Sailing the Sinking ShipNewtonian Physics and the Mechanistic World View

(50 slides)

(special thanks to R. Nadeau and M. Kafatos authors of : The Non-local Universe)

creatively compiled by dr. michael farnworth

The lesson will be an attempt to illustrate the inevitable crisis that awaits us as we awaken to the non-reality of the

Cartesian dualism between mind and matter originating in the 17th century.

In other words, Newtonian truths that we have trusted to build our current cultural paradigms on have been displaced.

This sacred cow of classical deterministic (cause and effect) western thinking will not go down easily and I doubt I can do it much

harm here.

The two world Cartesian dilemma… matter and mind

• The two world dilemma of Cartesian philosophy has been a bane to the western mind.

• One world, made up of separate parts, were bound to each other by rigid laws of cause and effect and was completely separate from the world of the mind.

• One could study and come to understand this independent world via reason and the scientific method but would always remain separate and distinct from it, an intruder of sorts!

“The tragedy of the Western mind is that we have lived, since the seventeenth century, with the prospect that the inner world of human consciousness and the outer world of physical reality are separated by an abyss or a void that cannot be bridged or

reconciled.” (p. 6)

In other words, the only way to know the world we lived in was by the scientific method of study and reason.

This method was enthroned as the ultimate in epistemological knowing.

Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”

This lesson will be divided into 5 parts:

Part 1: Definitions of…

Part 2: The history…

Part 3: The basic concepts…

Part 4: The philosophical…

Part 5: The so what…

Part 1: Definitions of

Newtonian Science

• Newtonian Science was based on the world view of cause and effect determinism.

• This world could be understood by empiricism, which was the study of the material world via our senses.

• Observation, research, experimentation could all serve to uncover the laws thought to govern this clock-work world of order and mathematical logic.

Newtonian Science’s purpose…

• The full and certain truth about physical reality is disclosed in the mathematical description of this reality. (p.11) In other words mathematical formulas can explain the nature of the world!

• The classical ideal of causality (cause and effect) (p, 89) and the one-to-one correspondence between every element of the physical theory and the physical reality it describes (p. 54).

• Means that for everything in nature there is a cause and effect which can be observed, studied and eventually explained, is the corner stone of Newtonian Science!

Quantum Science

• Quantum Science is the study of nature and energy of the sub atomic world.

• It has turned the Newtonian world up side down with it’s

bizarre findings.

• In 1900 Max Planck presented the beginnings of Quantum Theory to the German Physical Society.

Quanta…

• Small bundles of energy and matter that are incessantly exchanged and interacting within the energy fields of the sub atomic world.

• Fermions are elementary particles of matter: quarks and leptons.

• Bosons are the elementary particles of energy and forces that create relationships.

The dueling sciences

• Newtonian Science• 1. Mechanistic• 2. Reductionistic• 3. Mathematical• 4. Positivistic• 5. Lawful cause-effect• 6. Objective

• Quantum Science• 1. Unvisualizable• 2. Holistic• 3. Mystical• 4. Conscious• 5. Nonlocal• 6. Subjective

The following definitions are shared in the spirit of memory refreshment.

The Newtonian Theory

1. Mechanistic…

• Reality is materialistic and machine metaphors were used to describe and understand this world of laws that determined how things really are.

• The machine became the chosen metaphor to explained how things worked in our universe.

2. Reductionism

• The study of something by breaking it down into its smallest parts.

• “The sum of all the parts equal the whole.”

• “With medieval tools we murder with dissection and reduction the truth and life of nature.”

• The belief of Newtonian physics was that if we just kept reducing nature down to it’s smallest parts then we would eventually understand all her secrets.

3. Mathematical

• Mathematical formulas were thought to be the ideal source of communion with God.

• Descartes had a heavenly vision in which he was shown that the world was governed by laws and that man could discover these laws and come to understand the nature of reality and the world as machine.

4. Positivism

• The premise that anything that belongs to science has to be studied and examined.

• Materialism is the foundation of science.

• If it cannot be examined, studied and quantified by testing, observation and empiricism it has no place in science!

5. Lawful cause and effect

• This is a well known principle of Newtonian physics locality.

• For every action there is a reaction in the locality of cause and effect.

• Nothing happens without cause.

• Logic forbids otherwise.

6. Objective

• For science to have any credibility it has to be objective.

• I cannot impact what is being studied or it will pollute the very epistemology that science has claimed in discovering reality.

• In other words if science unknowingly impacted and changed that which was being studied then, it is all for naught.

The Quantum Theory

1. Unvisualizable…

• The quantum world is so bizarre and unexplainable that any attempt to explain it logically or visually is doomed to failure.

• There is no known metaphor or diagram to communicate the profound mystery and magic of the quantum world.

2. Holistic…

• The universe is a web and tapestry of interwoven emergent energy and matter that is intimately connected and in constant sharing.

• The smallest part is a mirror image of the whole.

• Example: the same way that one cell of the body contains the DNA of the whole.

3. Mystical

• Quantum theory violates so much of our common sense, logic and wisdom that there is no adequate explanation for it.

• “There may be no such thing as the glittering central mechanism of the universe. Not machinery but magic may be the better description of the treasure that is waiting.”

John A. Wheeler, Physicist

4. Conscious

• The universe is not static, or dead but is rather alive and awake.

• It is almost as if all the particles of the sub atomic world can act as they had consciousness and a will.

• This is very much opposed to the dead, static nature of the Newtonian world.

5. Nonlocal

• There seems to be no cause and effect in the quantum world, particles communicate instantaneously without any known cause or connection.

• Particles show up without coming from anywhere.

• The quantum world is best represented by a ghostly and spooky paradigm or one physicist (J.B.S. Haldane) put it:

• “The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine.”

6. Subjective

• The quantum world is very much impacted by the simple act of viewing it.• • The act of observation changes the nature and behavior of the thing being

observed.

• Reality is then evoked, depending on what one is looking for.

• The observer constantly alters what he observes by the meddling act of observation.

Werner Heisenberg

Part 2: The history

The two scientific revolutions…

• The 1700s brought the scientific revolution with Descartes, Newton, Bacon and Classical Physics which changed the worldview from an enchanted superstitious paradigm to a mechanistic materialistic paradigm.

• The second scientific revolution started in the early 1900s with Max Planck and with Albert Einstein’s relativity theory and with other physicists such as Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrodinger working on developing aspects of Quantum Theory.

• This ongoing revolution is changing the worldview from a mechanistic materialistic paradigm to an entangled conscious non-local universe. The paradigm shift continues.

One of the far reaching results of the first scientific revolutions was the classical assumption that the only privileged and valid

knowledge was scientific.

It was believed that scientific truth was transcendent and absolute (since it was mathematical).

This is the current paradigm of the western industrialized world.

It changed an enchanted and superstitious world, alive with mystery and meaning, into a dead, static machine.

One of the consequences of the second scientific revolution was the slow deconstruction of the Newtonian World view of mechanistic

determinism.

In other words, Quantum Theory is bringing the magic and the mystery back in to science.

Part 3: The basic concept

“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.”

Werner Heisenberg, German Physicist, 1923

So started the second revolution of science.

A metaphorical earthquake that threatened to destroy all that physics had worked so hard to discover.

We are going to take a look at just two of the Newtonian ideas of realism and locality that were threaten to be swallowed up in the

metaphorical earthquake!

Realism assumed that physical reality exists independently of the observer and that the state of this reality is not dependent upon

acts of observation or measurement. (p. 69)

It was believed that reality existed whether it was observed or

not.

Objective study and discovery of reality was the basic foundation upon which our understanding of the Newtonian world was

based.

Locality means action with causation.

This was quintessential to the classical world of Newtonian Physics.

Things did not act without a cause and effect.

This led to a famous statement of Albert Einstein in reacting to the unfolding of Quantum Physics:

“God does not play dice with the universe.” Locality assumes that signals or energy transfers between

particles cannot occur greater than the speed of light.

The Newtonian ideas of realism and locality were both proven wrong.

These important Quantum ideas (idealism and nonlocality as opposed to realism and

locality) which Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein had a running *argument for 23 years were instrumental in changing the nature of reality as we

had known it for the past 200-300 years.

* (which by the way, Albert lost. He was championing the realism and locality argument)

The reason the argument took the 23 years was because there was no proof to validate either party just thought experiments

and logic.

It wasn’t until 1964 that John Bell, of the Center for European Nuclear Research came up with an experiment that would

solve the long running argument.

But it wasn’t carried out until years later with both main characters in the drama long dead.

Bell’s Theorem

• “Bell’s Theorem proposes that certain predictions made by quantum mechanics are impossible in any terms previously understood by physics!

• If these quantum predictions are true, we must use whole new categories of thinking about physical events to understand them!”

(Who’s Afraid of Schrodinger’s Cat, Ian Marshall and Danah Zohar, p. 64)

• The issue in Bell’s Theorem was proving non-locality was real and a fact of nature!?!

Einstein's reaction to Bell’s Theorem and non-locality.

• Einstein saw Bell’s Theorem and non-locality as impossible and referred to it as spooky actions at a distance (p.2)

• He and two other physicists created the Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) Paradox, a thought experiment, to disprove quantum non-locality.

• They failed in their attempt.

• Bell’s Theorem was proven in 1982 by French physicist Alain Aspect and in 1997 by Swiss physicist Nicolus Gisin.

• This proof shocked and amazed scientists across the world (as they thought Einstein and the EPR paradox would eventually prove correct).

• The leak in the ship just got bigger.

In the course of the long playing argument between Bohr and Einstein, Einstein was forced into “claiming that a quantity must

be called real within the context of physical theory *even if it cannot be disclosed by observation and measurement in a single

instance”. (p.98)

*This claim violated the strident scientific credo of positivism and the absolute requirement of evidence for validation of a

physical theory!!!

This claim shows how motivated Einstein was to restore order to the Newtonian paradigm that was under assault by

Quantum Theory!

It was high drama in the world of physics!

The prediction

• Quantum theory predicts that two particles can be correlated instantaneously (faster than the speed of light) in the absence of any such force or signal, that somehow certain particles can be linked non-locally across space and time.

• Classical physics cannot explain the correlation without a mediated local force.

• It is as if things happen and there is no (known) cause for their action.

It is pivotal to understand that the scientific agenda is to measure, understand and comprehend all of reality.

It is who they are and what they are about.

Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation:

• The state of a system becomes real or actual when a measurement occurs, and we cannot assume the reality of potential states in the absence of measurement.

• This measurement (using Schrodinger wave equation) in the quantum world makes accurate predictions but the physicists have no idea of how or why it works!

• Bohr’s interpretation was to essentially say: And that’s ok!

• Which other scientists thought was scientific heresy, namely indeterminism!

Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation basically states:

Objective reality does not exist.

Rather there are potential realities that exist simultaneously until we evoke them via measurement.

History and physics seem to come down of the side of Niels Bohr on every one of the ideas of physics that he and Albert Einstein

argued about.

That reality and nature are complementary and nonlocal and indeterminate.

“Non-locality could be the most profound discovery in all of science.”

Henry Stapp, Quantum Physics and the Physicist’s View Of Nature. p. 40

the end