Ah, the vacation is over! After reading a novel, I have picked up a brain-twister: "Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn," by Amanda Gefter. It is written by a woman who claims to never have had formal mathematics or science training, taking up writing at liberal arts colleges, but whose father's passion to understand "nothing" brought her into the scary realm of state-of-the-art physics. She parlayed that into a gig as a science writer, and now has turned that skill into this book.
I have had some higher math and lots of science courses, and I am dumbfounded with this stuff. Shroedinger's (sp) cats? The double-slit paradox? Bent space and time? Chatting as if on a lark with some friends, the author will suddenly drop a bomb like, 'at the quantum level, gravity increases as one approaches an ultimate smallness, such that it would tear the universe apart were it not for something limiting a further decrease in size' (my paraphrase). Oh, yeah, I get that.
Welp, no I don't, not really, but what is coming out in this book is how physics - and science in general - is not about "reality" but about a philosophy of reality. Newtonian physics was not accepted or understood at first, nor was or is General Relativity now by most - but they are both philosophical pictures of reality. With quantum physics (that on the small scale of the universe), the relatively new relativity theory does not work, either. So: we have learned to see Newtonian physics, that of an objective observer over an objective reality, as OUR reality. Einstein's relativity diminishes the objective observer, making perception relative while still assuming a general overall picture of a single, shared reality. To focus on this as a new picture of reality, we come to see that this uniform but relative universe is made possible through the curving of space by gravity. Gravity, then, is not something that holds us too the earth, but rather is the universal force that homogenizes relative perspectives into one greater reality. In other words (as Gefter put it), what we understand as gravity is really the one unifying force in the universe.
Get it? Nor do I, really, but I do get what she is saying: that what we see and experience as rational Newtonians is a great over-simplification - not reality, anymore than Zeus and the Olympian gods are a reality. Our reality is a metaphor, an allusion to a greater reality, not the real one. Pagan, Christian, physicist, we are all in our own illusion of reality.
This becomes much more obvious with quantum mechanics. In contrast to relativity theory, quantum mechanics, as Neils Bohr said, depends entirely on the observer. That is, something is NOT until it is observed. This angered Einstein, who insisted that such things were "spooky" : that the moon he sees is the moon we all see; in other words, that behind relativity is a true reality, not a subjective one. But relativity theory does not work at the quantum level. Gefter's reading of current physicists working on this problem has this emphasis in place: that they are attempting to redefine the observer so that even the observer is integral to the system, not something "outside."
I will read until the end and perhaps be able to clarify this and the purposed unified theories (unification of relativity and quantum), but will stop now with this observation: Occam's Razor would call for the most minimal of explanations necessary; the most minimal necessary would arrive at the conclusion that there is a god, a creator or forever-isser, who stands either outside creation or is fully part and partial to an infinite reality that subsumes creation. Unified theory solved.
Of course, not to the satisfaction of scientists, which is a world view of reality unto itself. But the ancient philosophers understood what the physicists' quandary is thousands of years ago, and they formed philosophical worlds that encompassed their thoughts and observations, just as scientists do today. Both they and theoretical physicists, then, are philosophers arguing for a particular world view, both of which will never be complete. However, there are two differences: science has greater physical tools for measurement; but philosophers can also use another tool that science will not: the emotion, or feeling of reality. So while we could say that our modern physical philosophers have a greater grasp on physical reality, we might also say that they have a lesser grasp - if any at all - on the reality of being, of direct human experience. The mystics see, as poet William Blake said, 'an entire world in a grain of sand.' They are not kidding. This observation comes with a certainty that is more certain than the grain of sand itself. Science, on the other hand, uses mathematics as a substitute for the language of the philosophers, both of them limited tools for understanding. Who among them really knows and who is only trying to know?
But I would like it both ways, to have my cake and eat it too. I am cheering for the physicists to finally find a mathematics for God. It seems impossible, but so does quantum physics. Maybe, just maybe a meeting of the minds - of ecstasy and understanding - can come within that whispered hair-space of one to the other. In that we would have some kind of evolution. FK
I have had some higher math and lots of science courses, and I am dumbfounded with this stuff. Shroedinger's (sp) cats? The double-slit paradox? Bent space and time? Chatting as if on a lark with some friends, the author will suddenly drop a bomb like, 'at the quantum level, gravity increases as one approaches an ultimate smallness, such that it would tear the universe apart were it not for something limiting a further decrease in size' (my paraphrase). Oh, yeah, I get that.
Welp, no I don't, not really, but what is coming out in this book is how physics - and science in general - is not about "reality" but about a philosophy of reality. Newtonian physics was not accepted or understood at first, nor was or is General Relativity now by most - but they are both philosophical pictures of reality. With quantum physics (that on the small scale of the universe), the relatively new relativity theory does not work, either. So: we have learned to see Newtonian physics, that of an objective observer over an objective reality, as OUR reality. Einstein's relativity diminishes the objective observer, making perception relative while still assuming a general overall picture of a single, shared reality. To focus on this as a new picture of reality, we come to see that this uniform but relative universe is made possible through the curving of space by gravity. Gravity, then, is not something that holds us too the earth, but rather is the universal force that homogenizes relative perspectives into one greater reality. In other words (as Gefter put it), what we understand as gravity is really the one unifying force in the universe.
Get it? Nor do I, really, but I do get what she is saying: that what we see and experience as rational Newtonians is a great over-simplification - not reality, anymore than Zeus and the Olympian gods are a reality. Our reality is a metaphor, an allusion to a greater reality, not the real one. Pagan, Christian, physicist, we are all in our own illusion of reality.
This becomes much more obvious with quantum mechanics. In contrast to relativity theory, quantum mechanics, as Neils Bohr said, depends entirely on the observer. That is, something is NOT until it is observed. This angered Einstein, who insisted that such things were "spooky" : that the moon he sees is the moon we all see; in other words, that behind relativity is a true reality, not a subjective one. But relativity theory does not work at the quantum level. Gefter's reading of current physicists working on this problem has this emphasis in place: that they are attempting to redefine the observer so that even the observer is integral to the system, not something "outside."
I will read until the end and perhaps be able to clarify this and the purposed unified theories (unification of relativity and quantum), but will stop now with this observation: Occam's Razor would call for the most minimal of explanations necessary; the most minimal necessary would arrive at the conclusion that there is a god, a creator or forever-isser, who stands either outside creation or is fully part and partial to an infinite reality that subsumes creation. Unified theory solved.
Of course, not to the satisfaction of scientists, which is a world view of reality unto itself. But the ancient philosophers understood what the physicists' quandary is thousands of years ago, and they formed philosophical worlds that encompassed their thoughts and observations, just as scientists do today. Both they and theoretical physicists, then, are philosophers arguing for a particular world view, both of which will never be complete. However, there are two differences: science has greater physical tools for measurement; but philosophers can also use another tool that science will not: the emotion, or feeling of reality. So while we could say that our modern physical philosophers have a greater grasp on physical reality, we might also say that they have a lesser grasp - if any at all - on the reality of being, of direct human experience. The mystics see, as poet William Blake said, 'an entire world in a grain of sand.' They are not kidding. This observation comes with a certainty that is more certain than the grain of sand itself. Science, on the other hand, uses mathematics as a substitute for the language of the philosophers, both of them limited tools for understanding. Who among them really knows and who is only trying to know?
But I would like it both ways, to have my cake and eat it too. I am cheering for the physicists to finally find a mathematics for God. It seems impossible, but so does quantum physics. Maybe, just maybe a meeting of the minds - of ecstasy and understanding - can come within that whispered hair-space of one to the other. In that we would have some kind of evolution. FK
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