The second chapter may look a little more complicated if we are looking into the concepts. It gives us a picture of the similarity between the eastern mythical world and western science. In the chapter, the author goes from one world where classical physics to the quantum world. But it doesn\’t destroy the older concepts; instead, it keeps both as equal parts of science. Also, here we could see science, especially physics, becoming more philosophical than we ever met. Continuing from the previous chapter, we could see a significant shift in the scientific world\’s image. Here, we could see the science more or less linked to our senses, perceptions, consciousness, and, ultimately, our cognition. So science isn\’t absolutely independent even though it is mentioned so. Science is cited as an objective search. But one cannot put himself away from the investigation, as there will always be some subjective opinion. So these are the critical things that we could see in this chapter.
Most physicists believe that there will be a large enough theory to incorporate all of the branches of physics, which are very diverse as we see. But the explanations given by humans need not be how it actually works. Einstein had spent a large portion of his career arguing against quantum mechanics, but the controversy is his own contributions to the branch. But we\’ve to see that quantum mechanics emerged in history when physics was stuck on some observations that classical physics couldn\’t explain. So it wasn\’t desired by conventional physicists. Quantum mechanics could be read as the study of the motion of quantities, and in short, it is the study of fragmentation of nature. But quite interestingly, it doesn\’t displace or replace Newtonian worldview, but it has a broader view that could actually
include that also as it stays valid in some limits. Here we are even finding the limits of our previous theory. In Einstein\’s words building a new idea is not like destroying an old building and constructing a skyscraper on it, but it is more like climbing a mountain. As high we reach, the broader view we get. Newtonian physics could still work better in our large-scale daily life, but not applicable to the subatomic realm where things are totally different. This is actually the point where quantum mechanics enters.
The idea of the indivisible atom, which had been proposed 100years before Christ, was still an idea until late 1800. Then some scientists find devices to observe atomic phenomena and proved the theory. But later, physicists could find more fundamental building blocks such as electrons, protons, and neutrons. Here also, they believed that they had reached the end. The theory of elementary particles, similar to ancient Greek ideas, was nothing else. The observations from the quantum world weren\’t explained by Newtonian ideas, although it could explain the macroscopic world very well. Basically, classical physics is made for observable phenomena that we could encounter in our day-to-day life. But quantum mechanics deals with phenomena that we cannot directly observe with any of our senses, making it totally different.
Newton\’s physics actually depicts things that we can imagine and picture. But quantum mechanics play with probabilities related to some events which cannot be visualized. So it is better not to make a complete picture of quantum events, so our effort has to be without creating an image of something we\’ve never seen before. From Werner Heisenberg\’s words, the more mathematical nature of quantum theory shows clearly that our ordinary intuitive concepts cannot be directly applied to that tiny world. The idea of getting a clear picture of something to make our concepts clear about that is a product of the Newtonian world. It is the kind of processing that we already got from the ordinary world where classical ideas are dominant and aren\’t familiar with the quantum world.
Now we could look at how Newtonian concepts became great. In the past, where Aristotelian thoughts were dominant, Aristotle presented his laws of motion. Here we\’ve to see that until then, the world believed that the natural tendency of a moving object was to attain the state of rest as they were not familiarized with the concept of physics. Secondly, those theories could explain non-observable things at that time. They could explain the motion of celestial bodies. The validity of any law or idea proposed by Newton was its reproducibility that anyone doing the same experiment could exactly get the same result.
The Newtonian physics was actually a challenge to the Church as what the authority had said for about many hundred years was never subjected to any experimentation. But the Church had a considerable power that could torture Galileo because he supported heliocentrism. This action made an impression of the Church among people and philosophers like Rene Descartes. But Descartes\’s idea was that the universe and everything in it is an Autonoma. Perhaps due to his influence, until recently, many were still believing that a galaxy is a great machine, and we are still trying to figure out how it actually works.
Even though we take it for granted, the gravitational theory is another most significant contribution of Newton. Old physics called the action at a distance as an unexplainable phenomenon. In his famous work Philosophia Naturalis, Principia Mathematica, Newton had already written that everything he had explained and formulated about gravity phenomenon but could not explain the cause behind it. But according to him, it is enough to believe in the existence of gravity. So it could be described, but it was tough to explain.
Another critical feature was that Newton could destroy the division as earthly and heavenly bodies as people at that time believed. He could show that the law regulating the free fall of an apple on the earth was also causing celestial bodies\’ motion through his observations and calculations. Newton could find the similarities among significant movements of nature and could give mathematical formulation for all those. In short, the proof that the universe is structured in a rationally comprehensive view. Galileo, following the middle ages, was more concentrated on the physical world and phenomena. And it was Rene Descartes who developed the fundamental technique of modern mathematics and picture of the universe as a great machine. And Newton developed laws governing this machine. Their concept is based on the thought that human is the center of all, similar to the medieval scholasticism in an attempt to show that humanity need not be a bystander in a world governed by forces. This could be seen as an irony as what they had shown was a great machine which was just opposite to what they had tried to prove. And power is nothing if it is not the power to choose. Newton\’s laws enabled us to predict an object if we know about its past. The more information we have, the more accuracy we can expect. This prediction could be about an event in history. And we can\’t do many things without classical mechanics such as space programs. For more complex dynamics such as a chamber of gas, more data is needed. But if it\’s always true that if we have enough information, we could predict a future event, it is like we are playing a prewritten story. Here is free will, and the ability to alter the course of events becomes an illusion. This can be seen as the blind mechanism of the great machine.
But this is not possible by quantum mechanics, even by principle, to predict the future with available information. It is not a matter of precision or the effort we can put into our task. It is just the fact that we can only accurately measure one, not all the aspect of a thing at a time, as we could also see in what said by Neils Bohr. In Newtonian mechanics, we can precisely predict the events of a moving object. But in quantum mechanics, we cannot simultaneously predict position and momentum accurately, as per the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The key feature of quantum mechanics is that the contradictions that we could meet with our common sense. In these theories, the output is only probabilities. It will not give an absolute answer. By Newton, the universe is governed by laws. This point of view is kind of religious, and the rules are like the manifestation of God as it explains the function of the machine. It is actually the introduction of a new view called natural philosophy. But the irony is that this natural, at last, reduces to the hopeless human trapped in a gigantic machine, which had been already programmed on the very day of its creation. Quantum mechanics clearly tells that we cannot predict subatomic phenomena with certainty but could only obtain their probabilities. In a way, it is like the observer is creating a property by choosing that. So the existence of those properties before the act of observation becomes a big question mark. From John Wheeler\’s words, we are clear that an observer\’s classical concept, which doesn\’t interfere with any aspect of an experiment, is no longer valid in the quantum realm. Here we could see the merging of Eastern mythology and western science. It opens a strange world of
fantasy, which no longer could be explained by pure rational thought considered science for an extended period.
Both Newtonian and quantum mechanics are partners in a double irony. Newton was more cautious on laws and powers governing observable phenomena and eventually leading to the great machine. Modern physics leads to the probability that our reality is what we choose to make it. This may look totally different from our previous concepts of Newton. So the harmless observer would have all its effect on its surroundings. But looking at an experiment in classical physics, this may seem to be strange. Indeed it is so for the classical world, and it doesn\’t care about the person involved in it. Due to these facts, philosophers had believed that the physical world is wholly controlled by those laws and forces. That is the excellent machine impersonal. This leads to absolute objectivity. All these show the contrast between those two streams and how the world manifests differently for each person according to our thoughts.
We have to examine the concept of scientific objectivity here, in which an
the external environment is observed by an observer as objectively as possible. It actually means to see something as it would appear to an observer who has no prejudices about what he kept. But honestly, this decision to be objective is subjective, which affects one\’s perceptions. Quantum mechanics tells that it is impossible to observe reality without changing it. So there is almost nothing that could be called an objective. As we discussed before, this tells us about the continuity of one and its external nature. As we are also a part of the heart, we study nature itself doing it to itself. This explains how physics has become a branch of psychology or another way around.
The book actually leads to a beautiful concept here that what we experience around us is the thing there is in our unconscious mind. From Carl Jung\’s words, when one is not aware of his or her hard part, it happens outside. In his own words, \”The world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.\” This may seem to be a little complicated to see opposite halves of the same person becoming a reality, as reality is what we perceive. By Wolfgang Pauli, it is like the movement of the inner center of the psyche outward, in the sense of an extraversion into the physical world. Here we could see that physics is also a study of the structure of consciousness. And at the end of the discussion about the size of subatomic particles, the author tells us that those are not like dust particles or something like that as we would think.
These words by the author tell us about the characteristics of this branch of physics. But we only know those are only quantities of something and don\’t know what actually it is. And at the subatomic level, energy and matter are interconvertible. And if there is a vast number of them or observations involved, there is no wonder that we have to deal with probabilistic calculation, precisely what happens in quantum mechanics. And it could give us a fairly good interpretation of how the group will behave based on our repeated observations. We could find the probabilistic calculations in Newtonian physics also.
This will be clearer if we think about gas molecules in a chamber, which is exerting pressure on the walls. It is the result of that tiny atom that obeys classical mechanics, hitting on the walls. Even though it is not quantifying the microscopic effects, it is expressed as a macroscopic property. In short, the pressure results from the collision of a large number of particles, collection of a large number of events. Each of these events could be analyzed as it is governed by classical mechanics, but the only difference that will appear there is the probability and statistics.
Even though both quantum and Newtonian mechanics use statistics, there is a big difference. In quantum mechanics, there is no way to predict an individual event. So it concerns only about group events. And statistical mechanics, which deals with a system rather than a particular event, could be considered the soul of this branch. And this is how it became a perfect tool to deal with subatomic phenomena. For an example of radioactivity, we could say how much of them would decay in a given time but not which one will decay. There is no physical law giving an idea. Atomic spectra are also a good example, and we cannot predict which atom would stop wherein excitation or emission. This actually depicts the central philosophical issue. What even quantum mechanics describes? On the other way is predicting the overall behavior of a system or statistical probability of an individual event or something else? The description of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics in 1927 tells us about a similar problem. Still, this event becomes an acceptance of a new stream of physics as a more consistent worldview. The actual question faced at Brussels was whether we are actually able to replace Newtonian mechanics. Even though Einstein opposed this in 1927 until his death, forced to acknowledge it\’s an advantage in predicting subatomic phenomena.
In short, the interpretation only cares about whether it is working good or not and not what it is. In a sense, the author tells us that it is the fusion of our psyche\’s rational part with the irrational part of it, which was ignored since 1700. And there was also a concept of absolute truth even we cannot perceive it directly. Quantum mechanics replace or discards laws governing individual events with those governing aggregations.
Our mind actually deals with ideas, and it is not possible to relate to anything other than pictures. The mind can\’t directly ponder into reality; it needs the language of thoughts. So the concept of absolute truth is not about how close it corresponds to the whole truth but how consistent it with our experience. Which implies the new physics have to be based on human.
A further explanation of the interpretations is given by the concept of the difference between the left, and right hemispheres of the brain seems a little fictitious. The reason is such that the rational and logical views are more based on the left part, and the right amount is for irrational thoughts similar to the concept of yin and yang. Our society has a dominant left hemisphere bias and gives very little space to the right hemisphere. So the advent of science is marked by the growing dominance of left hemisphere thinking over right, which is descended to the underground psyche. The concept of unconsciousness by Freud explains it as a dark, mysterious and irrational as the same way as the left could see the right.
But more than a scientific event, Copenhagen\’s interpretation was a recognition of limits of left hemisphere thoughts and a call back of those psychic aspects, which long had been ignored in a rationalistic society. More often physicist is those people who actually wonder at the universe. The experience of wonder, which is perception itself, is understood in ways other than rational. Even the act of mere observation without any intention to understand anything will give us an idea, but we may not be able to put it into words. Wu Li masters perceive both rational and irrational, assertive and receptive, masculine and feminine, but they neither reject one nor the other. As we could see, such a vision is more contrasting. We could see the universe more clearly, more eventfully, and not bounded by any concepts. One like that is free to experience, perceive the universe in his own way where it has more beauty.
So this chapter is not only about the difference between Newtonian and quantum mechanics. And how it is different in psychological and socio-cultural aspects. The link between psychology and physics may seem to be a wonder to a student. But more deeply, the contrast thoughts in humans have a significant role in perceptions and hence in science. So science cannot be entirely independent of humans.
abstract thoughts 