The New Physics and The Anthropic Connection. An Introductory Lecture on the Progression of Physics in the 20TH Century. The Relationship of the Observer, his Consciousness, to these. A General Description of the QREST-FIELD GUT/TOE Paradigm Subject. ------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Recipe for the Universe. A Description of the Theme of; "The Little Scroll" Books.
The Great Search; Is it a Search for Something we have Lost, or is it Perhaps our Age Old Search for Ourselves? A General Description of the Progression of Reductionism and Quantum Mechanics, and the Failure to Include the Observer in the Analyses. Has Physics Abandoned Hope of Connecting the Observer to it's Theories of the Universe? Some Contemplations on Man's Search for the Ultimate Knowledge and Understanding.
A part of the introduction to "The Little Scroll" book three. Note; This essay is taken in part from the writings of Johann Grolle, F. David Peat, Richard M. Restac, Stephen Hawking, John Boslough and others. ------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Great Search. Many years after Thomas Alva Edison had become famous, he was asked about his experience at the discovery of the light-bulb. Edison's reply, and he may have had the anecdote from others; "I was just like a little boy walking on the beach where I saw a stone which seemed different from the rest. I picked up the stone and saw why it was so."
During the former age of information in the history of man--the age of enlightenment in the West--the Greek age of antiquity's period of philosophy, science and art, which lasted for about 800 years, or from about 400 before, until about 400 after Christ, the famous Agora at the root of the Acropolis, became one of the prime arena in Man's discussion on the nature of the World, Man and Reality. The philosophers of the time, which ever they were, Stoics, Pythagoreans, Epicureans or Platonists, discussed and scrutinized all subjects and left no stones untouched. At the onset of the dark period in the history of the spirit of Man in the West--the middle ages which began at the burning of Hypothesa's library in Alexandria about 400 years after Christ--Men began telling each other which stones were permitted to be scrutinized and which not. This control on the search for knowledge had most of its roots in religion. The period lasted for about 1200 years, during which it not only Men were condemned but also much of the scrutiny of Nature as well, that is if it did not have to do with the attempts at making gold. In this Galileo and Bruno became the most famous examples.
In the beginning of the renaissance around the end of the 15th century, the British philosopher and nature-scientist Sir Francis Bacon made the following comment; "There are two revelations in reality; The first is given to us in scripture and tradition, and it guided our thinking for centuries. The second revelation is given by the Universe, and that book we are just beginning to read." This prognosis of Bacon turned out to be true and the spirit of the philosophers was reborn in the form of natural-philosophers which later evolved into the different disciplines of the natural sciences. Disciplines which have, for the last 400 years, been progressing away from each other. The motto of the sciences soon became; "Nullius in Verba," or, words alone are not enough. This in turn brought about the doctrines of empiricism and positivism, or the demand that the statement of the investigator be proven through predictions which later would appear as facts in experiments. This has now been the guiding light of the sciences for the last four hundred years and has justified itself in most fields as concerns the investigation into physical reality. This method has particular proven itself in the so called reductionism which proposes to seek the nature of exerting by tearing it into ever smaller fractions. This motto has however on the other hand, brought about a new type of limitation into the investigation of nature and a decision as to what stones may be scrutinized.
Now, in the later part of the twentieth century, it has come to pass that some of the special disciplines of the sciences have begun to approach each other, and even unify. This, however, is not coming about through some ideology of the scientists, rather the nature of the evolution of the investigation. This in turn has brought about critic and reassessment of the methods of the sciences--amongst the scientists them selves--this to the traditional methods of investigation and their limitations. The prime targets of this critic have been the phenomena that appear in the high energy accelerators of theoretical physics. This is where Man has been seeking the ultimate explanations for existence. At the onset of the century, on the 14th of December 1900, on the birthday of the New Physics, Max Plank presented the findings of his investigation into the ultraviolet radiation and solved the enigma of the so called ultra-violet catastrophe. At this time it was generally assumed that physics could explain everything, only this one thing seemed to throw a shadow, but this was the fact that ultraviolet radiation violated the known laws of nature, all of which were believed to be known. Plank's finding now destroyed this believe of Man.
With the evolution of the New Physics, Man now acquired two classes of Physical Laws, instead of one. Forty-five years after this beginning, this lead to the detonation of the Plutonium bomb in Alamogordo in New Mexico and thereby the onset of the Age of the Atom. The story of the evolution of the New Physics, quantum physics, is a story of a discipline which tells us that the material part of the Universe, even Space itself, are composed of energy units whose smallest division is one quanta. This story is seen by many as the most magnificent part of the evolutionary history of Man's search for knowledge and understanding.
Ever since Rutherford, at the beginning of the century, began his famous experiments by firing alpha particles at thin gold-foils, and along with Bohr, created our new ideas of the Atom, this method has been evolving in the building of ever larger accelerators, with ever increasing energy. In this we have been asking nature questions and she has been replying to us. In turn we have had to use the discipline of mathematics to understand the answers. This has been relatively successful but none the less critic on this method has appeared in the form of metaphors which suggest that this is like someone taking a sledge hammer and with it, granulating grandpas watch, then getting someone, who has never seen a watch, to investigate the fragments and then tell what they once were and how they worked together. The critic has been connected to doubts about our interpretation and understanding of natures answers.
The Ghost in the Machine. The physicists have pointed out that Nature does not deceive us in her replies and that mathematics are a language which does not permit delusions. On the other hand the minds of Man are quite often caught being delusioned. However, a problem is still associated with our understanding of the replies of nature in the symbolism of mathematics and in spit of the unquestionable and grandiose success of quantum physics, it is still, as Stephen Hawking has said; "Basically a theory about something which we do not know and can not predict." Here the reference is to the fact that although we can control the outcome statistically, we do not know what is happening. Quantum mechanical investigation of the physical world have brought with it a ghost which has proven difficult to exorcise. This ghost has repeatedly reappeared and has caused many a physicist to sneer in disgust when ever it has been mentioned. The ghost is in the form of the demand for the observer, the scientific investigator, Man himself, be included in the outcome of the experiment. Even that he be included in the mathematical equations of quantum mechanics. Here the most famous is the thought experiment of Schr”dinger of the cat in the box.
The trail of the ghost is to be found in remarkable remarks of many of the physicists and it can be said that Plank himself had this initiated in 1931, when he said; "Science can never solve the enigma of Nature, and this is because that in the final analyzes, we our selves are a part of the puzzle which we are trying to solve."
Right at the onset of the evolution of the discoveries of quantum mechanics, the British physicists Sir James Jeans quipped; "The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than a machine." Later, Adolf Portmann, commented on this; "It is now known that the natural sciences have arrived at the borders of the physically knowable. They have had to acknowledge an infinite mystical domain behind all life." The temperamental Nobel laureate, Wolfgang Pauli, did not make much fuss about this question but went to see Carl Gustafs Jung in his search for an understanding of the connection between the observer and the experiment. Later Pauli was quoted; "Behind reality there is an elevated and independent order which both the spirit of the observer, as well as the object of investigation, are subject to."
When David Bohm later sought out Kristnamurti, then he was not the first physicist of the New Physics, who turned to those who investigate the spirit of Man. Their discourse, which ended up dealing whit the question; "What happened to humanity? Did we take a wrong turn somewhere on the way? in the book The Ending of Time, turns out to be most interesting.
