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The Joyce of Science: New Physics in Finnegans Wake

Index Introduction Background Physics Philosophy Relativity Quanta Conclusion

The Philosophical Implications of New Physics

Contents:

Physics and Philosophy

Disintegration of the Mechanistic View of Nature
The Unity of Nature
Non-material Nature of Reality
The Mind and the Universe
Free Will and Determinism
Causality
Being and Becoming
Transformation of the Scientific Language
"... by the light of philophosy (and may she never
folsage us!) things will begin to clear up a bit"
Finnegans Wake (119.04-06)

Physics and Philosophy

Modern man tends to regard science and philosophy as two distinctly separate fields. In
this age of specialization few are afforded a chance to investigate both fields and acquire a
balanced outlook on the relationship between them. The direction and circumstances of
one's education usually result in instilling a mode of thinking which favors one of the two
fields over the other. Those with predominantly technical training often criticize philosophy
for obscurity of ideas and speculative character; they accuse philosophical methods of
vagueness and ambiguity, and blame the supposed stagnation of the field on the age-long
antagonism between opposing schools of ideas. In contrast, they believe science to impart
exact and experimentally verifiable knowledge. They hail science as a vehicle of progress
and praise it for its spirit of cooperation. The humanists, on the other hand, tend to dismiss
scientific knowledge as shallow and fragmentary (often failing to see the difference between
science and technology), while praising philosophy for its attempts to answer vital questions
about human existence. Such antagonistic views on the relationship between science and
philosophy are regrettable, for they obscure the vital connection which exists between the
two fields, both in regard to their essence and their origin. At the roots of Western culture,
in the period of early Greek civilization, physics and philosophy were indistinguishable.
Along with other subjects such as logic, ethics or psychology, they belonged to
"philosophy" understood broadly and literally as "love of wisdom." Science, as an
intellectual pursuit differentiated from philosophy by method or subject matter, did not
appear until the Roman times. In spite of apparent differences, then, physics and philosophy
are clearly connected for "the physicist is by origin a philosopher who has specialized in a
particular direction" (Eddington, Philosophy 8).

The affinity between modern physics and philosophy, however, extends beyond their
common roots in antiquity. In part it is also a result of the new relationship between the two
fields developed in the course of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution. "The origin
of modern philosophy," writes Alfred North Whitehead, "is analogous to that of science and
is contemporaneous. The general trend of its development was settled in the seventeenth
century, partly at the hands of the same men who established the scientific principles"
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(Modern World 200). We have already pointed out that the main aspect of that relationship
was the introduction of empiricism. That new trend gave the emerging science a
philosophical background, while providing philosophy with a new analytical method of
investigation. Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, Hume believed that their task was to analyze
experience and to evaluate the validity of our inferences about nature. The empiricists'
philosophical antagonists, the apriorists, such as Descartes or Leibnitz, also partook in the
scientific revolution, both as mathematicians and as philosophers attempting to create their
own systems of thought and to establish the place of science in the totality of human
experience. This new interaction between physics and philosophy continued well into the
end of the nineteenth century with Kant, Hegel or Nietzsche on the apriorist side, and such
empiricists as Mill, Russell and many outstanding scientists on the other. Like the
development of science in that period, this interaction was a relatively peaceful process, and
like science, after two hundred years of complacency, philosophy was significantly
transformed by the advent of new physics. This transformation, however, not only
paralleled the changes in science; it went further and united the two fields in an even
stronger bind than the first revolution, for the new developments in physics suggested that
without the recourse to philosophy no further significant progress in physics was possible.

The philosophy of any period has always been interwoven with science and influenced by
its development, but the new physical findings suggested that science depends on
philosophy in a more profound way:

In the new movement scientific epistemology is much more intimately

associated with science. For developing the modern theories of matter and
radiation a definite epistemological outlook has become a necessity; and it is
the direct source of the most far-reaching scientific advances. (Eddington,
Philosophy 5)

This unprecedented impact of philosophy on the course of physics resulted from the
peculiar characteristics of the scientific developments in the early twentieth century. The
changes of new physics, according to Jeans, "are of a distinctly philosophical hue; a direct
questioning of nature by experiment has shown the philosophical background hitherto
assumed by physics to have been faulty" (Physics 2).

The faulty philosophical background indicated by Jeans was the mechanistic attitude of
nineteenth-century science. Classical physics ascribed to a corpuscular-kinetic view of
nature in which the universe "was regarded as an enormous aggregate of bits of
homogeneous material whose quantity remained constant while the spatial distribution was
continuously changing according to the immutable laws of mechanics" (Capek 6). This
corpuscular-kinetic scheme was based on the predominance of two of the human senses,
those of sight and touch. Tactile sensations were believed to provide man with a direct
insight into the mechanical properties of matter, its solidity and permanence, while visual
sensations gave him knowledge of geometrical and kinematic properties, that is, of the
arrangement and motion of the particles of matter. All the remaining properties of objects
and the corresponding human senses such as color, flavor, sound or scent were denied
objective existence. They were relegated to the realm of man's private mental reactions and
their presence or absence was said to be irrelevant to the scheme of the physical world. The
senses of touch and sight, on the other hand, were believed to verify the existence of an
objective reality and they had served as a basis for the classical definitions of space, time,
matter and motion (Capek 4-6).

Disintegration of the Mechanistic View of Nature

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Classical science viewed space as a homogeneous medium which had an objective existence
and was independent of its physical content. In Newton's words: "Absolute space, in its own
nature, without relation to anything external, remains always similar and immovable" (6).
This absolute theory of space was criticised by a number of Newton's contemporaries
including Leibnitz, Huygens and Berkeley (Capek 11). Leibnitz, for example, claimed that
space is no more than a set of relations between the bodies contained therein and he found
the idea of space with no bodies in it absurd (Whitehead, Science and Philosophy 254). The
notion of matter independent from space, however, was quite compatible with the
mechanistic spirit of modern science, and the absoluteness of space remained a firmly
established principle for two hundred years. It was reinforced by the parallel notion of
absolute time to which classical physics also ascribed. To quote Newton again: "Absolute,
true and mathematical time, of itself and by its own nature, flows equably without relation
to anything external" (6). Time and space, thus conceived, were distinctly separate entities,
although a close analogy could be observed between them since space was said to be
occupied by matter just as time was occupied by motions or changes (Capek 38). Matter
was believed to possess impenetrability and temporal permanence. Because of persistence
through time, a particle of matter could detach itself from a given position in space and
move to another. Thus the independence of matter from space and time served as a basis for
the classical concept of motion (Capek 389).

This mechanistic view of nature was introduced in the course of the seventeenth-century
Scientific Revolution and was solidified with the development of modern science in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The revolutionary change in twentieth-century physics
involved a disintegration of this mechanistic scheme and a gradual formulation of a new
mode of understanding reality. This disintegration, as we have already observed, was a
direct result of technological progress. Constant improvement in obtaining information
about regions of the universe removed from the realm of everyday experience gradually
showed the inadequacy of a system based on human sensuous perception. In both particle
physics and astronomy new data were obtained which directly challenged the classical
notions of space, time, matter and motion, and eventually led to their profound
transformation.

In the light of new physical findings, matter lost both its solidity and permanence. The
fusion of mass and energy proposed in the special theory of relativity removed the essential
distinction between a material body and its surrounding space by showing that the mass of a
group of particles depends not only on the sum of its components but also on the energy of
the binding between them (Capek 388). The general theory reinforced that view by
interpreting "particles" of matter as mere points of extreme density of the timespace
continuum. In Einstein's words:

Matter which we perceive is merely nothing but a great concentration of energy

in very small regions. We may therefore regard matter as being constituted by
the regions of space in which the field is extremely intense. . . . There is no
place in this new kind of physics both for the field and matter for the field is the
only reality. (Capek 319)

These inferences from the relativity theory were soon reinforced by new data from particle
physics. Quantum mechanics challenged the solidity of matter by renouncing the very idea
of the subatomic particle as a minute equivalent of other particles in physics. Bohr's model
of the atom as a minuscule planetary system was the last attempt to interpret the nature of
particles in terms of familiar mechanistic concepts. Further development of quantum
mechanics showed the futility of such endeavors, for the subatomic reality displayed
properties incompatible with classical mechanics. The indeterminacy principle of
Heisenberg also implied the loss of solidity in the subatomic realm. The principle negated

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the solidity of matter by precluding our direct experience of a subatomic particle. To

observe such a particle would mean to find simultaneously the momentum and position of
the particle and that, according to quantum mechanics, we cannot do because such a
conjunction of momentum and position does not exist in nature.

The loss of distinction between matter and its enveloping space also challenged the
traditional concept of motion. In classical physics motion was conceived as a displacement
of material particle in space. A particle, being essentially distinct from its surrounding
medium, was believed to travel in space by detaching itself from one position and moving
to another. The relativistic fusion of matter and space rendered this explanation inadequate.
By removing the qualitative difference between space and matter, the relativity theory
showed that the particle cannot be "detached" from its position in any meaningful way. The
theory suggested that instead of viewing motion as a displacement of a solid body in space
we should conceive of it as a pair of events in which the distortion of the spatiotemporal
medium decreases in one area while it increases in the neighboring region. This new idea of
motion was formulated as early as 1920. Philosopher Hans Reichenbach wrote:

Space is filled with the field that determines its metric; what we used to call
matter is merely condensations of this field. It makes no sense to speak of
traveling material particles as a transport of things; what occurs is a progressive
condensation process that should be compared rather to the propagation of a
wave in water. (103)

The physical notion of time underwent an equally profound transformation as those of

space, matter and motion. The special theory of relativity, as we have pointed out, described
the effect of motion on time measurement. More specifically, it predicted time dilatation in
all systems moving uniformly in relation to the given frame of reference. An important
aspect of that time transformation was its admittedly apparent character. The lengthening of
time intervals and the accompanying directional contraction of matter were believed to
involve a subjective change in perception rather than intrinsic transformation of nature. In
Max Born's words, these transformations are "a consequence of our way of regarding things
and . . . not a change of physical reality" (189). In Duration and Simultaneity Bergson
compared this relativistic dilatation of time to the optical effect of perspective in painting.
The diminishing size of more distant objects in a painting is never taken to indicate their
actual size but rather conveys the idea of distance between the objects and the artist.
Similarly, the temporal dilatation does not involve an actual lengthening of time but rather
expresses the contrast of velocities between the two frames of reference (73-74).

Bergson extended this apparent character of time dilatation to the general theory of
relativity, but he is now believed to have been wrong in that respect. According to the
current interpretation of the general theory, "the course of time itself is lengthened by the
action of the gravitational field or, what is the same, by the curvature of space-time" (Capek
200). The time dilatation, which in the special theory was no more than a perspective-like
distortion, is considered a genuine modification in the general theory. It results in a plurality
of local times whose rhythms depend on the intensity of the gravitational fields in their
respective regions. These multiple times, according to Bergson, do not negate the unity of
real time; on the contrary, they even "imply and uphold" it (Capek 207). Local times are all
one in the sense that each of them joins the same identical sequence of causally connected
events. The measured time interval between two such events may vary depending on the
frame of reference, but the actual stretch of duration between them must be the same for
both measurements since in each case it is bounded by the same identical events. It is not
the separation of the events that is affected, but the time units: their dilatation in different
gravitational fields results in the variety of local times (Capek 206).

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The Unity of Nature

The new concepts of time, space, matter and motion which emerged as a new paradigm of
physics were characterized by a closer interdependence than their classical equivalents.
Time and space were shown to be inextricably bound to form a fourdimensional continuum,
while matter and motion were reduced to a quantitative transformation of the spatio-
temporal medium. Such new understanding of the basic physical concepts implied the
existence of an intrinsic unity in nature extending beyond the relationships admitted and
analyzed by classical science. With matter resolved into the intensity of spatio-temporal
field it became clear that any event involving a subatomic particle is in essence a
transformation of a portion of the field which cannot be sharply delineated from its wider
context. Thus, the individual event lost its independence and had to be regarded as a
transformation of a considerable part of the universe.

Physics explained this new emphasis on the unity of nature in terms of wave mechanics.
Jeans's exposition of this aspect of new physics is most lucid and worth quoting in full:

In particle-picture, which depicts the phenomenal world, each particle and each
photon is a distinct individual going its own way. When we pass one stage
further towards reality we come to the wave-picture. Photons are no longer
independent individuals, but members of a single organization or whole--a
beam of light--in which their separate individualities are merged, not merely in
the superficial sense in which an individual is lost in the crowd, but rather as a
raindrop is lost in the sea. The same is true of electrons; in the wave picture
these lose their separate individualities and become simply fractions of a
continuous stream of electricity. In each case, space and time are inhabited by
distinct individuals, but when we pass beyond space and time, from the world
of phenomena towards reality, individuality is replaced by community. (Physics
204)

Thus the universe has to be regarded not as an agglomeration of particles but rather as an
organism whose inter-connectedness is so intricate that no part of it can be clearly
delineated from the whole. Jeans further speculates that the unity in nature could possibly
extend from objects to perceiving minds. If so, our individual consciousnesses would also
merge beyond timespace into "a single continuous stream of life" in a way resembling
objective idealism such as that of Hegel (204).

The interconnectedness of nature exposed by new physics soon found its

reflectcion in the current philosophical thought. One of the most ardent
supporters of the notion was Alfred North Whitehead. His insistence on
the unity of being is an essential aspect of the "organic philosophy of
nature" which he developed in his later period. Its affinity to the
revelations of physics is obvious. According to Whitehead,

The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature Whitehead

throughout the centuries is the notion of "independent existence." There is no
such mode of existence; every entity is only to be understood in terms of the
way in which it is interwoven with the rest of the universe. (Science and
Philosophy 91)

The unity of the world was conceived philosophically as a network joining not only the
elements of alike nature, but also those which in the classical scheme belonged to clearly
separate categories. Objects were now believed to interact with abstract notions; animate
matter with the inanimate. "The whole trend of modern scientific views," wrote Eddington,

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"is to break down the separate categories of 'things,' 'influences,' 'forms,' etc., and to
substitute a common background of all experience" (Nature xi).

Non-material Nature of Reality

The emphasis on the unity of all being was not an original notion of new physics. A similar
tendency had characterized early Greek physics and, in a modified form, medieval physics.
It was perhaps best expressed in the writings of Aristotle, who opposed the atomists by
stressing the wholeness of organisms and by ascribing to inanimate matter the notions of
purpose and potency (Bronowski, Common Sense 29). These and other non-metrical
properties had been removed from the scientific scheme by the seventeenth-century
revolution. Newtonian physics had renounced subjective and non-metrical knowledge as
irrelevant to the objectively existing universe. New physics restored this type of knowledge
to prominence by suggesting that subjective, mental aspect of existence may in fact be more
real than the world of objects.

This shocking assertion of new physics followed from the abstract character of the
relativistic and quantum phenomena. In both relativity and quantum mechanics, physicists
worked with abstract concepts which lacked a parallel in the world of the senses. The
phenomena of new physics were expressed verbally but only with a stipulation that the
verbal model or picture is merely an approximation of their actual nature. The true reality
was said to reside only in the appropriate mathematical formulae. Attempts to go beyond
the mathematical expression might assist in understanding the concepts, but they had to be
recognized as leading away rather than towards reality (Jeans, Mysterious Universe 150-
51). This idea of reality as a purely mental construct has been pointed out repeatedly by
physicists and philosophers. Albert Einstein, for example, claimed that "the concepts which
arise in our thought and in our linguistic expressions are all--when viewed logically--the
free creations of human thought which cannot inductively be gained from sense
experiences" (Ideas 22).

The non-material nature of reality, just like its organic unity, could be explained in terms of
wave mechanics. The probability waves of quantum physics were said to describe not
matter itself but only a potential for matter to come into existence and they could not
achieve the status of matter without the participation of the human mind. The matter waves,
according to Jeans, cannot have any material or real existence:

They are not constituents of nature, but only of our efforts to understand nature,
being only the ingredients of a mental picture that we draw for ourselves in the
hope of rendering intelligible the mathematical formulae of quantum
mechanics. (Physics 167).

Again, this non-material nature of reality was not an original concept of new physics. Like
the notion of the organic unity of nature, it could be traced to the early Greek times as an
essential feature of philosophical idealism. In modern times it found its most ardent
supporter in the person of George Berkeley, a subjective idealist whose views on the nature
of physical reality strikingly resemble the inferences of new physics. In the early eighteenth
century, amid general exultation with the triumphs of modern science, Bishop Berkeley
accused the scientific materialists of drawing unwarranted conclusions about reality. He
refused to accept the existence of an objective material world independent of conscious
experience. Reality, according to Berkeley, is no more than a complex of sensations, actual
or remembered, in the perceiving mind:

[A]ll the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies
which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence
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without a mind. . . . [S]o long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do
not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no
existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit. . . . From
what has been said it is evident there is not any other Substance than SPIRIT, or
that which perceives. (Berkeley 67-68)

Two centuries later and by a different method, new physics reached

similar conclusions. It renounced the notion of reality as a material entity
endowed with objective existence. Instead, it acknowledged the central
role of the perceiving mind, by suggesting that the mind takes an active
part in shaping the reality. For, according to quantum mechanics, without
an act of observation the subatomic realm consists of no more than
potentialities. Only through interaction with the perceiving mind can the
Berkeley potentialities turn into actualities and take the form of the familiar
everyday reality.

The Mind and the Universe

The central role of the perceiving mind in the world concept of new physics suggested a
new philosophical outlook on the relationship between the mind and the universe. The
classical view of this relationship was based on the Cartesian differentiation between the
physical universe and the perceiving mind. In formulating his metaphysics Descartes had
split reality into two separate realms. On the one hand there was the res extensa: the world
of solid bodies extending in space and independent of human mental processes; on the
other, the res cogitans, or the inner realm of the perceiving mind. Only the former was
capable of consistent mathematical description and was gradually developed into the
intricate mechanistic concept of reality. The realm of the mind involved primarily notions
which precluded strict mathematical treatment. Consequently, it was removed from the
mainstream of scientific thought for two centuries.

New physics reversed that tendency and reinstated the human mind to the central position it
had in Platonic and Aristotelian world concepts. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, "the
world presented for our belief by philosophy based on modern science [i.e. new physics] is
in many ways less alien to ourselves than the world of matter as conceived in former
centuries" (Jeans, New Background 296). Under the influence of new physics a number of
concepts which Newtonian mechanics had dismissed as irrelevant to the scheme of the
universe regained their philosophical significance.

Free Will and Determinism

The newly asserted position of the perceiving mind brought new attention to the old
philosophical question of free will and determinism. The corpuscular-kinetic view of nature
in Newtonian physics implied that the universe is governed by strict determinism. The state
of the universe at a given instant was believed to determine unequivocally its future state,
just as itself it was determined by the past. With particles of matter subjected to strict laws
of motion, a detailed description of their instantaneous configuration and momenta was
considered sufficient to determine their future state. This strict determinism was stressed
especially by Laplace who claimed that by knowing the position and momenta of all the
constituents of matter at a given instant, an infinitely skilled mathematician could in theory
predict the future of the universe. Classical determinism thus implied that there is no real
novelty in nature: everything that will happen has already been predetermined, and
contingency in nature is "nothing but a symptom of human ignorance" (Capek 138).

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The strictly deterministic scheme of classical science was dethroned by the disintegration of
the corpuscular-kinetic view of nature. The changes of new physics involved a
transformation of both components of the Laplacian model: the possibility of instantaneous
configuration of particles was negated by the relativity theory, while the notion of a definite
particle associated with a specific momentum and location was dismissed by quantum
mechanics. The world of quantum phenomena showed indeterminacy to be an intrinsic
feature of nature and suggested that while every moment is partly dependent on its
antecedent, it also contains an element of genuine novelty:

In such a growing world every present event is undoubtedly caused, though not
necessitated by its own past. For as long as it is not yet present, its specific
character remains uncertain for one simple reason: that it is only its presentness
which creates its specificity, i.e. brings an end to its uncertainty, by eliminating
all other possible features incompatible with it. Thus every present event is by
its own nature an act of selection ending the hesitation of reality between
various possibilities. (Capek 340)

Causality
The denial of absolute determinism in nature also argued for a need to reevaluate the
classical notion of causality. The principle of causation was established by the seventeenth-
century Scientific Revolution as a driving force in nature. The task of the classical scientist
was to describe reality by isolating individual causes and analyzing their effects. The
relation between cause and effect was conceived in strictly mechanical terms, and it led to
the interpretation of the material universe as a vast machine. For the classical scientist there
were no alternatives to this mechanical mode of understanding reality. Christiaan Huygens,
the first proponent of the wave theory of light, observed in his Traite de la lumiere (1690):

In true philosophy, the causes of all natural phenomena are conceived in

mechanical terms. We must do this, in my opinion, or else give up all hope of
ever understanding anything in physics. (Jeans, New Background 38)

And yet in the early twentieth century physicists were forced, by their own findings, to
renounce the principle of strict causation. In particle physics, for instance, the phenomenon
of radioactive disintegration was analyzed, raising disturbing questions. In some chemical
elements a certain number of atoms were found to transform regularly into radiation. The
process was puzzling because there was no apparent reason for the radioactive decay: it
appeared to be an effect without a cause.

Physicists thus found it necessary to renounce strict causality as a fundamental feature of

the physical world. With no substitute in sight, scientists were forced to acknowledge their
shortcomings by admitting a lack of a definite stance on the subject. Eddington wrote in
1928:

Strict causality is abandoned in the material world. Our ideas of the controlling
laws are in the process of reconstruction and it is not possible to predict what
kind of form they will ultimately take; but all the indications are that strict
causality has dropped out permanently. (Nature 332)

Amidst the confusion created by renouncing strict causation, several physicists attempted to
redefine causality and determinism in the light of new findings. Their tendency was to
acknowledge man's ignorance of the true nature of causality rather than accept an
essentially a-causal world. Einstein's belief was that "events in nature are controlled by a
much stricter and more closely binding law than we suspect to-day, when we speak of one

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event being the cause of another," although we have not been able to grasp that law due to
our limited, narrow perspective. According to Einstein, " our present rough way of applying
the causal principle is quite superficial. . . . We are like a juvenile learner at the piano, just
relating one note to that which immediately precedes or follows," unable to grasp the sense
and beauty of the whole composition (Jeans, New Background 233). A similar opinion was
expressed by Hermann Weyl in The Open World (1932):

These considerations force upon us the impression that the law of causality as a
principle of natural science is one incapable of formulation in a few words, and
is not a self-contained exact law. Its content can in fact only be made clear in
connection with a complete phenomenological description of how reality
constitutes itself from the immediate data of consciousness. (43)

Jeans offered yet another perspective on causality. According to him, "if we still wish to
think of the happenings in the phenomenal world as governed by a causal law, we must
suppose that these happenings are determined in some substratum of the world which lies
beyond the world of phenomena, and so also beyond our access" (Physics 145).

Being and Becoming

The denial of absolute determinism and causality by new physics had another philosophical
repercussion: it marked a return to an essentially dynamic view of nature, or a reinstatement
of the concept of becoming in the physical world. Newtonian physics described the universe
as an essentially static entity. Changes in nature had only a superficial character as
ultimately they could be reduced to rearrangement of a finite number of permanent
elementary particles. These particles, then, were characterized by being--they remained
always the same, regardless of their configuration. While it had been the task of the
classical physicist to investigate and describe that objectively existing world, new physics
indicated that another aspect of reality must also be considered:

In sorting out the confused data of our experience it has generally been
assumed that the object of the quest is to find out all that really exists. There is
another quest not less appropriate to the nature of our experience--to find out
all that really becomes. (Eddington, Nature 110)

The essentially dynamic view of physical reality became a recurrent motif of early
twentieth-century philosophical thought. In The Nature of the Physical World Eddington
observed that "we must regard the feeling of `becoming' as (in some sense at least) a true
mental insight into the physical condition which determines [the world outside us]" (89).
William James spoke of "the everlasting coming of concrete novelty into being." "Time," he
observed, "keeps budding into new moments, every one of which presents a content which
in its individuality never was before and will never be again" (148-49). Alfred North
Whitehead expressed a similar view when he wrote about "the creative advance of nature . .
. which we experience and know as the perpetual transition of nature into novelty" (Concept
178). Finally, the same belief in the genuine novelty in nature underlay Bergson's discussion
of time in Creative Evolution. "The universe endures," he wrote. "The more we study the
nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of
forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new" (14).

The reinstatement of the notion of becoming as a fundamental feature of the physical world
resulted in part from the findings of particle physics. A subatomic particle turned out to be
nothing but a modification, often temporary, of the spatiotemporal continuum and the term
"particle" with its connotations of solidity and permanence seemed inappropriate to denote
the final constituents of nature. The term "event" then was adopted by several philosophers
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as a substitute for "particle": Russell, Jeans, Whitehead, Bergson and Bachelard all saw the
term "event" as expressing more accurately the essence of the fundamental constituents of
the subatomic world (Capek 368). Jeans, for example, observed:

Thus the events must be treated as the fundamental objective constituents, and
we must no longer think of the universe as consisting of solid pieces of matter
which persist in time, and move about in space. . . . Matter gives us a rough and
easily understood, but not a true, picture of the reality underlying physical
phenomena. But we now begin to suspect that events and not particles
constitute the true objective reality. (New Background 294-95)

In Science and the Modern World Whitehead reached a similar conclusion:

Thus nature is a structure of evolving process. The reality is the process. It is

nonsense to ask if the colour red is real. The colour red is ingredient in the
process of realisation. The realities of nature are the prehensions in nature, that
is to say, the events in nature. (106)

Transformation of the Scientific Language

This need to readjust the language to the new mode of understanding reality became another
prominent feature of new physics. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries the
scientific language developed into a powerful, dependable tool. It was based on ordinary
language, but gradually it lost the looseness and ambiguity of everyday usage. Common
terms within a scientific context became clearly defined, precluding the possibility of any
ambiguity or misunderstanding in interpreting the text. The belief in the exactitude of the
scientific language, however, was shattered by the advent of new physics. The formulation
of the relativity theory and the exploration of the subatomic realm showed that at its most
basic level nature transcends language and reasoning: in Heisenberg's words, the "new
aspects of nature . . . cannot be described in terms of the common concepts" (167-68).

Although since the time of Galileo the mathematical description of the

physical world was considered the most accurate, the physicist has had to
rely upon linguistic description to communicate his findings to laymen.
Moreover, as Heisenberg points out, "even for the physicist the
description in plain language will be a criterion of the understanding that
had been reached" (168). New physics, however, introduced a number of
concepts which denied visualization and image-making since they lacked
Heisenberg an equivalent in the familiar everyday reality. Such concepts as "the
fourdimensional continuum" or a particle's status as "a tendency to exist" clearly indicated
the inadequacy of language to express the essence of the physical reality. Consequently,
scientists were forced to re-examine their assumptions about the workings of language.
Definitions, for example, had always been trusted to guarantee the exactitude of meaning.
But, as Heisenberg observes, a language cannot fully describe itself because "definitions can
be only given with the help of other concepts, and so one will finally have to rely on some
concepts that are taken as they are, unanalyzed and undefined" (169). Furthermore, a
"logical analysis of language involves a danger of oversimplification":

In logic the attention is drawn to very special structures, unambiguous

connections between premises and deductions, simple patterns of reasoning,
and all the other structures of language are neglected. These other structures
may arise from associations between certain meanings of words; for instance, a
secondary meaning of a word which passes only vaguely through the mind
when the word is heard may contribute essentially to the context of a sentence.
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The fact that every word may cause many only half-conscious movements in
our mind can be used to represent some part of reality in the language much
more clearly than by the use of the logical pattern. (170)

The same danger of oversimplification was noted by Whitehead:

One source of vagueness is deficiency of language. We can see the variations of

meaning; although we cannot verbalize them in any decisive, handy manner.
Thus we cannot weave into the train of thought what we can apprehend in
flashes. We are left with the deceptive identity of the repeated word. (Science
and Philosophy 136)

Faced with the inadequacies of strict scientific language, physicists were forced to accept
the use of a somewhat vague, ambiguous idiom to convey the meaning of their experimental
findings. Heisenberg pointed out that the language employed by physicists to describe
subatomic events "is not a precise language in which one could use the normal logical
patterns; it is a language that produces pictures in our mind, but together with them the
notion that the pictures have only a vague connection with reality, that they represent only a
tendency toward reality" (181). This admitted vagueness of language when applied to
relativity and quanta stressed again the connection between new physics and philosophy.
Unlike modern science, which found its primary language in mathematics, philosophy had
always struggled "to express itself in the inadequate words of common speech" (Jeans,
Physics 83). Indeed, Whitehead once defined philosophy as "an attempt to express the
infinity of the universe in terms of the limitations of language" (Science and Philosophy
21).

The admittance of vagueness and ambiguity in scientific language marked not only a
reaffirmation of the ancient link between physics and philosophy but also the emergence of
a new alliance with the fine arts. Literary language had always depended upon such vaguely
perceived shades of meaning and associations as those now admitted into scientific
discourse. This new convergence of physics and literature, however, extended beyond the
use of a common tool. As the discoveries of new physics opened for man's scrutiny new
regions of the physical universe, it became more and more obvious that man is incapable of
directly experiencing reality on its most elemental level. Consequently, all the attempts at
describing it amount to no more than creating fictions. In the light of the new physical data,
Jeans observed,

space begins to appear merely as a fiction created by our own minds, an

illegitimate extention to nature of a subjective concept which helps us to
understand and describe the arrangement of objects as seen by us, while time
appears as a second fiction serving a similar purpose for the arrangement of
events which happen to us." (New Background 99-100)

And, if this line of thought is pursued further still, literature can be identified with life: for
the contact between consciousness and the world "reduces merely to a contact between
mind and a creation of mind--like reading of a book or listening to music" (Jeans,
Mysterious Universe 53).

The link joining new physic and fiction writing was imagination. In literature imagination
always played a predominant role but in classical physics, while imagination was
considered an important factor in breakthrough discoveries, its role in describing the
physical reality was believed to be marginal. To develop relativity and quantum mechanics,
however, physicists found imagination indispensable. Deprived of a direct experience of the
subatomic world, only through creating an image could the physicist announce to the non-
scientific community the results of his findings. Niels Bohr is reported to have said to
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Heisenberg: "When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet,
too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images" (Bronowski,
Ascent 340).

The immediate impact of this fusion of science and art was minimal in comparison with the
technological outcome of new physics. The long-term results are still in the making and it is
too early to assess them. But the general trend of the change is clear: the intuitive and the
rational aspects of human existence are regaining the balance they lost with the advent of
modern science in the seventeenth century. Only through such merging of reason and
intuition man hope to fully understand the world.

Index Introduction Background Physics Philosophy Relativity Quanta Conclusion

Copyright 1997 Andrzej Duszenko

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