something real out there, entirely independent of us and our models, as the earth is independent of its maps. But this is because I can't help believing in an objective reality, not because I have good arguments for it."
Steven Weinberg's use of the phrase "objective reality" is most telling. He uses the correct, traditional, platonic meaning for "objective" as referring to a reality that is completely separate from, and independent of, the observer and his senses or consciousness. This is exactly how Galileo defined his "primary qualities" of matter and motion: in his opinion, these were the only 'qualities' of nature that could appear to us objectively, that is without requiring our presence or senses. He therefore called them "objectively real" in the old, platonic sense. As Galileo overlooked the fact that the sense of sight was still involved in registering these two qualities, he was mistaken in calling them objective and, in fact, physics today has completely ignored Galileo's reasoning: quantum mechanics sees the human consciousness and all senses (especially that of sight!) intimately entwined with the reality of the world around us - the only reality it recognizes. This view, however, leaves many other questions unanswered. One glaring one is what does quantum mechanics have to say about the world before the (very necessary but very recent) appearance of man? It is only if you regard the world as objectively real and completely independent of man that you can speculate about the early eons of our planet and assume that the world appeared then as it does now to our senses, when we appear to have given it the only reality that quantum mechanics recognizes.
There are other, most eminent physicists, who have stated that quantum mechanics, while correct in all its predictions, is not complete. Einstein thought it missed certain aspects of physical reality, which he called "hidden variables", which would (when found) confirm his conviction that the world was independently real From the other side of the great debate between Einstein and Niels Bohr on just this question of reality, John Bell thought also that the story of quantum mechanics was incomplete and that physics must continue to probe into its meaning - and John Bell was the person whose iconic mathematical work led to the actual experiments that established the correctness of quantum mechanics over the objections posed by Einstein. There is also Richard Feynman, who worked on the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics and understood the subject as well as anyone. He summed up the present state of knowledge very clearly: "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."
This disconnect between scientists and the science they are working on reflects the distance that has opened up between the acquisition of knowledge (which nobody doubts) and the corresponding understanding, which is lagging. This state of affairs was already foreseen by Heisenberg in the early 1930s, when he had this to say to the Saxon Academy of Science: "Almost every scientific advance is bought at the cost of renunciation, almost every gain in knowledge sacrifices important standpoints in established modes of thought. As facts and knowledge accumulate, the claim of the scientist to an understanding of the world in a certain sense diminishes."
During the long reign of Newtonian physics, the great increase in knowledge achieved during that period was always accompanied by a corresponding increase in our understanding of how nature works. Heisenberg's remarks, therefore, cannot be taken to mean that modern physics has discovered a previously hidden law that an increase in knowledge inevitably means a decrease in understanding. All this simply means that quantum mechanics, for all its stunning successes is, as Einstein and other suspected, incomplete. For instance, it has not yet considered the possibility of needing two realities to explain the world: one the subjective reality of the physical world of nature and the other the objective reality of the realm of multiple universes and the quantum fog of potentialities and possibilities. That these two realities might be the necessary framework for physics to operate in, so that the science can be internally consistent, is something that was foreseen many years ago by the Idealist philosopher-physicists who were active in the 1920s and 1930s.
This brings us squarely to the missed opportunity in physics, which is the subject of this article and which needed this background explanation to bring it into focus. The objective reality of the non-material realm of the mind, which the Idealist physicists concentrated on, refers of course to the mind of the Creator. The concept of such a realm would be readily accepted by non-scientific religious thinkers, for whom God is a reality. Science and faith would thus have come together in the mental realm of the mind, without either side having to give up any of its positions to accommodate the other. The gap that Galileo opened between faith and the traditional philosophy associated with it on the one hand and science (especially physics) on the other would thus have been closed over eighty years ago if Idealism had been allowed to go on flourishing within physics after the 1930s. As a result, many problems that currently occupy modern physics might have been looked at very differently, such as the multi-dimensional string theory
When it first became evident that relativity was incompatible with quantum theory, Alfred North Whitehead made the following suggestion: "If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations." Today, his worst fears seem to be realized. All kinds of theories (some very bizarre) abound while experimental verification lags. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva has not even been able to verify the existence of the Higgs boson yet, which was expected to be one of its very first successes, let alone some sign that string theory mathematics might have a basis in our world. Whitehead's idea was evidently that philosophy was needed to unify the various incompatibilities encountered in physics and provide a framework within which the science can operate. However unfashionable they have become, that is what the Idealist scientists of the early part of the twentieth century tried to do. Perhaps their ideas deserve another hearing.
Werner Thurau was born in December 1927, in Havana, Cuba. In 1929, his family returned to his father's native Germany. He spent the entire 1930s in Berlin, but came to England in 1939 and was then further educated in that country, ending with an engineering degree from London University. His further career took him all over the world on technical projects, moving first to Mexico and then to the United States, where he lives now. At school in England, he was exposed early in life to the world of ideas. Some of his teachers were friends of C.S. Lewis and Lewis's Oxford group, the Inklings, and his father was a philosophical bookworm. Werner combined this background with a lifelong interest in physics, especially modern physics after it breached the atomic barrier. This interest extended to Galileo, the founder of our age, and what made him so different from others of his time, as well as to the effect physics has had on other related sciences He came to see that the latest developments in physics bring in subjects not normally associated with a book on that science, such as consciousness, reality concepts and even ethics. Modern quantum mechanics especially views these subjects as vital to today's theory in many ways, and this opens up the possibilities of reaching out to religion also.
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