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.
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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.
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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.