Modern Physics: A Path with a Heart?

Modern physics has become the basis of natural science.

The combination of natural and technical science has fundamentally changed life on our earth, both in beneficial and detrimental ways.

Today, there is hardly an industry that does not make use of the results of nuclear physics.

Nuclear weapons have had influence on the political structure of the world.

However, the influence of modern physics goes beyond technology. It extends to the realm of thought and culture where it has led to a deep revision in man’s conception of the universe and his relation to it.

The exploration of the atomic and subatomic world in the 20h century has:

• revealed the limitation of classical ideas
• necessitated a radical revision of many basic concepts.

For example, the concept of matter in subatomic physics is totally different from the traditional idea of a material substance in classical physics.

The same is true for concepts like space, time, or cause and effect.

These concepts are fundamental to our outlook on the world around us.

If they are radically transformed, then our whole world view also changes.

These changes are brought about by modern physics.

They all seem to lead towards a view of the world which is very similar to the views held in Eastern mysticism.

These parallels have not yet been discussed extensively. But they have been noticed by some of the great physicists of our century when they came in contact with Far Eastern culture during their lecture tours to India, China and Japan.

This book explores this relationship between:

• the concepts of modern physics
• the basic ideas in the philosophical and religious traditions of the Far East.

Quantum theory and Relativity are the 2 foundations of 20th-century physics.

These both force us to see the world as how a Hindu, Buddhist or Taoist sees it,

This similarity strengthens when we look at the recent attempts to combine these two theories in order to describe the properties and interactions of the subatomic particles of matter.

Here the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism are most striking.

‘Eastern mysticism’ refers to the religious philosophies of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism.

My argument is that modern physics leads us to a view of the world which is very similar to those held by mystics of all ages and traditions.

The parallels to modern physics appear in:

• the Vedas of Hinduism
• the I Ching
• the Buddhist sutras
• the fragments of Heraclitus
• the Sufism of Ibn Arabi
• the teachings of the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan.

The difference between Eastern and Western mysticism is that mystical schools have always played a marginal role in the West, whereas they constitute the mainstream of Eastern philosophical and religious thought.

I shall therefore, for the sake of simplicity, talk about the ‘Eastern world view’ and shall only occasionally mention other sources of mystical thought.

If physics leads us today to a world view which is essentially mystical, it returns, in a way, to its beginning, 2,500 years ago.

It is interesting to follow the evolution of Western science along its spiral path, starting from the mystical philosophies of the early Greeks, rising and unfolding in an impressive development of intellectual thought that increasingly turned away from its mystical origins to develop a world view which is in sharp contrast to that of the Far East.

In its most recent stages, Western science is finally overcoming this view and coming back to those of the early Creek and the Eastern philosophies.

This time, however, it is not only based on intuition, but also on experiments of great precision and sophistication, and on a rigorous and consistent mathematical formalism.

The roots of physics, as of all Western science, are to be found in the first period of Greek philosophy in the 6th century BC when science, philosophy and religion were not separated.

The sages of the Milesian school in lonia were not concerned with such distinctions. Their aim was to discover the essential nature of things which they called ‘physis’.

The term ‘physics’ is derived from this Greek word and meant the endeavour of seeing the essential nature of all things.

This is also the central aim of all mystics. The philosophy of the Milesian school did have a strong mystical flavour.

The Milesians were called ‘hylozoists’, or ‘those who think matter is alive’, by the later Greeks, because they saw no distinction between animate and inanimate, spirit and matter.

In fact, they did not even have a word for matter, since they saw all forms of existence as manifestations of the ‘physis’, endowed with life and spirituality.

Thus, Thales declared all things to be full of gods.

Anaximander saw the universe as a kind of organism which was supported by ‘pneuma’, the cosmic breath, in the same way as the human body is supported by air.

The monistic and organic view of the Milesians was very close to that of ancient Indian and Chinese philosophy.