The New Physics

According to the Eastern mystics, the direct mystical experience of reality is a momentous event which shakes the very foundations of one’s world view.

D. T. Suzuki has called it ‘the most startling event that could ever happen in the realm of human consciousness . . . upsetting every form of standardised experience’. He has illustrated the shocking character of this experience with the words of a Zen master who described it as ‘the bottom of a pail breaking through’.

Physicists, at the beginning of this century, felt much the same way when the foundations of their world view were shaken by the new experience of the atomic reality, and they described this experience in terms which were often very similar to those used by Suzuki’s Zen master.

Thus Heisenberg wrote :

The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science.*

Einstein experienced the same shock when he first came in contact with the new reality of atomic physics. He wrote in his autobiography:

All my attempts to adapt the theoretical foundation of physics to this (new type of) knowledge failed completely.

It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built.3

The discoveries of modern physics necessitated profound changes of concepts like space, time, matter, object, cause and effect, etc., and since these concepts are so basic to our way of experiencing the world it is not surprising that the physicists who were forced to change them felt something of a shock.

Out of these changes emerged a new and radically different world view, still in the process of formation by current scientific research.

Eastern mystics and Western physicists went through similar revolutionary experiences which led them to completely new ways of seeing the world.

This chapter will serve to sketch a preliminary picture of this new conception of the world against the contrasting background of classical physics;* showing how

Quantum theory and Relativity are the 2 basic theories of modern physics. These have forced us to:

• adopt a much more subtle, holistic and ‘organic’ view of nature
• abandon the classical mechanistic world view

CLASSICAL PHYSICS

The world view which was changed by the discoveries of modern physics had been based on Newton’s mechanical model of the universe.

This model constituted the solid framework of classical physics. It was indeed a most formidable foundation supporting, like a mighty rock, all of science and providing a firm basis for natural philosophy for almost three centuries.

The stage of the Newtonian universe, on which all physical phenomena took place, was the three-dimensional space of classical Euclidean geometry.

It was an absolute space, always at rest and unchangeable. In Newton’s own words, ‘Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, remains always similar and immovable.‘6

All changes in the physical world were described in terms of a separate dimension, called time, which again was absolute, having no connection with the material world and flowing smoothly from the past through the present to the future.

‘Absolute, true, and mathematical time,’ said Newton, ‘of itself and by its own nature, flows uniformly, without regard to anything external.”

The elements of the Newtonian world which moved in this absolute space and absolute time were material particles.

In the mathematical equations they were treated as ‘mass points’ and Newton saw them as small, solid, and indestructible objects out of which all matter was made. This model was quite similar to that of the Creek atomists. Both were based on the distinction between the full and the void, between matter and space, and in both models the particles remained always identical in their mass and shape.

Matter was therefore always conserved and essentially passive. The important difference between the Democritean and Newtonian atomism is that the latter includes a precise description of the force acting between the material particles.

This force is very simple, depending only on the masses and the mutual distances of the particles.

It is the force of gravity, and it was seen by Newton as rigidly connected with the bodies it acted upon, and as acting instantaneously over a distance.

Although this was a strange hypothesis, it was not investigated further. The particles and the forces between them were seen as created by God and

thus were not subject to further analysis. In his Opticks, Newton gives us a clear picture of how he imagined Cod’s creation of the material world:

It seems probable to me that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other roperties, and in such proportion to space, as most conduced to the end for which he formed them; and that hese primitive particles being solids, are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them; even so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide what God himself made one in the first creation.8

All physical events are reduced, in Newtonian mechanics, to the motion of material points in space, caused by their mutual attraction, i.e. by the force of gravity.

In order to put the effect of this force on a mass point into a precise mathematical form, Newton had to invent completely new concepts and mathematical techniques, those of differential calculus.

This was a tremendous intellectual achievement and has been praised by Einstein as ‘perhaps the greatest advance in thought that a single individual was ever privileged to make’.

Newton’s equations of motion are the basis of classical mechanics. They were considered to be fixed laws according to which material points move, and were thus thought to account for all changes observed in the physical world. In the Newtonian view, God had created, in the beginning, the material particles, the forces between them, and the funda- mental laws of motion.

In this way, the whole universe was set in motion and it has continued to run ever since, like a machine, governed by immutable laws.

The mechanistic view of nature is thus closely related to a rigorous determinism. The giant cosmic machine was seen as being completely causal and determinate. All that happened had a definite cause and gave rise to a definite effect, and the future of any part of the system could-in principle-be predicted with absolute certainty if its state at any time was known in all details. This belief found its clearest expression in the famous words of the French mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace :

An intellect which at a given instant knew all the forces acting in nature, and the position of all things of which the world consists-supposing the said intellect were vast enough to subject these data to analysis-would embrace in the same formula the motions of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the slightest atoms; nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes.

The philosophical basis of this rigorous determinism was the fundamental division between the I and the world introduced by Descartes.

As a consequence of this division, it was believed that the world could be described objectively, i.e. without ever mentioning the human observer, and such an objective description of nature became the ideal of all science.

The 18th and 19th centuries witnessed a tremendous success of Newtonian mechanics. Newton himself applied his theory to the movement of the planets and was able to explain the basic features of the solar system. His planetary model was greatly simplified, however, neglecting, for example, the gravitational influence of the planets on each other, and thus he found that there were certain irregularities which he could not explain. He resolved this problem by as- suming that Cod was always present in the universe to correct these irregularities.

Laplace, the great mathematician, set himself the ambitious task of refining and perfecting Newton’s calculations in a book which should ‘offer a complete solution of the great mechanical problem presented by the solar system, and bring theory to coincide so closely with observation that empirical equations would no longer find a place in astronomical tables’.‘0 The result was a large work in five volumes, called Mecanique Celeste in which Laplace succeeded in explaining the motions of the planets, moons and comets down to the smallest details, as well as the flow of the tides and other phenomena related to gravity. He showed that the Newtonian laws of motion assured the stability of the solar system and treated the universe as a perfectly self-regulating machine. When Laplace presented the first edition of his work to Napoleon- so the story goes-Napoleon remarked, ‘Monsieur Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.’ To this Laplace replied bluntly, ‘I had no need for that hypo- thesis.‘

Physicists extended Newtonian mechanics to:

• the continuous motion of fluids
• the vibrations of elastic bodies
• the theory of heat

Heat was the energy created by a complicated ‘jiggling’ motion of the molecules.

When the temperature of water is increased, the motion of the water molecules increases until they overcome the forces holding them together and fly apart. In this way, water turns into steam.

On the other hand, when the thermal motion is slowed down by cooling the water, the molecules finally lock into a new, more rigid pattern which is ice.

In a similar way, many other thermal phenomena can be understood quite well from a purely mechanistic point of view.

The enormous success of the mechanistic model made physicists of the early 19th century believe that the universe was a huge mechanical system running according to the Newtonian laws of motion.