Download Materialism And Modern Physics

Materialism And Modern Physics
by Art Hobson
[email protected]
Judging by Americans’ reverence for the shopping mall and big box stores, we
are all crass materialists. And yet since 1900, fundamental physics has told us that the
universe is not made of “material” at all. It’s an important point, because the public
seems to assume that modern science describes a material and mechanical universe.
The machine-like image arises from the “old” physics of Isaac Newton (16421727), which reigned supreme until 1900. Newtonian physics assumes that the
universe is made of myriad tiny unchangeable material particles, similar to BBs only
smaller, whose motions account for everything that happens whether it be the fall of a
stone, a flash of light, a butterfly’s flight, or a thought arising in your brain. The
motions of these particles obey “Newton’s laws,” and are entirely predictable: If we
know what a group of particles is doing at one particular time, Newtonian physics can
tell us what they will be doing at any other time.
According to Newtonian physics, it’s a mechanical, impersonal and fairly
boring universe. It operates like a perfect clockwork mechanism: Once it is wound
up and started moving, its future behavior is precisely determined. Newton’s
mechanical universe allows little room for such commonly-believed notions as free
will or ultimate purpose. This Newtonian worldview was immensely
influential. During three centuries, most educated people thought of the universe as a
precisely predictable clocklike mechanism. I believe that this view continues to
pervade our culture and is at least partly responsible for America’s ultimate devotion
to money, the mall, and material power.
But science no longer supports the mechanical worldview. Since 1900,
physicists have learned that Newtonian physics only approximates the real behavior of
the universe. It is a very good approximation in many practical situations, so it is still
widely used by scientists and engineers. But philosophically, the implications of
Newtonian physics are now known to be far off base.
The “new” (now 104 years old, actually) physics is based on quantum theory
and Einstein’s relativity. These theories are far broader, and far better verified, than
Newtonian physics ever was. They tell us that the universe is made not of
unchangeable material particles but of non-material and highly changeable “fields,”
similar to the magnetic field around a toy store magnet, or the gravitational field
around Earth. These fields contain energy, and Einstein’s relativity tells us that
anything having energy has “mass” (or, roughly, “weight”), and this is why clocks,
cabbages and kings have mass. At the microscopic level, cabbages and everything
else are made of seemingly-empty fields, much like the “empty” space around the two
poles of a magnet. It’s true that ordinary objects are made of atoms, but these atoms
are themselves made only of fields. There is no material, no permanent particles or
substance, there.
According to quantum physics, all fields are “quantized,” which simply means
that whenever anything happens to them they must instantaneously (“all at once”)
gain or lose a certain tiny but definite amount of energy. This process of
instantaneously gaining or losing a bundle of energy is called a “quantum
jump.” Scientists usually think of these “energy bundles” as tiny particles, called
electrons, protons, atoms, etc. But atoms and other particles are not at all like the
unchangeable particles that Newton had in mind. They are ephemeral, always
appearing and disappearing, almost an illusion created by the underlying reality of
fields. The particles of modern physics are anything but machine-like!
To quote Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum physics, “Some
physicists would prefer to come back to the idea of an objective real world whose
smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or trees exist. …This
however is impossible. …Materialism rested upon the illusion that the direct
‘actuality’ of the world around us can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This
extrapolation, however, is impossible: Atoms are not things.”
Furthermore, quantum physics says that the future behavior of a particle
contains an element of unpredictable chance. This isn’t surprising, really, because
we’ve just seen that a “particle” is really a quantum jump of a field and so it could
occur anywhere the field exists. According to this “uncertainty principle,” the future
is not precisely determined.
That’s not all. Quantum physics tells us that any group of particles that
interact with each other, or that interacted with each other at any time in the past, will
be “entangled.” This means that they form a single quantum object, and that
whenever one particle quantum jumps all the other particles in the group must
simultaneously quantum jump. This happens even if the particles are separated by
great distances, for instance if they are in different galaxies in the
universe. Furthermore, since the entire universe is thought to have been created in a
single quantum event called the “big bang,” all the particles in the universe must be
subtly entangled. So there is a sense in which, whenever you move a muscle, the
entire universe changes a little.
To sum up, the universe is made of non-material fields, the particles of the
microscopic world are merely quantum jumps of these fields, the future is inherently
non-predictable, and nature is deeply interconnected and not divisible into separatelyexisting parts. This is nothing like a machine. If we must use grand metaphors—and
physicists have for centuries used the machine metaphor to describe Newtonian
physics—then the universe is like a biological organism. Perhaps we inhabit a
“living,” rather than a “mechanical,” universe.