DANCE OF THE WOOLLY MASTERS
(The title is a pun on 'The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics', [publ. USA: William Morrows, 1979;UK Rider/Hutchinson, 1979, Fontana Perbacks, 1980]a book by Gary Zukav.)
The profound transmutation undergone by physics in the early years of this century was concomitant with its abrupt awakening from philosophic slumber. Unphilosophic man - the naive realist - believes that the external world closely resembles his perception of it. And the classical physicist, despite certain superficial concessions to subject-object distinctions, remained in all essential respects this naive realist. He really believed that his mechanistic conception, so crudely abstracted from everyday experience, presented a reasonably faithful picture of the physical world. Philosophic man knows better. He knows that while there certainly exists an objective physical reality, those responses to it we call our perceptions are the end-product of an enormously complex, radically constructive, psycho-physiological process; furthermore, that the objectively existing processes which trigger our perceptual responses are often themselves responses triggered initially by our very efforts to perceive the world. So that what the nature of the raw material is at the objective end of this process, he knows we have no means of knowing, unless it be by some equally complex inferential process to which all our empirical knowledge is tributary. And, not through any accession of philosophic wisdom, but because physics had attained that stage of maturity when its discoveries could no longer be accommodated within a naively realistic conceptual framework, the physicist was compelled to recognise as valid this immeasurably more subtle and complex assessment of the true relations existing between observer and observed.In this situation it was inevitable that some physicists should be tempted to don the metaphysical mantle and speculate as to the ultimate nature of this now more than ever mysterious world. And, as we well know, our century has seen an unabating flood of such speculation. In predictable reaction to materialism, it has tended to take an idealistic, even mystical, direction. So much so, that the mystically oriented physicist has become a culture symbol of our time, seen by many as the spearhead of the intellectual advance to that spiritual renaissance which is mankind's one hope for the future. However, a realistic appraisal of this speculative venture discloses that although it is metaphysical in the sense of striving to see behind appearances to the real nature of matter, time, space, causality, etc., in point of fact it contains no metaphysics whatsoever. Authentic metaphysical method can only take the form of a rational analysis of experience into its ultimate structural components, with a view to the description of a universal generative process logically arising out of the very nature of these elements, in which matter, time, space, causality, etc. will be seen to emerge as natural structural features.1 But physicists have never attempted any such enterprise, or anything like it.
The sadly ironic consequence of this metaphysical omission has been that the modern physicist, for all his greater epistemological sophistication, remains as inescapably trapped within naive realism as his classical predecessor. And his desperate but unavailing struggles to transcend it produce only different kinds of error. He tortures his essentially mechanistic conceptions into all manner of absurd and unintelligible relationships - curved space-time, effects prior to causes, waves of nothing, virtual particles, time dilation, partial existence, and so on - and believes his incoherence to be an index of profundity. Or else he may mistake metaphor and analogy for genuine description. Or, most fatally of all, reify conceptual abstractions into objective concrete realities. Examples are the purely metrical concept, energy, or the methodologically convenient, field, and, all pervasively, the abstractions of mathematics.2 It has even been claimed that ultimate reality consists of equations. It is this abstractionist error which has done so much to persuade the philosophically imperceptive that the new physics has spiritualised the world: in a word, abstractionism has been mistaken for dematerialisation.
The new physicist finds himself compelled to accept the absurd or unintelligible as truth because he believes it to be inescapably implied by the experimental evidence. To understand the form this implication takes, we must turn to another major developmental trend of modern physics: its increasing subordination to mathematics. As an exact - which is to say, metrical - science, physics has always aspired to organise its observations in the form of equations composed of quantitative relations obtaining among classes of measure numbers. And it is these equations, rather than physical theories, that physicists actually work with. If they correctly predict the pointer readings in relevant experimental set-ups, then, by instrumentalist canons of truth, they are true. But this is far from establishing the objective truth of any physical theory with which they may be associated. As physics has advanced, this association has grown ever more tenuous. It is broadly true to say that as mechanistic conceptions of what was actually taking place among increasingly hypothetical entities and processes grew less and less adequate to account for the observations, the derivation of equations from physical theory tended to give way to the opposite process, with the equations themselves now being derived by the mathematical development of already existing equations, and guided by only the most general physical considerations.3 Hence modern physical theory is largely a question of interpreting empirically successful mathematics. What do these relations among measure numbers imply as to the nature of the physical world? Clearly, no logical necessity is operative here, the only even quasi-deductive process open to the physicist being grounded in the postulate of constant correspondence between mathematical and physical structure. But all the evidence, both empirical and rational, runs counter to the truth of this postulate. The most that such a hypothetical correspondence can do is to provide suggestions, and the physical absurdity of the great majority of these demonstrates, not the irrationality of the world, but only the worthlessness of the method.
Consideration of the two theories, special relativity and wave mechanics, which, together, can almost be said to define the new physics, and which have proved so fertile a source of inspiration for the 'mystically' inclined, fully bears out the justness of these strictures. The instrumental truth of the Lorentz Transformation Equations when used in conjunction with Maxwell's Electromagnetic Equations is thought to establish the objective truth of Einstein's special theory of relativity from whose postulates they can be derived. But, firstly, Maxwell's Equations, for which the Lorentz Transformations acts as a 'correction', are not the only equations that have been found to 'work'4; secondly, the Lorentz Transformation can be derived from quite different physical assumptions; thirdly, Einstein's theory is, in any case, irremediably false, as Herbert Dingle5, Louis Essen6 and others7 have conclusively proved, not least because it necessarily requires that each of two precisely similar clocks shall work steadily slower than the other simultaneously. All the evidence offered in support of this theory (and the general theory also) collapses under serious examination.8 One feels that Einstein was driven to this impossible position by an imperious 'aesthetic' intuition that the mathematical property of covariance, which the Lorentz Transformation exhibits, must also be a fundamental principle of cosmical organisation. The conflation of space and time into unimaginable space-time, which is popularly supposed to have transformed our conception of the universe more than any other revelation of the new physics, is nothing more than a wholly gratuitous physical interpretation of an ingenious piece of pure mathematics by Minkowski in which he translated the Lorentz Transformation into the language of four-dimensional geometry. But no mere change in mathematical vocabulary can tell us anything about the structure of space and time, even with the help of an inference as fanciful as any to be found in Alice in Wonderland. Even the belief that our conceptions have been changed is, at bottom, an illusion. Space remains space; time is still time. Which is not, of course, to imply that space and time are not most intimately associated. We live in a physical world which is, above all else, a system of interactions, and most, if not all, of these occur across intervening space and after an appreciable lapse of time.
The wave in wave mechanics appears because the equations which, as a system, effectively constitute the theory, possess the same general structure as those classical equations which gave accurate metrical descriptions of waves in membranes, strings and fluids. But whilst these equations make possible remarkably successful predictions for the instruments registering the behaviour of fundamental particles and their interactions with radiation, all attempts to provide a coherent physical interpretation of them have failed. Central to this failure is the so-called 'dual nature' of matter (and radiation) which they would seem to imply - that matter and radiation each possess an irreconcilable wave aspect and particle aspect.
If physicists had attempted even the most elementary metaphysical analysis they would know that the ultimate source of all their confusion is the particle concept. The particle is the root conception of materialism and so long as one believes in its objective existence, as defined by the attribute which a real philosopher has termed "undifferentiated endurance" (A.N.Whitehead, Process and Reality, II II V), so long one remains in all essential respects a mechanist, however 'mystical' one believes one's physical conceptions to be. (And such mind-crunching epistemological gaffes as particles hovering between existence and non-existence are not a contribution here). Just how much progress physics has made in this key area is strikingly revealed by the following quote. It is the opening sentence of a state of the art article entitled 'A Unified Theory of Elementary Particles and Forces' in the April 1981 issue of Scientific American by Howard Georgi, professor of physics at Harvard University: "There can be nothing simpler than an elementary particle: it is an indivisible shard of matter, without internal structure and without detectable shape or size". Clearly, where substance theory is concerned, physics is still in the days of Leucippus!
Far from serving as the principal channel for that spiritual ichor which is to regenerate a moribund humanity, the mystically speculative physicist constitutes a major impediment to its flow. That revolution in cosmic consciousness of which modern man stands so desperately in need, can only come about through a rationally coherent interpretation of our empirical knowledge as spiritualistic in form and substance as our present interpretation is materialistic. And the cloud of pure nonsense in which mathematico-mystical physicists have succeeded in enveloping the world, and through which alone, they have persuaded the educated public, ultimate truth can ever hope to emerge, cannot but greatly defer the general acceptance of this truly spiritual theory.
If physicists really wish to serve the best interests of humanity, they should rid themselves of the delusion that their absurd interpretations of unintelligible mathematics have any remote connections with genuine thought. They should learn to clearly distinguish, both in theory and practice, between science as an aid to understanding the world. and science as a means of manipulating the world. They should revert to the classical conception of mathematics as the servant, not the master, of physical theory. They should develop new physical conceptions, much more intimately and intelligently concerned with matter - following the admirable lead of Dr. Burniston Brown.9 Finally, and above all, they should leave philosophy to the philosophers: to those whose intellects (ideally, at least) are, at once, synoptic, rational, concrete, and constructive, and who alone have any chance of throwing a clear light upon the riddle of the world.
Notes:
1. Geoffrey Read, Bliss and Philosophy. A contribution to Nona
Coxhead's The Relevance of Bliss (UK: Wildwood House, 1985; USA: St Martin's Press, 1986).
2. Herbert Dingle, 'Definitions and Realities', The Listener, July 3, 1969.
3. Guy Burniston Brown, 'Must Western Science Decline?', The Listener, May 23, 1957.
4. P. Moon and D. E. Spencer, Electromagnetism without Magnetism: An Historical Sketch, Amer. J. Phys. 22, 120, (1954).
5. Herbert Dingle, Science at the Crossroads,Martin Brian and O'Keefe, London, 1972.
6. L.Essen, Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, Proc. Roy. Inst.. 45,1972.
7. G. Burniston Brown, What is Wrong with Relativity?, Bull. Inst.Phys. & Phys. Soc. 18, 71, (1967).
8. C. L. Poor, The Deflection of Light as Observed at Total Solar Eclipses, J . Opt. Soc.Amer., 20, 173-211, (1930).
9. G. Burniston Brown, Retarded Action-at-a-Distance, Cortney Publications, Luton, Bedfordshire, England, 1982.Geoffrey Read July 1987