Mar 09, 2004
Book Extract: Quantum Physics and Eastern Philosophy
by anand
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Why is it that so many physicists are attracted to Eastern mysticism and, finally, what is the connection with quantum physics?
There can be no doubt that many physicists have been drawn to Eastern philosophy. Schrodinger himself practically adopted Vedanta (the outlook of the Upanishads) as his own. David Bohm, an exceptional physicist and patron saint to the New Age, held a deep interest in Eastern thought, visible through his long association with the spiritual teacher Krishnamurti. Heisenberg in his old age gave a nod to the East, and Bohr himself took over the yin-yang symbol for his coat of arms.
It is not clear that all scientists who have Oriented themselves?and certainly those who have written on physics and Eastern thought?have made an attempt to distinguish one philosophical system from another. Throughout these debates we have tried to speak of Indian philosophy when we mean Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy when we mean Chinese philosophy, and Zen when we mean Zen. Each of these traditions has distinct beliefs that are often incompatible with one another. One after all would hesitate to lump Presbyterians and Unitarians under the heading "Western religions."
Nevertheless, speaking generally, it is easy to understand the psychological appeal of Eastern religions to theoretical physicists. Physicists are often agnostic or atheistic, and if they are not always rational they always pretend to be. Buddhism, with its lack of a supreme being, and Vedantic philosophy, with its emphasis on Reality, satisfy their deepest spiritual yearnings without overtly compromising them. The Eastern religions' emphasis of unity is also not foreign to the physicist.
But the appeal is more than the merely personal. Schrodinger gave a partial answer to the question you have raised. Science works only because of "the golden rule," the assumption that each investigator is as conscious as the next, that the results discovered by one are as valid (or invalid) as the results discovered by another. "It thinks, therefore it is." This assumption cannot be proven, according to Schrodinger, by scientific means and so science cannot be put on a scientific foundation: "Yet, the most wonderful and most sublime of all teaching, the Brahman doctrine that the all equals the unity of consciousness, culminates in a mystical victory over this dilemma, the words so obscure to the understanding, so close to the intuition: Tat Tvam Asi. That Thou Art. One may see in the Brahman doctrine merely a facile play of ideas. But it would be a vast error to believe that science knows any better or clearer answer concerning these things." Or as is said in the Vedas:
The one highest Godhead
In all beings existent
And when they die yet living
Who sees this is seeing
For the one who has found the highest God everywhere
That man will not harm himself through himself.
Schrodinger's is of course a belief, not a rational scientific conclusion, but it is a belief that has resonated strongly with other scientists. In his philosophical book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, David Bohm contrasted the Western and Eastern attitudes to science, measurement in particular: "In the East, the notion of measure has not played so fundamental a role. Rather, in the prevailing philosophy of the Orient, the immeasurable (i.e., that which cannot be described or understood through any form of reason) is regarded as the primary reality." For Bohm it is significant that the Greek "metron" is etymologically related to the Sanskrit "maya" for illusion; however, this is not really the case. The first syllable of "maya" does indeed mean "measure," but the second syllable designates a bridge to the transcendent realm, to the immeasurable. One should also not forget that the Chinese were obsessed with time measurement and the Indians with exact chemical prescriptions. Nevertheless, it is true enough that Eastern religions regard the immeasurable as the primary reality.
Bohm received his ideas on the undivided, immeasurable Om from Krishnamurti and attempted to give them expression in the concept of implicate and explicate order. If you take a drop of ink and put it into glycerin and stir the glycerin very slowly, the ink will gradually spread over the whole container until the mixture appears uniformly gray. But when you reverse the stirrer?Behold!?the gray mass of ink con-tracts to the original drop. Another drop would produce the same uniform gray across the container, but when the stirrer was reversed, this second droplet would emerge at its own location. Thus. information about the drop's position was enfolded, or implicated, in the gray mass, which reversing the stirrer explicated or unfolded. Explicate, to reveal.
Bohm felt that the universe was much like the bowl of glycerin. Or a hologram, in which the entire image is recorded at every spot on the photographic plate. The whole is enfolded in each of the parts. He viewed the EPR experiment as an indication that the quantum field is "actually a multidimensional reality which can only be under certain conditions simplified as a three-dimensional reality." Indeed, the entire implicate order had to be "extended into a multidimensional reality. In principle, this reality is one un-broken whole, including the entire universe with all its 'fields' and 'particles.' " Consciousness for Bohm was also part of this undivided reality.
But despite the influence of Krishnamurti, Bohm's thought reflects standard Buddhism, not Vedanta. In his drop of ink which can be enfolded and unfolded in the glycerin?or in the hologram from which information can be retrieved at will?is a rejection of irreversible processes, of the sort that Prigogine considers so fundamental. Bohm's view of time, like the Mahayana Buddhists' of the Fifth Debates, is that the temporal order is illusory, something to be transcended. Beyond all lies an undivided, dynamic reality, which Bohm termed "the holomovement," that which is. The Brahman, perhaps.
Note: The above article is an excerpt from "Doubt and Certainty" by Tony Rothman and George Sudarshan. Perseus Books, 1998 |
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