The Dynamic Universe

The central aim of Eastern mysticism is to experience all phenomena in the world as manifestations of the same ultimate reality. This reality is seen as the essence of the universe, underlying and unifying the multitude of things and events we observe. The Hindus call it &&man, the Buddhists Dharma- kaya (the Body of Being), or Tathata (Suchness), and the Taoists Tao; each affirming that it transcends our intellectual concepts and defies further description. This ultimate essence, however, cannot be separated from its multiple manifestations. It is central to its very nature to manifest itself in myriad forms which come into being and disintegrate, transforming them- selves into one another without end. In its phenomenal aspect, the cosmic One is thus intrinsically dynamic, and the appre- hension of its dynamic nature is basic to all schools of Eastern mysticism. Thus D. T. Suzuki writes about the Kegon school of Mahayana Buddhism, The central idea of Kegon is to grasp the universe dynamic- ally whose characteristic is always to move onward, to be forever in the mood of moving, which is life.’ This emphasis on movement, flow and change is not only characteristic of the Eastern mystical traditions, but has been an essential aspect of the world view of mystics throughout the ages. In ancient Greece, Heraclitus taught that ‘everything flows’ and compared the world to an ever-living fire, and in Mexico, the Yaqui mystic Don Juan talks about the ‘fleeting world’ and affirms that ‘to be a man of knowledge one needs to be light and fluid.‘*

In Indian philosophy, the main terms used by Hindus and Buddhists have dynamic connotations. The word Brahman is derived from the Sanskrit root brih-to grow-and thus suggests a reality which is dynamic and alive. In the words of S. Radhakrishnan, The word Brahman means growth and is suggestive of life, motion and progress.‘3 The &an&ha& refer to Brahman as ‘this unformed, immortal, moving’,4 thus associating it with motion even though it transcends all forms. The Rig Vecfa uses another term to express the dynamic nature of the universe, the term Rita. This word comes from the root ri-to move; its original meaning in the Rig Veda being ‘the course of all things’, ‘the order of nature’. It plays an important role in the legends of the Veda and is connected with all the Vedic gods. The order of nature was conceived by the Vedic seers, not as a static divine law, but as a dynamic principle which is inherent in the universe. This idea is not unlike the Chinese conception of Tao-The Way’-as the way in which the universe works, i.e. the order of nature. Like the Vedic seers, the Chinese sages saw the world in terms of flow and change, and thus gave the idea of a cosmic order an essentially dynamic connotation. Both concepts, Rita and Tao, were later brought down from their original cosmic level to the human level and were interpreted in a moral sense; Rita as the universal law which all gods and men must obey, and Tao as the right way of life. The Vedic concept of Rita anticipates the idea of karma which was developed later to express the dynamic interplay of all things and events. The word karma means ‘action’ and denotes the ‘active’, or dynamic, interrelation of all phenomena. In the words of the Bhagavad Cita, ‘All actions take place in time by the interweaving of the forces of nature.‘5 The Buddha took up the traditional concept of karma and gave it a new meaning by extending the idea of dynamic interconnections to the sphere of human situations. Karma thus came to signify the never-ending chain of cause and effect in human life which the Buddha had broken in attaining the state of enlightenment. Hinduism has also found many ways of’ expressing the dynamic nature of the universe in mythical language. Thus Krishna says in the Gita, ‘If I did not engage in action, these

worlds would perish,‘6 and Shiva, the Cosmic Dancer, is perhaps the most perfect personification of the dynamic universe. Through his dance, Shiva sustains the manifold phenomena in the world, unifying all things by immersing them in his rhythm and making them participate in the dance- a magnificent image of the dynamic unity of the universe. The general picture-emerging from Hinduism is one of an organic, growing and rhythmically moving cosmos; of a universe in which everything is fluid and ever-changing, all static forms being maya, that is, existing only as illusory con- cepts. This last idea-the impermanence of all forms-is the starting point of Buddhism. The Buddha taught that ‘all com- pounded things are impermanent’, and that all suffering in the world arises from our trying to cling to fixed forms-objects, people or ideas-instead of accepting the world as it moves and changes. The dynamic world view lies thus at the very root of Buddhism. In the words of S. Radhakrishnan: 191 The Dynamic Universe A wonderful philosophy of dynamism was formulated by Buddha 2,500 years ago . . . Impressed with the transitori- ness of objects, the ceaseless mutation and transformation of things, Buddha formulated a philosophy of change. He reduces substances, souls, monads, things to forces, movements, sequences and processes, and adopts a dynamic conception of reality.’ Buddhists call this world of ceaseless change samsara, which means, literally, ‘incessantly in motion’; and they affirm that there is nothing in it which is worth clinging to. So for the Buddhists, an enlightened being is one who does not resist the flow of life, but keeps moving with it. When the Ch’an monk’ Yin-men was asked, What is the Tao?’ he answered simply, Walk on!’ Accordingly, Buddhists also call the Buddha the Tathagata, or ‘the one who comes and goes thus’. In Chinese philosophy, the flowing and ever-changing reality is called the Tao and is seen as a cosmic process in which all things are involved. Like the Buddhists, the Taoists say that one should not resist the flow, but should adapt one’s actions to it. This, again, is characteristic of the sage-the enlightened being. If the Buddha is one who ‘comes and goes thus’, the

Taoist sage is one who ‘flows’, as Huai Nan Tzu says,* ‘in the current of the Tao’. The more one studies the religious and philosophical texts of the Hindus, Buddhists and Taoists, the more it becomes apparent that in all of them the world is conceived in terms of movement, flow and change. This dynamic quality of Eastern philosophy seems to be one of its most important features. The Eastern mystics see the universe as an inseparable web, whose interconnections are dynamic and not static. The cosmic web is alive; it moves, grows and changes continually. Modern physics, too, has come to conceive of the universe as such a web of relations and, like Eastern mysticism; has recognized that this web is intrinsically dynamic. The dynamic aspect of matter arises in quantum theory as a consequence of the wave-nature of subatomic particles, and is even more essential in relativity theory, as we shall see, where the unification of space and time implies that the being of matter cannot be separated from its activity. The properties of subatomic particles can therefore only be understood in a dynamic context; in terms of movement, interaction and transformation. According to quantum theory, particles are also waves, and this implies that they behave in a very peculiar way. Whenever a subatomic particle is confined to a small region of space, it reacts to this confinement by moving around. The smaller the region of confinement, the faster will the particle ‘jiggle’ around in it. This behaviour is a typical ‘quantum effect’, a feature of the subatomic world which has no macroscopic analogy. To see how it comes about, we have to remember that particles are represented, in quantum theory, by wave packets. As discussed previously,** the length of such a wave packet represents the uncertainty in the location of the particle. The following wave pattern, for example, corresponds to a particle located somewhere in the region X; where exactly we cannot say with certainty. If we want to localize the particle more precisely, i.e. if we want to confine it to a smaller region, we have to squeeze its wave packet into this region (see diagram

below ). This, however, will affect the wavelength of the wave packet, and consequently the velocity of the particle. As a result, the particle will move around; the more it is confined, the faster it will move.

The tendency of particles to react to confinement with motion implies a fundamental ‘restlessness’ of matter which is characteristic of the subatomic world. In this world, most of the material particles are bound to the molecular, atomic and nuclear structures, and therefore are not at rest but have an inherent tendency to move about-they are intrinsically restless. According to quantum theory, matter is thus never quiescent, but always in a state of motion. Macroscopically, the material objects around us may seem passive and inert, but when we magnify such a ‘dead’ piece of stone or metal

we see that it is full of activity. The closer we look at it, the more alive it appears. All the material objects in our environ- ment are made of atoms which link up with each other in various ways to form an enormous variety of molecular structures which are not rigid and motionless, but oscillate according to their temperature and in harmony with the thermal vibrations of their environment. In the vibrating atoms, the electrons are bound to the atomic nuclei by electric forces which try to keep them as close as possible, and they respond to this confinement by whirling around extremely fast. In the nuclei, finally, the protons and neutrons are pressed into a minute volume by the strong nuclear forces, and consequently race about with unimaginable velocities. Modern physics, then, pictures matter not at all as passive and inert, but as being in a continuous dancing and vibrating motion whose rhythmic patterns are determined by the molecular, atomic and nuclear structures. This is also the way in which the Eastern mystics see the material world. They all emphasize that the universe has to be grasped dynamically, as it moves, vibrates and dances; that nature is not in a static, but a dynamic equilibrium. In the words of a Taoist text, The stillness in stillness is not the real stillness. Only when there is stillness in movement can the spiritual rhythm appear which pervades heaven and earth.8 In physics, we recognize the dynamic nature of the universe not only when we go to small dimensions-to the world of atoms and nuclei-but also when we turn to large dimensions- to the world of stars and galaxies. Through our powerful tele- scopes we observe a universe in ceaseless motion. Rotating clouds of hydrogen gas contract to form stars, heating up in the process until they become burning fires in the sky. When they have reached that stage, they still continue to rotate, some of them ejecting material into space which spirals out- wards and condenses into planets circling around the star. Eventually, after millions of years, when most of its hydrogen fuel is used up, a star expands, and then contracts again in the final gravitational collapse. This collapse may involve gigantic explosions, and may even turn the star into a black hole. All

these activities-the formation of stars out of interstellar gas clouds, their contraction and subsequent expansion, and their final collapse-can all actually be observed somewhere in the skies. The spinning, contracting, expanding or exploding stars cluster into galaxies of various shapes-flat discs, spheres, spirals, etc.-which, again, are not motionless but rotate. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is an immense disc of stars and gas turning in space like a huge wheel, so that all its stars-in- cluding the Sun and its planets-move around the galaxy’s centre. The universe is, in fact, full of galaxies strewn through all the space we can see; all spinning like our own. When we study the universe as a whole, with its millions of galaxies, we have reached the largest scale of space and time; and again, at that cosmic level, we discover that the universe is not static-it is expanding! This has been one of the most important discoveries in modern astronomy. A detailed analysis of the light received from distant galaxies has shown that the whole swarm of galaxies expands and that it does so in a well orchestrated way; the recession velocity of any galaxy we observe is proportional to the galaxy’s distance. The more distant the galaxy, the faster it moves away from us; at double the distance, the recession velocity will also double. This is true not only for distances measured from our galaxy, but applies to any point of reference. Whichever galaxy you happen to be in, you will observe the other galaxies rushing away from you; nearby galaxies at several thousand miles per second, farther ones at higher speeds, and the farthest at velocities approaching the speed of light. The light from galaxies beyond that distance will never reach us, because they move away from us faster than the speed of light. Their light is-in the words of Sir Arthur Eddington-‘like a runner on an expanding track with the winning post receding faster than he can run’. To have a better idea of the way in which the universe expands, we have to remember that the proper framework for studying its large-scale features is Einstein’s general theory of relativity. According to this theory, space is not ‘flat’, but is ‘curved’, and the precise way in which it is curved is related to the distribution of matter by Einstein’s field equations. These equations can be used to determine the structure of the

universe as a whole; they are the starting point of modern cosmology. When we talk about an expanding universe in the framework of general relativity, we mean an expansion in a higher dimen- sion. Like the concept of curved space, we can only visualize such a concept with the help of a two-dimensional analogy. Imagine a balloon with a large number of dots on its surface. The balloon represents the universe, its two-dimensional curved surface representing the three-dimensional curved

space, and the dots on the surface the galaxies in that space. When the balloon is blown up, all the distances between the dots increase. Whichever dot you choose to sit on, all the other dots will move away from you. The universe expands in the same way: whichever galaxy an observer happens to be in, the other galaxies will all move away from him. An obvious question to be asked about the expanding universe is: how did it all start? From the relation between the distance of a galaxy and its recession velocity-which is known as Hubble’s law-one can calculate the starting point of the expansion, in other words, the age of the universe. Assuming that there has been no change in the rate of expan- sion, which is by no means certain, one arrives at an age of the order of 10,000 million years. This, then, is the age of the universe. Most cosmologists believe today that the universe came into being in a highly dramatic event about 10,000 million years ago, when its total mass exploded out of a small

primeval fireball. The present expansion of the universe is seen as the remaining thrust of this initial explosion. According to this ‘big-bang’ model, the moment of the big bang marked the beginning of the universe and the beginning of space and time. If we want to know what happened before that moment, we run-again-into severe difficulties of thought and language. -It-r the words of Sir Bernard Lovell, There we reach the great barrier of thought because we begin to struggle with the concepts of time and space before they existed in terms of our everyday experience. I feel as though I’ve suddenly driven into a great fog barrier where the familiar world has disappeared.g As far as the future of the expanding universe is concerned, Einstein’s equations do not provide a unique answer. They allow for several different solutions corresponding to different models of the universe. Some models predict that the expansion will continue for ever; according to others, it is slowing down and will eventually change into a contraction. These models describe an oscillating universe, expanding for billions of years, then contracting until its total mass has condensed into a small ball of matter, then expanding again, and so on without end. This idea of a periodically expanding and contracting universe, which involves a scale of time and space of vast proportions, has arisen not only in modern cosmology, but also in ancient Indian mythology. Experiencing the universe as an organic and rhythmically moving cosmos, the Hindus were able to develop evolutionary cosmologies which come very close to our modern scientific models. One of these cosmologies is based on the H i n d u m y t h o f / i / a - t h e d i v i n e p l a y - i n w h i c h Brahman transforms himself into the world.* Lila is a rhythmic play which goes on in endless cycles, the One becoming the many and the many returning into the One. In the Bhagavad Cita, the god Krishna describes this rhythmic play of creation in the following words:

At the end of the night of time all things return to my nature; and when the new day of time begins I bring them again into light. Thus through my nature I bring forth all creation and this rolls around in the circles of time. But I am not bound by this vast work of creation. I am and I watch the drama of works. I watch and in its work of creation nature brings forth all that moves and moves not: and thus the revolutions of the world go round.‘0 The Hindu sages were not afraid to identify this rhythmic divine play with the evolution of the cosmos as a whole. They pictured the universe as periodically expanding and con- tracting and gave the name kalpa to the unimaginable time span between the beginning and the end of one creation. The scale of this ancient myth is indeed staggering; it has taken the human mind more than two thousand years to come up again with a similar concept. From the world of the very large, from the expanding cosmos, let us now return to the world of the infinitely small. Physics in the twentieth century has been characterized by an ever- progressing penetration into this world of submicroscopic dimensions, down into the realms of atoms, nuclei and their constituents. This exploration of the submicroscopic world has been motivated by one basic question which has occupied and stimulated human thought throughout the ages: what is matter made of? Ever since the beginning of natural philosophy, man has speculated about this question, trying to find the ‘basic stuff’ of which all matter is made; but only in our century has it been possible to seek an answer by undertaking experi- ments. With the help of a highly sophisticated technology, physicists were able to explore first the structure of atoms, finding that they consisted of nuclei and electrons, and then the structure of the atomic nuclei which were found to consist of protons and neutrons, commonly called nucleons. In the last two decades, they have gone yet another step farther and

have begun to investigate the structure of the nucleons-the constituents of the atomic nuclei-which, again, do not seem to be the ultimate elementary particles, but seem to be composed of other entities. The first step in the penetration into ever deeper layers of matter-the exploration of the world of atoms-has led to several profound modifications of our view of matter which have been discussed in the previous chapters. The second step was the penetration of the world of atomic nuclei and their constituents, and it has forced us to change our views in a way which is no less profound. In this world, we deal with dimensions which are a hundred thousand times smaller than atomic dimensions, and consequently the particles confined to such small dimensions move considerably faster than those confined to atomic structures. They move, in fact, so fast that they can only be described adequately in the framework of the special theory of relativity. To understand the properties and interactions of subatomic particles, it is thus necessary to use a framework which takes into account both quantum theory and relativity theory, and it is relativity theory which forces us to modify our view of matter once more. The characteristic feature of the relativistic framework is, as mentioned previously, that it unifies basic concepts which seemed totally unrelated before. One of the most important examples is the equivalence of mass and energy which is expressed mathematically by Einstein’s famous equation E=mc*. To understand the profound significance of this equivalence, we first have to understand the meaning of energy, and the meaning of mass. Energy is one of the most important concepts used in the description of natural phenomena. As in everyday life, we say that a body has energy when it has the capacity for doing work. This energy can take a great variety of forms. It can be energy of motion, energy of heat, gravitational energy, electrical energy, chemical energy, and so on. Whatever the form is, it can be used to do work. A stone, for example, can be given gravitational energy by lifting it up to some height. When it is dropped from that height, its gravitational energy is transformed into energy of motion (‘kinetic energy’), and when the stone hits the ground it can do work by breaking some-

thing. Taking a more constructive example, electrical energy or chemical energy can be transformed into heat energy and used for domestic purposes. In physics, energy is always associated with some process, or some kind of activity, and its fundamental importance lies in the fact that the total energy involved in a process is always conserved. It may change its form in the most complicated way, but none of it can get lost. The conservation of energy is one of the most fundamental laws of physics. It governs all known natural phenomena and no violation of the law has so far been observed. The mass of a body, on the other hand, is a measure of its weight, i.e. of the pull of gravity on the body. Besides that, mass measures the inertia of an object, i.e. its resistance against being accelerated. Heavy objects are harder to accelerate than light objects, a fact which is well known to anybody who has ever pushed a car. In classical physics, mass was further- more associated with an indestructible material substance, i.e. with the ‘stuff’ of which all things were thought to be made. Like energy, it was believed to be rigorously conserved, so that no mass could ever get lost. Now, relativity theory tells us that mass is nothing but a form of energy. Energy can not only take the various forms known in classical physics, but can also be locked up in the mass of an object. The amount of energy contained, for example, in a particle is equal to the particle’s mass, m, times c2, the square of the speed of light; thus Once it is seen to be a form of energy, mass is no longer required to be indestructible, but can be transformed into other forms of energy. This can happen when subatomic particles collide with one another. In such collisions, particles can be destroyed and the energy contained in their masses can be transformed into kinetic energy, and distributed among the other particles participating in the collision. Conversely, when particles collide with very high velocities, their kinetic energy can be used to form the masses of new particles. The photo-

graph below shows an extreme example of such a collision: a proton enters the bubble chamber from the left, knocks an electron out of an atom (spiral track), and then collides with

another proton to create sixteen new particles in the collision process. The creation and destruction of material particles is one of the most impressive consequences of the equivalence of mass and energy. In the collision processes of high-energy physics, mass is no longer conserved. The colliding particles can be destroyed and their masses may be transformed partly into the masses, and partly into the kinetic energies of the newly created particles. Only the total energy involved in such a process, that is, the total kinetic energy plus the energy contained in all the masses, is conserved. The collisions of subatomic particles are our main tool to study their properties and the relation between mass and energy is essential for their description. It has been verified innumerable times and particle physicists are completely familiar with the equivalence of mass and energy; so familiar, in fact, that they measure the masses of particles in the corresponding energy units. The discovery that mass is nothing but a form of energy has forced us to modify our concept of a particle in an essential way. In modern physics, mass is no longer associated with a material substance, and hence particles are not seen as con- sisting of any basic ‘stuff’, but as bundles of energy. Since energy, however, is associated with activity, with processes, the implication is that the nature of subatomic particles is]

intrinsically dynamic. To understand this better, we must remember that these particles can only be conceived in re- lativistic terms, that is, in terms of a framework where space and time are fused into a four-dimensional continuum. The particles must not be pictured as static three-dimensional objects, like billiard balls or grains of sand, but rather as four-dimensional entities in space-time. Their forms have to be understood dynamically, as forms in space and time. Subatomic particles are dynamic patterns which have a space aspect and a time aspect. Their space aspect makes them appear as objects with a certain mass, their time aspect as processes involving the equivalent energy. These dynamic patterns, or ‘energy bundles’, form the stable nuclear, atomic and molecular structures which build up matter and give it its macroscopic solid aspect, thus making us believe that it is made of some material substance. At the macroscopic level, this notion of substance is a useful approxi- mation, but at the atomic level it no longer makes sense. Atoms consist of particles and these particles are not made of any material stuff. When we observe them, we never see any substance; what we observe are dynamic patterns continually changing into one another-a continuous dance of energy. Quantum theory has shown that particles are not isolated grains of matter, but are probability patterns, interconnections in an inseparable cosmic web. Relativity theory, so to speak, has made these patterns come alive by revealing their in- trinsically dynamic character. It has shown that the activity of matter is the very essence of its being. The particles of the subatomic world are not only active in the sense of moving around very fast; they themselves are processes! The existence of matter and its activity cannot be separated. They are but different aspects of the same space-time reality. It has been argued in the previous chapter that the awareness of the ‘interpenetration’ of space and time has led the Eastern mystics to an intrinsically dynamic world view. A study of their writings reveals that they conceive the world not only in terms of movement, flow and change, but also seem to have a strong intuition for the ‘space-time’ character of material objects which is so typical of relativistic physics. Physicists have to take into account the unification of space and time when they

study the subatomic world and, consequently, they view the objects of this world-the particles-not statically, but dynamically, in terms of energy, activity and processes. The Eastern mystics, in their non-ordinary states of consciousness, seem to be aware of the interpenetration of space and time at a macroscopic level, and thus they see the macroscopic objects in a way which is very similar to the physicists’ con- ception of subatomic particles. This is particularly striking in Buddhism. One of the principal teachings of the Buddha was that ‘all compounded things are impermanent’. In the original Pali version of this famous saying,” the term used for ‘things’ is sankhara (Sanskrit: samskara), a word which means first of all ‘an event’ or ‘a happening’-also ‘a deed’, ‘an act’-and only secondarily ‘an existing thing’. This clearly shows that Buddhists haveadynamic conception of things asever-changing processes. In the words of D. T. Suzuki, Buddhists have conceived an object as an event and not as a thing or substance . . . The Buddhist conception of ‘things’ as samskara (or sankhara), that is, as ‘deeds’, or ‘events’, makes it clear that Buddhists understand our experience in terms of time and movement.12 Like modern physicists, Buddhists see all objects as processes in a universal flux and deny the existence of any material substance. This denial is one of the most characteristic features of all schools of Buddhist philosophy. It is also characteristic of Chinese thought which developed a similar view of things as transitory stages in the ever-flowing Tao and was more con- cerned with their interrelations than with their reduction to a fundamental substance. While European philosophy tended to find reality in substance,’ writes Joseph Needham, ‘Chinese philosophy tended to find it in relation.“3 In the dynamic world views of Eastern mysticism and of modern physics, then, there is no place for static shapes, or for any material substance. The basic elements of the universe are dynamic patterns; transitory stages in the ‘constant flow of transformation and change’, as Chuang Tzu calls it. According to our present knowledge of matter, its basic patterns are the subatomic particles, and the understanding of

their properties and interactions is the principal aim of modern fundamental physics. We know today over two hundred particles, most of them being created artificially in collision processes and living only an extremely short time; far less than a millionth of a second! It is thus quite obvious that these short-lived particles represent merely transitory patterns of dynamic processes. The main questions with regard to these patterns, or particles, are the following. What are their dis- tinguishing features? Are they composite and, if so, what do they consist of or-better-what other patterns do they involve? How do they interact with one another, i.e. what are the forces between them? Lastly, if the particles themselves are processes, what kind of processes are they? We have become aware that in particle physics all these questions are inseparably connected. Because of the relativistic nature of subatomic particles, we cannot understand their properties without understanding their mutual interactions, and because of the basjc interconnectedness of the subatomic world we shall not understand any one particle before under- standing all the others. The following chapters will show how far we have come in understanding the particles’ properties and interactions. Although we are still lacking a complete quantum-relativistic theory of the subatomic world, several partial theories and models have been developed which describe some aspects of this world very successfully. A dis- cussion of the most important of these models and theories will show that they all involve philosophical conceptions which are in striking agreement with those in Eastern mysticism.