This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 6, Issue 5, from 1992.
During the election campaign of March and April 1992, a curious advertisement appeared in several of the national daily newspapers (see, for example, The Guardian, 16 March). It began:
Modern Science and Ancient Vedic Science Reveal the Constitution of the Universe, the Source of All Order and Harmony Displayed throughout the Universe, Discovered through Maharishi’s Vedic Science, Verified by Modern Science…
This was in fact an advertisement for the ‘Natural Law Party’, the party which proposed to use Transcendental Meditation and the TM-Sidhi programme to eliminate the root cause of crime and other antisocial behaviour and ultimately implement the Maharishi’s Master Plan to Create Heaven on Earth.
It must rate as one of the most unusual campaigns in British political history, but the reason I raise the issue here is because the rest of this particular advertisement consisted of an attempt to draw analogies between Maharishi’s version of ‘Vedic science’ and recent ideas in modern physics concerning so-called ‘superstring theories’.
The details need not concern us here (the analogies are in any case too crude to warrant serious consideration) but it does illustrate in a dramatic fashion a recurrent theme in New Age Physics (a theme which seems to have subsequently been picked up by the Maharishi and his followers), namely, that there is some sort of connection between the ideas of modern physics and those of Eastern mysticism.
This notion first gained popularity with the publication in 1975 of Fritjof Capra’s book The Tao of Physics (now in its third edition with over a million copies sold worldwide), and later other books (such as Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters) also made use of the same idea. In this – the second and final part of my article on New Age Physics – I want to take a closer look at ‘mystical’ interpretations of modern physics and examine how well they stand up to criticism.
A Tao of Physics?
The principal thesis of The Tao of Physics is that there are profound similarities between the ideas of modern physics and those of Eastern mysticism – a notion which is surprising, provocative and yet also somehow rather intriguing. For Capra, both modern physics and Eastern mysticism lead one to view the world as an intrinsically dynamic and unified whole. His arguments for this view are far more sophisticated than the crude imitations of his thesis advocated by the Maharishi and his followers, and as someone who clearly has an interest in Eastern thought as well as a training in theoretical particle physics Capra is in many respects well qualified for the task he set himself. Nevertheless, anyone who attempts to draw parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism faces certain problems which must be overcome if a convincing case is to be made.
The first thing that one must do is to provide an accurate portrayal of modern physics. Capra’s description of the theories of modern physics does seem to me to be broadly correct and as a popularisation of the subject his treatment has much to recommend it. It is, however, a somewhat biased account in that it overemphasises certain approaches (such as S-matrix theory and the so-called ‘bootstrap’ model of sub-atomic particle interactions), perhaps because such approaches are more easily reconciled with Capra’s view of Eastern mysticism than are the more successful theories which have in recent years superseded them.
However, a more subtle problem arises when we turn to consider the philosophical implications of modern physics. For whilst there is a wide measure of agreement amongst physicists as to which particular mathematical theories describe atomic and sub-atomic phenomena, there is unfortunately no general agreement amongst them as to the philosophical conclusions to be drawn as a result. In fact, many different philosophical ‘interpretations’ of modern physics exist. Thus there is the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’, the ‘hidden variables interpretation’, the ‘many worlds interpretation’, and so on. Consequently, it is not easy to say just precisely what is the ‘worldview’ of modern physics, since this will depend on which particular interpretation one selects.
Fortunately, there are one or two features which are more or less common to all the viable interpretations of modern physics and so one can be pretty certain that these reflect genuine characteristics of reality rather than being simply artifacts resulting from choosing an incorrect interpretation. One of these invariant features is that all the interpretations seem to require a form of ‘action at a distance’ (or some other radically non-local effect) in order to explain the correlations that are observed between measurements made at widely separated distances from one another. The precise nature of this non-locality differs from interpretation to interpretation, but some kind of non-locality seems to be unavoidable.
This feature (which was discussed in more detail in the first part of this article) is sometimes referred to as quantum ‘non-separability’ because it implies that the physical systems described by modern physics (and by quantum mechanics in particular) cannot be regarded as totally isolated from one another no matter how far apart they may be. There seems to be good evidence that the universe is somehow ‘connected together’ in a way which is genuinely holistic and Capra is therefore probably correct in thinking that modern physics must envisage the world as being in some sense a unified and interconnected whole. On the other hand, I am less convinced by Capra’s argument for the intrinsically dynamic nature of reality, not least because his argument seems to rely fairly heavily on the use he makes of the now rather dated approach of S-matrix theory.
The second thing that one must do is to provide an accurate portrayal of ‘Eastern mysticism’, and it is here that more serious problems arise. By ‘Eastern mysticism’ Capra seems to mean the philosophical schools associated with those Eastern spiritual traditions (such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism) which emphasise the importance of contemplation, meditation and certain types of religious experience. However, this construct ‘Eastern mysticism’ is really not a very satisfactory one because it suggests that there is a greater degree of uniformity between the various schools of Eastern philosophy than may in fact be the case.
The task of reconstructing the philosophical systems of cultures that are far removed from our own in time and space is in any case not an unproblematic one, especially as scholars of oriental thought inevitably bring their own philosophical preconceptions to the study of their subject, and this may tend to colour their interpretations. However, so far as one can judge, the worldviews of the various schools of Eastern philosophy differ quite considerably from one another, not just between Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism but also between the large number of schools which exist even within a particular tradition.
Capra is aware of some of this diversity but nevertheless seems to want to extract some common denominator which would conform to his characterisation of the world as a unified, intrinsically dynamic whole. But this characterisation blurs the very real distinctions which exist between different schools of Eastern philosophy and is in some cases totally inappropriate.
For instance, the influential Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta is essentially a monistic philosophy which emphasises the undifferentiated, unchanging and timeless character of reality rather than what it takes to be the illusory surface flux of phenomena. On the other hand, Samkhya-Yoga is a dualistic philosophy which rejects any kind of monism, adopting instead two principles roughly equivalent to the Western notions of ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ – whilst the Sarvastivada school of Hinayana Buddhism is a pluralistic philosophy in which the entire world of phenomena is conceptually reduced to a multitude of component factors.
Many other examples could be produced, and faced with diversity such as this it is very difficult to see that there is any such thing as the worldview of Eastern mysticism. In which case, what is one supposed to be comparing modern physics with?
If Capra believes that there are close parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism then it would seem that what he would have to do is to make a case for the strong similarity between at least one of the viable interpretations of modern physics and perhaps one or two of the most closely related schools of Eastern philosophy. But in fact Capra does not do this in his book, and he seems content instead to select material from several different interpretations of modern physics and from many different Eastern philosophies and draw parallels between them as and when they show any kind of similarity at all, no matter how superficial these similarities might in fact be.
As it stands, therefore, Capra’s thesis that there are close parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism is simply not convincing. But of course, finding parallels between different sets of ideas is unlikely to be an all or nothing kind of affair and at some level of generality Capra’s arguments may have a certain validity.
Although mystical views of the world embody no single doctrine and often differ considerably from one another, it is difficult to deny that certain general themes tend to recur again and again in one form or another: themes such as the ‘unity of all things’, the ‘ultimate unreality of space and time’, and so on. And it is also difficult to deny that similar themes are often encountered in the various interpretations of modern physics. For example, quantum non-separability really does suggest that there is a sense in which ‘All is One’. This does not mean that the holistic implications of modern physics are identifiable with the teachings of any particular school of Eastern philosophy, but it would certainly be going too far to claim that there exist no similarities whatsoever with any mystical worldview.
Much depends on what one wishes to infer from such similarities as do exist. They are surely too weak to imply that Eastern philosophers had any real foreknowledge of the most recent advances in physics. On the other hand, mystical views of reality tend to be so far removed from our commonsense understanding of the world that the existence of any similarities with modern physics is itself a somewhat surprising fact which is in its own way quite impressive: the universe, it emerges, is a very strange place indeed!
Moreover, comparing and contrasting the worldviews of modern physics and Eastern mysticism may itself be a valuable exercise simply because it is always instructive to examine one set of ideas in the light of another. So I do not wish to imply that Capra’s thesis has no grain of truth in it and is completely without merit, only that by exaggerating the closeness of the parallels Capra has radically overstated his case.
The Holographic Universe
Another thinker who has produced what one might describe as a ‘mystical’ interpretation of modern physics is the physicist David Bohm. Bohm is an unconventional physicist in his interests and his approach to the subject but he is certainly no crank and he has a proven research record which includes several important contributions in the area of the foundations of quantum mechanics.
In the early 1950s he developed what he called the ‘causal interpretation’ of quantum mechanics, which subsequently played an important role in clarifying the nature of quantum non-separability, and (together with his colleagues Basil Hiley and P N Kaloyerou) he later developed this interpretation further in a much more sophisticated form. But Bohm is better known to the general public for his ideas concerning what he calls the ‘implicate order’. These ideas received much publicity when his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order appeared in 1980. This, together with several other subsequent books by or about Bohm and his ideas, have ensured him a high profile. And Bohm’s interest in the role that holism plays in modern physics (and perhaps also his friendship with the Indian religious teacher Krishnamurti) have guaranteed him an enthusiastic audience amongst New Agers. Indeed, Bohm’s ideas are probably better known to the general public than they are within the physics community itself, where his theories are just too unconventional and too speculative to have aroused much interest so far.
In order to understand Bohm’s notion of the implicate order it is necessary to appreciate that quantum mechanical objects (such as electrons, for example) exhibit a curious feature known as ‘wave-particle’ duality. That is, even though we may normally tend to think of them as being ‘particles’, in quantum mechanics they nevertheless need to be represented by a wave that spreads out across space as the object moves along (much as a water wave spreads out on the surface of a pond, for example). Description in terms of waves is therefore a quite fundamental feature of the world as described by quantum mechanics. In fact, the quantum mechanical wave associated with an object moves through space according to a rule known to all physicists as ‘Huygen’s Principle’. According to this principle, every point on a wavefront may itself be regarded as a source of secondary waves. These secondary waves spread out and overlap one another to produce a new wavefront, representing the position of the wave at a later time. This new wavefront then in turn acts as the source for yet further secondary waves and so the process continues, with the wave advancing a little at each stage.
The mathematics of Huygen’s principle is in fact closely analogous to that used in the theory of the hologram. A hologram is (as most readers will already be aware) a sort of special ‘three-dimensional’ photograph of an object. An ordinary photograph stores its information in a simple way: points on the photographed object are mapped into points on the photograph.
However, in creating a hologram, the points of an object are mapped into a photographic plate in a much more complicated way which effectively encodes a blurred image of the entire object into every small region of the plate so that in fact an image of the object can be reconstructed from even a small fragment of the original hologram. In a sense which can be made precise, the image of the object is ‘enfolded’ into the hologram and then ‘unfolded’ when the hologram is viewed.
In a similar way, each small section of a wave front is produced by the overlapping and ‘enfolding together’ of many secondary waves (each originating from a different point in space), and also produces its own secondary wave which spreads out and contributes to the formation of an entire new wavefront. So, in a sense, a quantum mechanical wave moving through space can be seen as the net result of a continual process of enfoldment and unfoldment.
This much is, I think, uncontroversial. But Bohm goes on to speculate that the greater part of physical reality may exist in a sort of enfolded or ‘implicate’ state which, however, gives rise through a process of unfoldment to the ‘explicate’ phenomena that we observe as the manifest world of particles and planets. Space and time are also envisaged to be merely the explicate form of an unmanifest underlying reality. This view of the world is a holistic one in the sense that the whole is reflected in the parts (rather than being simply the sum of the parts), just as in our analogy an image of an entire object can be enfolded into even a small fragment of the photographic plate.
The problem is to turn an intriguing and intuitively appealing speculation into a precise mathematical theory that is useful to other physicists in their theoretical and experimental work. Unfortunately, Bohm’s ideas remain at a fairly provisional stage at the moment and most physicists would probably wish to reserve judgment concerning their likely fruitfulness until more definite results have been obtained.
In the meantime, however, Bohm’s notion of the implicate order has received the enthusiastic endorsement of New Agers who are attracted by its holism and by its slightly mystical quality. And, indeed, the concept of the enfolded implicate order as a form of existence which underlies the manifest world of space, time and matter is somewhat similar to the notion of the ‘Ground of Being’ – conceived as an undifferentiated reality which underlies the world of everyday experience – which is a common theme in many different philosophies of a broadly ‘mystical ‘ persuasion. To this extent, Bohm’s ideas do tend to lend support to an identifiably mystical view of the world. But whether these ideas are in fact substantially correct still remains to be seen.
Paradigm Found?
New Agers clearly hope that the ideas of modern physics can be used to support and promote their own particular system of beliefs and so help bring about the profound spiritual transformation of our society which they both anticipate and desire. Indeed, those who advocate New Age Physics are fond of saying that it represents a ‘new paradigm’ that has overthrown (or is destined to overthrow) the older, mechanistic framework of Newton and Descartes. Such a characterization tends to exaggerate the mechanistic nature of classical physics (Newton was, after all, no simple mechanist: he was an alchemist as well as a physicist and a mathematician!). But New Agers are certainly correct in thinking that modern physics nowadays makes it very difficult to argue the case for a mechanistic view of the world.
Unfortunately, the full philosophical implications of modern physics remain unclear and, in practice, New Agers simply tend to emphasize those features and interpretations of modern physics which lie closest to New Age interests and concerns. It is true that some characteristics of modern physics (such as quantum non-separability) are provocatively close to the holistic notions endorsed by New Agers, but the full significance of these features is as yet rather uncertain and still remains to be clarified.
In order for New Age Physics to truly attain the status of a ‘paradigm’ – in the sense in which the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn has employed that term – these various features and interpretations would have to become accepted by the physics community as a whole and somehow form the basis for the ‘puzzle-solving’ activity that constitutes normal scientific practice. So far this has not happened. Instead, most of the approaches and interpretations that appear under the heading of ‘New Age Physics’ remain marginal to the work of the great majority of professional physicists and often represent no more than the personal viewpoint of one particular philosophically-minded physicist (be it Prigogine, Capra or Bohm), together perhaps with a handful of their collaborators.
By contrast, the approach taken by most physicists is primarily mathematical and/or experimental in emphasis and is (for better or worse) strongly permeated by a pragmatism that is sometimes openly hostile to anything that smacks of even ‘philosophy’, never mind ‘mysticism’ or the ‘New Age’. Consequently, the claim that New Age Physics represents a new paradigm seems to me to be rather exaggerated and premature.
Nevertheless, it is of course conceivable that this situation will change at some time in the future and that a common understanding of modern physics will eventually emerge that is broadly consistent with New Age ideas. If this happens then the New Age Movement will have gone some way towards gaining an intellectual respectability that it does not now possess and the implications for our view of the world and for Western culture generally might then indeed be as significant as New Agers claim. But how likely it is that this will in fact happen is another matter and, in the meantime, it seems to me that the fairest judgment one can make on most of the claims of New Age Physics is that they are either wrong, exaggerated, or as yet not proven.
Bibliography
- T J Axon, Beyond the Tao of Physics: Mysticism and Modern Physics – A Reappraisal (Tehuti Press, 1988).
- David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (RKP, 1980).
- Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (3rd edition, Harper Collins, 1991).
- Rene Weber, Dialogues with Scientists and Sages: The Search for Unity (RKP, 1986).
- Ken Wilber (Ed.) The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes: Exploring the Leading Edge of Science (Shambhala, 1982).
- Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (Rider/Hutchinson, 1979).
