Download Sailing the Sinking Ship* Newtonian Physics and

Sailing the Sinking Ship
Newtonian Physics and the Mechanistic World View
(50 slides)
(special thanks to R. Nadeau and M. Kafatos authors of : The Non-local Universe)
creatively compiled by dr. michael farnworth
The lesson will be an attempt to illustrate the inevitable crisis
that awaits us as we awaken to the non-reality of the
Cartesian dualism between mind and matter originating in the
17th century.
In other words, Newtonian truths that we have trusted to
build our current cultural paradigms on have been displaced.
This sacred cow of classical deterministic (cause and effect) western
thinking will not go down easily and I doubt I can do it much
harm here.
The two world Cartesian dilemma… matter and mind
• The two world dilemma of Cartesian philosophy has been a
bane to the western mind.
• One world, made up of separate parts, were bound to each
other by rigid laws of cause and effect and was completely
separate from the world of the mind.
• One could study and come to understand this independent
world via reason and the scientific method but would
always remain separate and distinct from it, an intruder of
sorts!
“The tragedy of the Western mind is that we have lived, since
the seventeenth century, with the prospect that the inner world
of human consciousness and the outer world of physical reality
are separated by an abyss or a void that cannot be bridged or
reconciled.” (p. 6)
In other words, the only way to know the world we lived in was
by the scientific method of study and reason.
This method was enthroned as the ultimate in epistemological
knowing.
Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”
This lesson will be divided into 5 parts:
Part 1: Definitions of…
Part 2: The history…
Part 3: The basic concepts…
Part 4: The philosophical…
Part 5: The so what…
Part 1: Definitions of
Newtonian Science
• Newtonian Science was based on the world view of cause and
effect determinism.
• This world could be understood by empiricism, which was the
study of the material world via our senses.
•
Observation, research, experimentation could all serve to
uncover the laws thought to govern this clock-work world of
order and mathematical logic.
Newtonian Science’s purpose…
• The full and certain truth about physical reality is disclosed in
the mathematical description of this reality. (p.11) In other
words mathematical formulas can explain the nature of the
world!
•
The classical ideal of causality (cause and effect) (p, 89) and the oneto-one correspondence between every element of the
physical theory and the physical reality it describes (p. 54).
• Means that for everything in nature there is a cause and
effect which can be observed, studied and eventually
explained, is the corner stone of Newtonian Science!
Quantum Science
• Quantum Science is the study of nature and energy of the
sub atomic world.
•
It has turned the Newtonian world up side down with it’s
bizarre findings.
• In 1900 Max Planck presented the beginnings of Quantum
Theory to the German Physical Society.
Quanta…
• Small bundles of energy and matter that are incessantly
exchanged and interacting within the energy fields of the sub
atomic world.
• Fermions are elementary particles of matter: quarks and
leptons.
• Bosons are the elementary particles of energy and forces that
create relationships.
The dueling sciences
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Newtonian Science
1. Mechanistic
2. Reductionistic
3. Mathematical
4. Positivistic
5. Lawful cause-effect
6. Objective
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Quantum Science
1. Unvisualizable
2. Holistic
3. Mystical
4. Conscious
5. Nonlocal
6. Subjective
The following definitions are shared in the spirit of memory
refreshment.
The Newtonian Theory
1. Mechanistic…
• Reality is materialistic and machine metaphors were used to
describe and understand this world of laws that determined
how things really are.
• The machine became the chosen metaphor to explained how
things worked in our universe.
2. Reductionism
• The study of something by breaking it down into its smallest
parts.
• “The sum of all the parts equal the whole.”
• “With medieval tools we murder with dissection and
reduction the truth and life of nature.”
• The belief of Newtonian physics was that if we just kept
reducing nature down to it’s smallest parts then we would
eventually understand all her secrets.
3. Mathematical
• Mathematical formulas were thought to be the ideal source of
communion with God.
• Descartes had a heavenly vision in which he was shown that
the world was governed by laws and that man could discover
these laws and come to understand the nature of reality and
the world as machine.
4. Positivism
• The premise that anything that belongs to science has to be
studied and examined.
• Materialism is the foundation of science.
• If it cannot be examined, studied and quantified by testing,
observation and empiricism it has no place in science!
5. Lawful cause and effect
• This is a well known principle of Newtonian physics locality.
• For every action there is a reaction in the locality of cause and
effect.
• Nothing happens without cause.
• Logic forbids otherwise.
6. Objective
• For science to have any credibility it has to be objective.
• I cannot impact what is being studied or it will pollute the very
epistemology that science has claimed in discovering reality.
• In other words if science unknowingly impacted and changed
that which was being studied then, it is all for naught.
The Quantum Theory
1. Unvisualizable…
• The quantum world is so bizarre and unexplainable that any
attempt to explain it logically or visually is doomed to failure.
•
There is no known metaphor or diagram to communicate the
profound mystery and magic of the quantum world.
2. Holistic…
• The universe is a web and tapestry of interwoven emergent
energy and matter that is intimately connected and in
constant sharing.
• The smallest part is a mirror image of the whole.
• Example: the same way that one cell of the body contains the
DNA of the whole.
3. Mystical
• Quantum theory violates so much of our common sense,
logic and wisdom that there is no adequate explanation for
it.
• “There may be no such thing as the glittering central
mechanism of the universe. Not machinery but magic may
be the better description of the treasure that is waiting.”
John A. Wheeler, Physicist
4. Conscious
• The universe is not static, or dead but is rather alive and
awake.
• It is almost as if all the particles of the sub atomic world can
act as they had consciousness and a will.
• This is very much opposed to the dead, static nature of the
Newtonian world.
5. Nonlocal
• There seems to be no cause and effect in the quantum world,
particles communicate instantaneously without any known
cause or connection.
• Particles show up without coming from anywhere.
• The quantum world is best represented by a ghostly and spooky
paradigm or one physicist (J.B.S. Haldane) put it:
• “The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer
than we can imagine.”
6. Subjective
• The quantum world is very much impacted by the simple act of viewing
it.
•
• The act of observation changes the nature and behavior of the thing
being observed.
• Reality is then evoked, depending on what one is looking for.
• The observer constantly alters what he observes by the meddling act of
observation.
Werner Heisenberg
Part 2: The history
The two scientific revolutions…
• The 1700s brought the scientific revolution with Descartes,
Newton, Bacon and Classical Physics which changed the
worldview from an enchanted superstitious paradigm to a
mechanistic materialistic paradigm.
• The second scientific revolution started in the early 1900s
with Max Planck and with Albert Einstein’s relativity theory
and with other physicists such as Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Paul
Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrodinger working on
developing aspects of Quantum Theory.
• This ongoing revolution is changing the worldview from a
mechanistic materialistic paradigm to an entangled conscious
non-local universe. The paradigm shift continues.
One of the far reaching results of the first scientific revolutions
was the classical assumption that the only privileged and valid
knowledge was scientific.
It was believed that scientific truth was transcendent and
absolute (since it was mathematical).
This is the current paradigm of the western industrialized world.
It changed an enchanted and superstitious world, alive with
mystery and meaning, into a dead, static machine.
One of the consequences of the second scientific revolution was the
slow deconstruction of the Newtonian World view of mechanistic
determinism.
In other words, Quantum Theory is bringing the magic and the
mystery back in to science.
Part 3: The basic concept
“The violent reaction to the recent development of modern
physics can only be understood when one realizes 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.”
Werner Heisenberg, German Physicist, 1923
So started the second revolution of science.
A metaphorical earthquake that threatened to destroy all that
physics had worked so hard to discover.
We are going to take a look at just two of the Newtonian ideas of
realism and locality that were threaten to be swallowed up in the
metaphorical earthquake!
Realism assumed that physical reality exists independently of the
observer and that the state of this reality is not dependent upon
acts of observation or measurement. (p. 69)
It was believed that reality existed whether it was observed or
not.
Objective study and discovery of reality was the basic foundation
upon which our understanding of the Newtonian world was
based.
Locality means action with causation.
This was quintessential to the classical world of Newtonian
Physics.
Things did not act without a cause and effect.
This led to a famous statement of Albert Einstein in reacting
to the unfolding of Quantum Physics:
“God does not play dice with the universe.”
Locality assumes that signals or energy transfers between
particles cannot occur greater than the speed of light.
The Newtonian ideas of realism and locality were both proven wrong.
These important Quantum ideas (idealism and nonlocality as opposed to realism and
locality) which Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein had a running *argument
for 23 years were instrumental in changing the nature of reality as we
had known it for the past 200-300 years.
* (which by the way, Albert lost. He was championing the realism and locality argument)
The reason the argument took the 23 years was because there
was no proof to validate either party just thought experiments
and logic.
It wasn’t until 1964 that John Bell, of the Center for European
Nuclear Research came up with an experiment that would
solve the long running argument.
But it wasn’t carried out until years later with both main
characters in the drama long dead.
Bell’s Theorem
• “Bell’s Theorem proposes that certain predictions made by
quantum mechanics are impossible in any terms previously
understood by physics!
• If these quantum predictions are true, we must use whole new
categories of thinking about physical events to understand
them!”
(Who’s Afraid of Schrodinger’s Cat, Ian Marshall and Danah Zohar, p. 64)
• The issue in Bell’s Theorem was proving non-locality was real
and a fact of nature!?!
Einstein's reaction to Bell’s Theorem and non-locality.
• Einstein saw Bell’s Theorem and non-locality as impossible and
referred to it as spooky actions at a distance (p.2)
• He and two other physicists created the Einstein, Podolsky and
Rosen (EPR) Paradox, a thought experiment, to disprove quantum
non-locality.
• They failed in their attempt.
• Bell’s Theorem was proven in 1982 by French physicist Alain
Aspect and in 1997 by Swiss physicist Nicolus Gisin.
• This proof shocked and amazed scientists across the world (as they
thought Einstein and the EPR paradox would eventually prove correct).
• The leak in the ship just got bigger.
In the course of the long playing argument between Bohr and
Einstein, Einstein was forced into “claiming that a quantity must
be called real within the context of physical theory *even if it
cannot be disclosed by observation and measurement in a single
instance”. (p.98)
*This claim violated the strident scientific credo of positivism
and the absolute requirement of evidence for validation of a
physical theory!!!
This claim shows how motivated Einstein was to restore order
to the Newtonian paradigm that was under assault by
Quantum Theory!
It was high drama in the world of physics!
The prediction
• Quantum theory predicts that two particles can be correlated
instantaneously (faster than the speed of light) in the absence of any
such force or signal, that somehow certain particles can be
linked non-locally across space and time.
• Classical physics cannot explain the correlation without a
mediated local force.
• It is as if things happen and there is no (known) cause for their
action.
It is pivotal to understand that the scientific agenda is to measure,
understand and comprehend all of reality.
It is who they are and what they are about.
Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation:
• The state of a system becomes real or actual when a
measurement occurs, and we cannot assume the reality of
potential states in the absence of measurement.
• This measurement (using Schrodinger wave equation) in the quantum
world makes accurate predictions but the physicists have no
idea of how or why it works!
• Bohr’s interpretation was to essentially say: And that’s ok!
• Which other scientists thought was scientific heresy, namely
indeterminism!
Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation basically states:
Objective reality does not exist.
Rather there are potential realities that exist simultaneously
until we evoke them via measurement.
History and physics seem to come down of the side of Niels Bohr
on every one of the ideas of physics that he and Albert Einstein
argued about.
That reality and nature are complementary and nonlocal and
indeterminate.
“Non-locality could be the most profound discovery in all of science.”
Henry Stapp, Quantum Physics and the Physicist’s View Of Nature. p. 40
the end