ABSTRACT
Science, with lamentable human consequences, has radically misunderstood the universe. An error syndrome built into the foundations of theoretical physics is chiefly responsible. Its eradication leads logically to a universe that is both rational and in accord with our highest aspirations.

“ ' Life is a poor tale, if it is to be settled by nonsense of that sort,' said Caleb, with disgust.”¹

PHILOSOPHY AND TECHNOLOGY: A DISASTROUS DISPARITY
Science, as the systematic study of natural processes, is the offspring of philosophy and technology. And it incorporates the aims of both its parents. It is at once an attempt to understand the world and an attempt to change it.
At the very outset of the new science, the significance of this dual nature was not lost either upon Francis Bacon or that coterie of visionaries known as the Rosicrucians. Thus, Bacon asserted that the true end of knowledge was "the relief of man's estate",² but also that he aimed to build "in the temple of the human understanding, a true model of the world".³ He saw these two goals as complementary. The light shed by a profounder understanding of mankind's place within a divinely ordered universe would guide our burgeoning control over natural processes towards truly constructive ends. Power and wisdom would advance as one.
But although both Bacon and the Rosicrucians were convinced that mankind stood upon the threshold of an era of unprecedented knowledge, and although they both hoped and believed that "sound reason and true religion"⁴ would ensure this new knowledge's wise use, they were fully "aware of the dangers of the new science, of its diabolical as well as its angelical possibilities"⁵ "of building downwards towards earth, rather than upwards towards Heaven".⁶
Four centuries on, each passing decade makes it harder not to see that the diabolical (destructive) side of science is inexorably gaining ground at the expense of its angelical (constructive) possibilities. Far from having taken the ideal form of which the early visionaries dreamed, science has succeeded only in monstrously inflating a sickness of the spirit to which humanity is all too prone: materialism. And I use this word in both its main senses: the conception of a universe consisting solely of material bodies; and a lifestyle dominated by the pursuit of wealth. The aetiology of modern materialism could hardly be simpler: the success of science-as-technology, the failure of science-as-philosophy. Power without wisdom.
Our technology has attained a virtuosity that has far outstripped all prophecy. But its wise control has eluded us. The will to affluence - more bluntly, the profit motive - now dictates the socio-economic structure of the whole world; a world organised around the, increasingly interfused, tripartite structure of technology, big business, and the masses (in their dual role of workers and consumers). Nor does the track record of twentieth-century man exactly inspire us with confidence that the innate good sense and human decency of twenty-first-century man will prove adequate to cope with such radical economic, social, and political problems as a relentlessly expanding technology must surely create. No, the magnitude of our technological power calls for a commensurate philosophic wisdom. As Bertrand Russell wrote, "The problem of a durable and satisfactory social order can only be solved by combining the solidity of the Roman Empire with the idealism of St. Augustine's City of God. To achieve this a new philosophy will be needed."⁷
But where is such a philosophy to come from? Ideally, it would have to establish mankind's origin, nature, and destiny within a universe making both moral and intellectual sense. In which case, the age-old philosophic ambition of adding a dimension of profound satisfaction to human experience by grounding social order on cosmic order might conceivably be realised. But no such directives can issue from a scientific world-view that depicts people as randomly generated electrochemical machines inhabiting an arbitrary, indifferent and purposeless universe; a universe that would seem to have produced humanity despite, rather than because of, its basic nature; above all, a universe void of any spiritual dimension, and hence inimical to mankind's highest hopes. So that science-as-philosophy effectively condemns as illusory the only aims and ideals compelling enough to outcompete the allurements of the material riches created by science-as-technology. Hence, if this orthodox scientific world-view is even remotely true, the outlook for humanity is bleak indeed.

THE BLUNDER AT THE BASE OF PHYSICS
Fortunately, there is every reason to believe that it is very far from true: that science, far from having understood the universe, has succeeded only in radically misunderstanding it. It may at once be objected: "But how can that possibly be? Surely our dominion over natural processes is proof enough that we understand them." However, such essentially practical knowledge is perfectly compatible with a shallow or perverted theoretical understanding. And, in fact, although the scientific world-view unquestionably incorporates some basic truths, these are far outweighed in significance by its fundamental untruths, both of omission and commission.
If, then, science has gone wildly astray in its attempt to establish the nature of the universe, where and how has it done so? Happily, this question may be answered with pinpoint precision, since all science's many theoretical errors can be shown to stem from a single basic error syndrome: the Fatal Trap of my title. The general form under which commonsense practical man conceives the world is that of a system of solid enduring bodies interacting within an all-enveloping space. The Fatal Trap, the root conception of mechanism, is really no more than this naively realistic conception adopted into systematic thought, first entering it in the form of Greek atomism. Its essence lies in believing that the objective world consists ultimately of intrinsically unchanging elementary particles in motion within some independently existing, quasi-substantial, extended medium: space.
It is, above all, this Fatal Trap that has given rise to the myth of an incomprehensible universe.⁸ It furnishes a theory of physical substance (matter) fatal to monism and dualism alike. For the monist it leads inevitably to the sterile, life-degrading absurdities of mechanistic materialism; for the dualist, no less inevitably, to equally absurd conceptions of 'other substances', and hence to the impossibility of coherently relating the physical and spiritual realms. I once described it, without exaggeration, as, " ... the most deadly fallacy ever to hold sway over the intellect of man, because the most humanly destructive".⁹
As I say, the Fatal Trap first entered systematic thought in the form of Greek atomism, and via the post-Renaissance revival of atomism by Galileo, Descartes et alia,¹⁰ became built into the theoretical foundations of Newtonian physics, whence it has descended to us. Ironically, the deadly potency of this most vicious of all error syndromes is strengthened rather than weakened by the fact that it incorporates, if in radically distorted form, two fundamental truths: that all complex entities are syntheses of simpler, and that all material bodies are ultimately composed of spatially elementary entities (without this in the least implying the existence of any spatial medium). It is to these two truths that mechanism owes whatever explanatory success it has achieved.
For the ordinary human observer, objective changes of material bodies consist of two great kinds: spatial, where the body stays intrinsically the same, but changes its location relative to other bodies, and intrinsic, where the body itself changes radically, as when wood becomes smoke and ash, or grass transforms to milk etc. The great achievement of classical (Newtonian) atomism, in combination with another theory also first advanced by the Greeks - element theory - was seemingly to account for all intrinsic changes in terms of spatial rearrangements of a relatively few kinds of fundamental particle. And though modern (post-classical) physics has shown that classical atoms are not, after all, elementary, but themselves consist of different spatial arrangements of even more elementary kinds of particle, the essential error, that all intrinsic change is ultimately resolvable into spatial change, persists - the more insidiously for being overlaid by a mass of mathematically generated pseudo-conceptions.

THE BLUNDER LAID BARE
But this superficial explanatory success leaves on the conceptual hands of those immured in the Fatal Trap two sets of wholly insoluble problems: those relating to the origins, nature, and interrelations of matter, space, and time; and those relating to the emergence of life, mind, and spirit out of a physical world so conceived.
In dealing with the first set, we confine ourselves to the more obvious incoherences. The first of these is the void, or extended nothingness - a straight contradiction in terms. The only way to avoid the void is to do what Descartes, Maxwell, and others did: fill space with an aether. But not only does this create more problems than it solves, through the impossibility of intelligibly defining aetheric substance and relating it to material substance; it falls victim to what I call the fallacy of primitive extension, which applies to any spatial medium, full or empty. Thus, since any part of an extended medium may be subdivided, any such subdivision may be further subdivided and so on indefinitely. This implies that any extended entity is composed of an infinity of juxtaposed infinitesimal extensions - an absurd notion. Hence, if an atom is extended it is infinitely subdivisible; if it is not extended, in what sense can it be said to occupy or move through space? Moreover, it will be noted that extension, as such, is never defined here; it is simply taken as a brute fact. As also is matter, since, if asked what a material body consists of, the materialist may answer, "Atoms". But, if asked what an atom consists of, he can only give the empty answer, "Matter".
As for time - to talk of time elapsing when nothing is changing is certainly to talk nonsense. But what is changing here? Not, by definition, the atoms themselves; only their distances apart in space. But if we consider a single atom without reference to others, nothing at all changes when it ‘moves through‘ space. Indeed, the very concept of motion has no meaning applied to an isolated particle. How, then, can the mere existence of other atoms, to each of which the same strictures apply, essentially affect this situation? Collective change must ultimately arise from individual change, not vice versa. There are other insuperable objections to this atomistic conception, but enough has been said to establish that it is no more than a tissue of absurdities: the naively realistic attribution of certain features of the world as perceived to that objective world from which this ultimately derives.

MATHEMATICAL TAKEOVER
We have already noted one reason why classical physics, despite having this nonsense built into its theoretical foundations, enjoyed considerable success. We now investigate another. Newton's epochal work was entitled, "The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy". What Newton meant by "Mathematical Principles" is best illustrated by his law of gravity. By his own admission,¹¹ Newton had no causal theory of gravity. Like all mechanists, the only kind of causal connection between bodies he could envisage was transmission of momentum by impact - one body bumping into another. As this was clearly out of the question for gravity, he was content to give a precise - which is to say, metrical - description of the behaviour of two bodies under mutual gravitational attraction and leave it at that. Such a metrical description we call a formula, or, more illuminatingly, a measure-number equation. Now, every equation is the expression of a relation between numbers. But twos and threes don't grow on trees. Where, in the equations of science, do the numbers come from? A few are obtained by counting, but the great majority are either read off calibrated measuring instruments, or else obtained by calculation from such numbers.
Measure numbers were hierarchically systematised by defining the unit measures of less fundamental physical quantities as mathematical combinations of more - ultimately, of quantity of matter (whose measure Newton called mass), length, time, and one electrical quantity. On the basis of the coordinated changes of pointer readings in experiments, new measure-number equations could be formed. Then, by working upon these mathematically, vast ramifying systems of measure-number equations were constructed; principally with the aim of exhibiting the less general equations as instances of the more, but with their variables restricted to certain values by local conditions - as, for example, by showing that Kepler's laws were no other than Newton's law of gravity acting within that particular set of constraints we call a planetary system. It is these vast interconnected systems of measure-number equations which make up the real theoretical substance of physics; physical theories inferred from them being of an altogether more nebulous nature. As Alfred O'Rahilly put it in what is perhaps the most devastating critique of modern physics yet written: "A clear distinction must be made between a physicist's algebra and his discourse. ... The only scientifically relevant and effective portion of a book on physics is its quantitative formulae ... "¹²
But although Newton was wholly unable to explain gravity, he could at least describe its effects in clearly picturable terms. As physics progressed experimentally, more especially when it began systematically to investigate the 'subtle fluids' - electricity, magnetism, heat, and light - it found itself less and less able even to give a clear description of what was happening - that is, the nature of the physical processes its instruments were measuring! But an altogether profounder level of unintelligibility was reached with the advent of those two conceptual revolutions effectively defining modern physics: quantum theory and relativity. However, by adapting and developing the equations of classical physics until they accorded with the new experimental results - a process in which physical considerations played a distinctly minor role - mathematics proved itself easily able to cope with the task of constructing satisfactory measure-number equations. For the most part new physical theory was derived from these new equations by a process of analogy. That is, by a process of modifying the classical physical conceptions, of which the classical equations were supposedly the metrical embodiment, in ways dictated by the mathematical developments of those equations. Inevitably, in due course, 'theoretical physicist' became synonymous with 'mathematical physicist'.
With that mechanistic core conception, the Fatal Trap, still firmly in place, this derivation of physics from measure-number mathematics could produce only one result: a kind of mechanism run mad, possessing, at most, heuristic value. Wave mechanics, the most successful formulation of quantum theory, was defined by the then Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics, as: " ... a system of equations which determines the behaviour of the fundamental particles of physics, the electron, the proton, the neutron, and their interaction with radiation."¹³ No mention of any theory! But this did not prevent the theorists glibly talking of 'matter waves', 'wave fields', and - basic to Heisenberg's Principle of Indeterminacy - 'wave packets', despite the fact that no remotely coherent physical conception of these was forthcoming. The case is even worse with relativity. In an ingenious but chimerical attempt to reconcile kinematics with electromagnetism by "... exploiting an elementary piece of mathematics ...",¹⁴ Einstein was obliged to advance two fundamental physical postulates which, taken together, "required each of two clocks to work steadily and continuously both faster and slower than the other"!¹⁵ Needless to say, all those wondrous revelations as to space and time that relativity has spawned, owe their existence solely to formal similarities and differences between its equations and the physically meaningful equations of classical physics. Truly, "The mathematicians got their chance and the semi-educated developed their natural gullibility".¹⁶
Modern physics is a compound of prodigious technology, sophisticated mathematics, and simplistic philosophy. This gulf between experimental and theoretical physics is amusingly highlighted by the following statement of intent by a Nobel Prize-winning experimental physicist: "I am happy to eat Chinese dinners with theorists, but to spend your life doing what they tell you is a waste of time".¹⁷ Finally, a quote from a widely read scientific journal: "Take quantum theory, the laws of the subatomic world. Over the past century it has passed every single test with flying colours, with some predictions vindicated to ten places of decimals. Not surprisingly, physicists claim quantum theory as one of their greatest triumphs. But behind their boasts lies a guilty secret: they haven't the slightest idea why the laws work, or where they come from. All their vaunted equations are just mathematical lash-ups, made out of bits and pieces from other parts of physics whose main justification is that they seem to work."¹⁸

BIOLOGICAL IMPOTENCE
We turn now to the second set of insoluble problems bequeathed us by the Fatal Trap. Mechanistic science has produced incontrovertible evidence both that the living world has evolved step-by-step out of the non-living, and that living organisms are composed of the same ultimate 'particles' as inanimate bodies. For science, the sole difference between the living and the non-living lies in the incomparably more complex ways in which these same 'particles' are organised. Yet its explanatory impotence is exposed by its mindless insistence that to account for this prodigious increase in systemic organisation, no forces other than those of the inanimate world need be invoked. But such forces acting alone would not account for the simplest living organism, let alone a human being. "The capacity somehow to maintain order and system in physico-chemical conditions which ordinarily tend to dissipate and destroy them presupposes some influence able to mobilize and direct the available free energy in such a way as to build up organized structure in higher and more complicated forms than those at the physical level ... . That there is some such influence at work in living processes is clearly evident from the facts, but what precisely it may be, and how precisely it functions, are matters not yet scientifically understood".¹⁹
So that even a living world viewed from the naive, interacting-bodies-in-space standpoint exposes the explanatory bankruptcy of mechanism. But how much more is this the case when we turn to the realities of consciousness. Why (as the mechanist feebly maintains) should unchanging particles moving through space, in no matter what intricacy of pattern, be experienced as sensation, emotion, memory, thought, imagination, and will? And when we turn to the vast, age-old body of paranormal and mystical experience - or even to those vistas and abysses of the human spirit revealed in works of imaginative genius - mechanistic impotence is so absolute as to require no comment.

RETHINKING BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
If, then, in walking unthinkingly into the Fatal Trap, science took the wrong path, where lay the right? To determine this, the first step is (if necessary) to disabuse oneself of the naively realistic notion that the two essential components of the Fatal Trap - intrinsically unchanging bodies, and a spatial medium - are given in immediate experience as part of the objective world. They are components of the perceived world, but even mechanistic science - as witnessed by its incorporation of the theory of primary and secondary qualities - recognises that such components need not also be part of the objective world. And, indeed, such empirical evidence as we have tends strongly to confirm the rational evidence that both compartments of the Fatal Trap are mere conceptual fictions. Thus, neurophysiology has established that all neural transmission takes the form of a series of discrete pulses; which suggests that what we take for unchanging sensation is really a regular sequence of changes too rapid for individual discrimination. As for space, psychology of perception shows this to be a mere conceptual abstraction from spatial relations: regularly recurring relations of succession and simultaneity among our sensations (more especially, visual and kinaesthetic) organised, with the intimate participation of memory, around a near-constant proprioceptive framework provided by our own-body image.

THE UNIVERSE TRANSFORMED
If, then, no spatial medium exists, the only way to account for physical change is to locate it within the ultimate 'particles' themselves. In reality, therefore, these must be sequences of changes, with each successive change defining one instant of time.²⁰ Thus, the atomist got it precisely wrong, in effect, standing the physical world on its head: instead of all intrinsic change being ultimately explicable as spatial change, all spatial change must ultimately be explicable as intrinsic change. And spatial relations, instead of being due to orderly motions of unchanging particles through space, must consist of exquisitely coordinated changes among instant events. Thus, 'matter' is not a stuff but a process: a conception tending to assimilate it to information. And, as a well-known physicist has put it, " ... if matter turns out to be a form of organised information, then consciousness may not be so mysterious after all."²¹
With this sequential conception of the physical world, the myth of an inexplicable universe is exploded - all barriers to a fully rational conception of the universe melting away. No insurmountable obstacle confronts us in resolving all the ultimate metaphysical problems, and incorporating within a perfectly rational - if hyperdaedalian - world-theory, not only all our scientific knowledge, and all human experience, but also such profound truths, traditionally associated with religion, as survival of death and reincarnation. Although the purpose of this article is primarily critical, I feel it would be a mistake to conclude without having drawn attention to two basic structural features of the sequential process which go far to account for what might otherwise puzzle the reader: why this inversion of the basic relation between spatial and intrinsic change should possess such overwhelming consequences.
Firstly, the nature of the sequential process is such as to require every sequence to bifurcate at every instant. 'Our universe' or Cosmos, comprises an ordered sub-set, self-selected out of a totality through the exclusive possession of certain unifying principles. Since the amount of 'matter' in 'our universe' stays at least broadly constant from instant to instant, it follows that at every instant on the great majority of sequences (conceivably all), one alternative is cosmically selected, and one not. Thus the Cosmos is, as it were, unremittingly steered on its course by the selective action of its basic unifying principles. We call these 'the laws of nature', and experience their selective constraints as 'forces'.
Secondly, in the mechanistic conception, each moment is conceived as a particular spatial configuration of unchanging particles. But this configuration, by immediately giving way to another under the action of interparticle forces, necessarily vanishes without trace. In the sequential conception nothing like this occurs. Each instant change is added to, and qualified by, its instant sequential predecessors. Mechanistic process is commutative; sequential process, cumulative. Hence, the past persists indefinitely. This persisting past also exerts a selective constraint upon the cosmic present: the long sought, but hitherto elusive, 'life force'. Clearly, mechanism mistakes the hide for the living animal.

CREATIVE VALUES
With the Fatal Trap lucidly dismantled, and the mechanistic world-view centred upon it wholly discredited, the way is open for the philosophical dimension of science to become as successful as its technological, and thereby to achieve the latter's wise use. Thus, the fundamental ethical imperative of beings whose fundamental nature is that of active participants in a universal creative process, must be, in order to fulfill that nature, to live creatively. Just how, in any particular historical context, creative values are to achieve concrete realisation in the form of the mores, laws, artefacts, institutions etc. of our societies, must be the unceasing constructive preoccupation of mankind. But the perennial raw material out of which such creative living must be wrought, must always comprise not only our human relationships, personal and social, but, equally, our relationship both with the natural world, and with that transcendental spiritual order out of which we have emerged at birth, and to which, at death, we shall return.

Notes and References:
1. George Eliot, Middlemarch, Penguin Classics, p.410.
2. The Advancement of Learning, I, V, 11.
3. The New Organon, I, CXXIV.
4. ibid. I, CXXIX.
5. Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. Ark Paperbacks, 1986, p.233.
6. Comenius, quoted ibid., p.191.
7. History of Western Philosophy, 1946. George Allen and Unwin. p.515.
8. For its effect upon physicists, see, for example, The Passion of the Western Mind, by Richard Tarnas. Ballantine, 1991. p.p. 358-9.
9.The Listener (24.10.1974), Letters, "The Ghost of a Billiard Ball".
10. This does not include Bacon. See The New Organon, II, VIII, where he explicitly repudiates the Fatal Trap..
11. Newton quoted three times to this effect. See E.N. da C. Andrade, Isaac Newton, 1950. Max Parrish. p.81.
12. Alfred O’Rahilly, Electromagnetics. A Discussion of Fundamentals, Longmans, 1938. Dover Edition, 1965. p. 374.
13. N.F. Mott, Elements of Wave Mechanics, 1962. Cambridge University Press. p.21.
14. O'Rahilly, (Reference 12), p.421.
15. Herbert Dingle. Science at the Crossroads, 1972. Martin Brian & O'Keefe. p.228. (A must for anyone seriously wishing to understand the true nature of 'relativity' - and, indeed, of modern physics in general).
16. O'Rahilly, (Reference 12), p.851.
17. Samuel C.C. Ting, quoted by Dick Terisi, The New York Times Book Review (5.9.1993), p.11.
18. Robert Matthews, New Scientist (30.1.1999), p.24.
19. Errol E. Harris, The Foundation of Metaphysics in Science, 1965. George Allen and Unwin. p.175.
20. Here, then, we touch on the real nature of that underlying periodic activity which the fatally trapped physicist can conceive only as 'waves'.
21. Paul Davies, New Scientist (30.1.1999), p.3.

Geoffrey Read.
January - February 2000

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