Janus (37 page)

 

* Where E stands for energy, m for mass, and c for the velocity of light.

 

 

 

 

Diagram tracing a bubble-chamber photograph of subatomic
events, from a Photo CERN -- courtesy of European Organisation
for Nuclear Research, Geneva. The caption (which leaves
non-physicists none the wiser) reads: 'interaction in the heavy
liquid bubble chamber, Gargamelle. At A an incident antiproton
which enters the chamber at C (see plan) annihilates a resident
proton giving rise to a +ve and -ve pion, a neutral pion, and
two gamma rays each of which converts (at D) into an electron
positron pair. A second event is recorded where a particle
entering at E interacts at B and produces two antiprotons and
two +ve pions, one of which collides subsequently twice with
resident particles.'

 

But the fundamental lesson which the bubble chamber and other sophisticated
instruments teach the physicist is that on the sub-atomic level our concepts
of space, time, matter and conventional logic no longer apply. Thus two
particles may collide and break into pieces, but these pieces may turn
out to be not smaller than the original particles -- because the kinetic
energy liberated in the course of the collision has been transformed into
'mass'. Or a photon, the elementary unit of light, which has no mass, can
give birth to an electron-positron pair which
does
have mass; and that
pair might subsequently collide, and by the reverse process transform
itself into a photon. The fantastic events in the bubble chamber have
been compared to the dance of Shiva, with its rhythmic alternations of
creation and destruction.*

 

* Capra (1975).

 

All this is a long way from the beguilingly simple Rutherford-Bohr model
of the beginning of our century, that represented atoms as miniature
solar systems, in which negatively charged electrons circle like planets
around a positively charged nucleus. Alas, the model ran into one paradox
after another. The electrons were found to behave quite unlike planets --
they kept jumping from one orbit into another without passing through the
space between them -- as if the earth were instantaneously transferred
into the orbit of Mars in a single jump, ignoring space. The orbits
themselves were not well-defined trajectories, but wide blurred tracks,
appropriate to the wave-aspect of the electron which was 'smeared' all
over the orbit, and it became as meaningless to ask at what exact point
in space the electron was at a given moment, as it was meaningless to
try to pin down a wave. As Bertrand Russell has put it:

 

The idea that there is a hard little lump there, which is the
electron or proton, is an illegitimate intrusion of common sense
notions derived from touch. [4]

 

The atomic
nuclei
in the model did not fare better than the orbiting
'planets'. The nuclei turned out to be compounds of particles, mainly
protons and neutrons, held together by other particles and forces
which defy any visual model or representation in terms of our sensory
experience. According to one hypothesis, neutrons and protons race around
inside the nucleus with velocities of about 40,000 miles per second --
a quarter of the speed of light. As Capra put it:

 

Nuclear matter is thus a form of matter entirely different from
anything we experience 'up here' in our macroscopic environment.
We can perhaps picture it best as tiny drops of an extremely dense
liquid which is boiling and bubbling most fiercely. [5]

 

 

3

 

 

In earlier books
^[6]
I have discussed some of the most
notorious paradoxes of quantum physics: Thomson's experiments which made
the same electron go though two minute holes in a screen at the same
time (which, Sir Cyril Burt commented, 'is more than a ghost can do');
the paradox of 'Schrödinger's cat', which can be shown to be both
alive and dead at the same time; Feynman's diagrams in which particles are
made to move for a brief instant backward in time (which earned him the
Nobel Prize in 1965); and the 'Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox' (or EPR
paradox) to which I shall briefly return. The situation has been summed
up by Heisenberg himself, one of the chief architects of quantum theory:

 

The very attempt to conjure up a picture of elementary particles and
think of them in visual terms is wholly to misinterpret them . . . [7]

 

Atoms are not
things
. The electrons which form an atom's shells are
no longer things in the sense of classical physics, things which could
be unambiguously described by concepts like location, velocity, energy,
size. When we get down to the atomic level, the objective world in
space and time no longer exists. [8]

 

 

 

4

 

 

Werner Heisenberg will probably be remembered as the great iconoclast
who put an end to causal determinism in physics -- and thereby in
philosophy -- by his celebrated 'Principle of Indeterminacy' which is
as fundamental to modern physics as Newton's Laws of Motion were to
classical mechanics. I have tried to convey its meaning by a rather
simplistic analogy.
^[9]
A certain static quality of many
Renaissance paintings is due to the fact that the human figures in
the foreground and the distant landscape in the background are both
in sharp focus -- which is optically impossible: when we focus on a
close object the backgrowid gets blurred, and vice versa. The Principle
of Indeterminacy implies that in studying the sub-atomic panorama the
physicist is confronted with a similar predicament (though of course for
quite different reasons). In classical physics a particle must at any time
have a definite location and velocity; on the sub-atomic level, however,
the situation turns out to be radically different. The more accurately the
physicist is able to determine the location of an electron, for instance,
the more uncertain its velocity becomes; and vice versa, the more exactly
he is able to determine the particle's velocity, the more blurred,
i.e., indeterminate, its location becomes. This indeterminacy is not
caused by the imperfection of our techniques of observation, but by the
inherently dual nature of the electron as both 'particle' and 'wavicle',
which makes it both practically
and theoretically
impossible to
pin down. But this implies nothing less than that down on the sub-atomic
level the universe at any given moment is in a quasi-undecided state,
and that its state in the next moment is to some extent indeterminate
or 'free'. Thus if an ideal photographer with a perfect camera took a
picture of the total universe at any given moment, the picture would be
to some extent fuzzy, owing to the indeterminate state of its ultimate
constituents.* Because of this fuzziness, physicists' statements about
sub-atomic processes can only refer to probabilities, not to certainties;
in the micro-world the laws of probability supplant those of causality:
'nature is unpredictable' -- to quote Heisenberg once more.

 

* It can be shown that however short the exposure time, the
Indeterminacy Principle will still blur the picture.

 

Thus for the last fifty years, since the advent of quantum theory,
it has become a commonplace among physicists of the dominant school
(the so-called Copenhagen School) that the strictly deterministic,
mechanistic world-view can no longer be upheld; it has become a Victorian
anachronism. The nineteenth -century model of the universe as a mechanical
clockwork is a shambles and since the concept of matter itself has been
de-materialized,
materialism can no longer claim to be a scientific
philosophy
.

 

 

 

5

 

 

I have quoted some of the giants (most of them Nobel laureates)* who were
jointly responsible for dismantling the antiquated clockwork, and attempted
to replace it by a more sophisticated model, sufficiently flexible to
accommodate logical paradoxes and wild theories previously considered
unthinkable. During this half century countless new discoveries have
been made -- by radio-telescopes scanning the skies and in the bubble
chambers recording the sub-atomic dance of Shiva -- but no satisfactory
model and no coherent philosophy has yet emerged comparable to that of
classical, Newtonian physics. One might describe this post-Newtonian
era as one of the periods of 'creative anarchy' which recur in the
history of every science when the old concepts have become obsolete,
and the breakthrough leading to a new synthesis is not yet in sight.**
At the time of writing, theoretical physics itself seems to be immersed
in a bubble chamber, with the weirdest hypotheses criss-crossing each
other's tracks. I shall mention a few, which seem pertinent to our theme.

 

* The frequent mention of Nobel awards is intended as a reassurance
that the strange theories quoted in this chapter were propounded not
by cranks but by physicists of international renown.
** Cf above, Ch. VIII.

 

First, there have been some eminent physicists, among them Einstein,
de Brogue, Schrödinger, Vigier, and David Bohm, who were unwilling
to accept the indeterminacy and acausality of sub-atomic events -- which
in their opinion amounted to saying that these events were ruled by blind
chance. (Einstein's famous phrase: 'God does not play dice with the world'
reflects this attitude.) They were inclined to believe in the existence
of a sub-stratum below the sub-atomic level, which ruled and determined
those seemingly indeterminate processes. This was called the theory of
'hidden variables' -- which, however, has been abandoned even by its
staunchest supporters because it seemed to lead simply nowhere.

 

 

But although unacceptable to the physicist, the 'hidden variables' provided
a fertile field for metaphysical and parapsychological theorizings.
Theologians proposed that Divine Providence might work from within
the fuzzy gaps in the matrix of physical causality ('the god of the
gaps'). Sir John Eccles, Nobel laureate in physiology, proposed that
the quantum indeterminacy of 'critically poised' neurons in the brain
made room for the exercise of free will:

 

In the active cerebral cortex within twenty milliseconds, the pattern
of discharge of even hundreds of thousands of neurons would be
modified as a result of an 'influence' that initially caused the
discharge of merely one neuron . . .
Thus, the neurophysiological hypothesis is that the 'will' modifies
the spatio-temporal activity of the neuronal network by exerting
spatio-temporal 'fields of influence' that become affected through
this unique detector function of the active cerebral cortex. [10]

 

The above applies to the action of individual minds on their 'own' brains.
In the concluding sections of his book, however, Eccles includes ESP and
PK (psychokinesis) in his theory. He accepts the experimental results
of Rhine and his school as evidence for a generalized 'two-way traffic'
between mind and matter, and of direct communication channels between
mind and mind. He believes that ESP and PK are weak and irregular
manifestations of the
same
principle which allows an individual's
mental volition to influence his own material brain, and the material
brain to give rise to conscious experiences.

 

 

The theory is not worked out in detail, but it is indicative of current
trends of thought among enlightened neurophysiologists -- from the late
Sir Charles Sherrington to Penfield and Gray Walter, whom I have quoted
in earlier works.

 

 

It is also interesting to note that Penfield, the neurologist, revived an
unduly neglected hypothesis by Eddington, the astronomer, which postulated
a 'correlated behaviour of the individual particles of matter, which he
[Eddington] assumed to occur for matter in liaison with mind. The behaviour
of such matter would stand in sharp contrast to the uncorrelated or random
behaviour of particles that is postulated in physics.' [11]

 

 

Thus matter 'in liaison with mind' displays specific properties not
otherwise found in the realm of physics -- a proposition not far removed
from panpsychism. Another astrononomer, V. A. Firsoff, suggested that
'mind was a universal entity or interaction of the same order as electricity
or gravitation, and there must be a
modulus of transformation
, analogous
to Einstein's famous equation E = mc².' [12]

 

 

In other words, as matter can be transformed into physical energy,
so physical energy must be transformable into psychic energy, and vice versa.

 

 

In recent years, there has been a spate of such theories, intended to bridge
the gap between quantum physics and parapsychology, which sound like
science fiction -- but the same remark applies, as we have seen, to the
basic proposition of modern physics itself. Thus the brilliant Cambridge
mathematician, Adrian Dobbs, has put forward an elaborate theory of
telepathy and precognition, in which hypothetical 'psytrons', with
properties similar to the neutrinos*, were regarded as the carriers of
ESP phenomena, capable of impinging directly on neurons in the recipient's
brain.