This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 6, Issue 4, from 1992.
One of the most intriguing features of what is loosely referred to as the ‘New Age Movement’ is the way in which it attempts to adopt and adapt existing forms of knowledge in order to validate and legitimise its own particular way of viewing the world. An especially notable example of this process is the use that ‘New Agers’ have made of the ideas of modern physics which (New Agers often contend) is the harbinger of a new holistic paradigm that is destined to overthrow the mechanistic thinking of our present era and herald the coming of a New Age. In this article I want to examine the nature of ‘New Age Physics’ and go some way towards assessing its claims.
By ‘New Age Physics’ I mean those ideas deriving from modern physics which have been taken up by New Agers and used to justify their view of the world, irrespective of whether or not the originators of these ideas are themselves sympathetic to the New Age Movement. Unlike most other aspects of the New Age phenomenon, New Age Physics rests on something more than mere fantasy and has its roots in real scientific discoveries and concepts.
Nevertheless, New Age Physics presents a distorted version of mainstream physics in the sense that the selection and treatment of ideas is systematically biased towards fulfilling the requirements of the New Age agenda, the intention being to create a system of belief along holistic, anti-materialistic and spiritually uplifting lines. To a scientist, the net result is at once both familiar and strange. As one physicist (Jeremy Bernstein) put it in the course of reviewing a couple of books advocating New Age Physics, ‘A physicist reading these books might feel like someone on a familiar street who finds that all the old houses have suddenly turned mauve’.
Such distorted presentations naturally arouse the ire of many professional physicists who feel that their subject is being misrepresented and used to further a cause with which they may have no particular sympathy. Yet, however much the style of the presentation may tend to irritate, the actual claims made by New Age interpretations of modern physics deserve to be examined in as cool and as fair a way as possible. Bearing this in mind, I shall now proceed to survey several of the most prominent themes in New Age Physics and attempt to make some sort of provisional judgment concerning them.
Chaos and Order
One recent trend on the New Age scene appears to be a burgeoning interest in the ideas of that branch of science known as ‘chaos theory’, which has recently been gaining the attention of the general public through a spate of new books, magazine articles, TV and radio programmes which have focused on the subject.
Chaos theory is the study of so-called ‘chaotic systems’ which, in the context of physics, embraces the investigation of such diverse phenomena as the behaviour of the moons of Saturn, turbulent fluids and the Earth’s weather system. Most of the chaotic systems which physicists have studied obey the laws of classical mechanics – the laws of mechanics discovered and developed by Newton and his successors – which describe how the state of a system (as specified by the positions and velocities of all its component particles, for example) changes with time. Like all systems described by classical mechanics such chaotic systems are entirely ‘deterministic’, in the sense that the state of the system at a given moment determines the entire future history of that system. Consequently, if one knows the initial state of such a system then one can in principle predict the state of the system at any later time.
However, chaotic systems are extremely sensitive in the sense that even very small changes in the initial state of a system can result in entirely different future histories. And since there is always a degree of uncertainty in our knowledge of the initial state of a system (owing to the imperfection of the measuring instruments which we use in order to determine that initial state) we consequently lose the ability to predict the future behaviour of chaotic systems. This behaviour is typically extremely complicated (in spite of the fact that the underlying laws can be quite simply expressed) and is in fact closely related to that branch of mathematics which studies the properties of the ‘infinitely complicated’ curves and surfaces known as ‘fractals’.
But why should chaos theory have attracted the attention of New Agers? Doubtless, part of the reason is simply the aesthetic appeal of the attractive illustrations of fractal geometries which adorn various popular books on the subject, the most famous of these illustrations being of the so-called ‘Mandelbrot Set’. Postcards of the Mandelbrot Set and other chaos-related material can now be easily purchased in shops specialising in New Age goods, and the Mandelbrot Set even made a brief appearance in the summer of 1991 in the form of a crop circle!
However, a more important reason for the New Age interest in this area of science seems to lie in the view that chaos theory is somehow holistic, anti-reductionistic and anti-mechanistic in character and therefore lends support to the New Age conception of the world. It is certainly true that chaotic systems are unpredictable, for the reasons given above. However, they are generally entirely deterministic and therefore claims that chaos theory represents a sharp break with the ‘clockwork’ view of the universe do seem to me to be rather exaggerated.
Moreover, there is a sense in which chaos theory is extremely reductionistic in spirit, for it shows that the complexity of the real world can nevertheless be reduced to the operation of quite simple underlying laws. However, there is one respect in which chaotic systems genuinely exhibit holistic features, for the very sensitivity of chaotic systems means that even extremely small disturbances to them can have significant consequences. As is sometimes said, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can radically alter the Earth’s weather system, pushing it into perhaps a quite different state than it would otherwise be in. Consequently, it is practically impossible to isolate such systems from the rest of the world, and this seems to imply a sort of broadly holistic view of the universe in which its various parts are connected together to form an indivisible whole.
One scientist who works in this area has gained the particular attention of New Agers. The Nobel prize-winning physical chemist Ilya Prigogine is probably best known for his work on the relationship between chaos and order. But he is also known for his robustly anti-reductionist opinions, in particular for his view that chaotic systems can exhibit features which cannot be reduced to the laws of classical mechanics.
However, Prigogine can only argue this way by according a fundamental role to the errors of observation which prevent one from determining the precise state of a system and thus from applying the laws of classical mechanics in the normal manner. Personally, I see little reason to do this and so I remain extremely skeptical about some of the more philosophical conclusions which Prigogine draws from his work. But, to be fair, other scientists take a more positive view of Prigogine’s ideas than I do, and it is certainly true that his anti-reductionist credentials have ensured him an audience in New Age circles.
The New Age enthusiasm for chaos theory is for the most part a recent trend and it will be interesting to see how it develops in the near future. However, apart from this interest in chaos theory, New Agers have tended to concentrate their attention almost exclusively on ideas deriving from ‘non-classical’ areas of physics (in particular, relativity theory, quantum mechanics and particle physics) and it is to some of these ideas to which we now turn.
Physics and the Paranormal
The often weird and wonderful ideas of modern physics (and especially quantum mechanics) have sometimes attracted the attention of parapsychologists in the belief that they might provide a possible basis for an explanation of the purported phenomena of extrasensory perception and psychokinesis, and the notion that there exists some sort of connection between modern physics and the paranormal is a theme which crops up quite frequently in New Age literature. There is a certain superficial plausibility to the notion that the weirdness of modern physics may somehow explain the weirdness of the paranormal but, beyond this, there does seem to me to be a real problem in devising convincing mechanisms to explain paranormal effects, and this is one reason for requiring especially high standards of evidence before the reality of such phenomena is accepted. To illustrate the sort of problems which arise, let me discuss some of the ideas of quantum mechanics which have been used to furnish ‘explanations’ of the paranormal.
Quantum mechanics is the modern theory that describes the behaviour of atoms, molecules, sub-atomic particles (such as electrons) and, in principle, everything else as well. One of its most remarkable features concerns the role which the ‘observer’ plays in the theory, a role which is far more central than is the case in classical mechanics and which has a particular importance in the context of New Age Physics.
This may be illustrated by considering the simple example of an observation of the position of an electron by an observer using an appropriate measuring instrument (that is, some form of ‘electron detector’). It turns out that, before the measurement is made, quantum mechanics does not (as one might expect) describe the electron as if it had a well-defined but unknown position. Rather, it is described (mathematically speaking) by a wave that is spread out in space. However, when the observer measures the position of the electron the description of the electron’s state suddenly changes from one in which the electron is in some sense ‘spread out’ to one where it is definitely localised at a particular point, and this is the position where the election is observed to be at the time the measurement is made.
This process is referred to as the ‘collapse of the wave function’ and is a completely random effect in the sense that it is not in general possible to predict in advance the outcome of a particular measurement, even when the state of the quantum mechanical system is precisely known. Hence, unlike classical mechanics, quantum mechanics is a fundamentally indeterministic theory. However, quantum mechanics does allow one to predict the probability of a particular outcome from a knowledge of the state of the system immediately prior to the measurement. Hence the probability of finding the electron to have a particular position when a measurement is performed can be calculated using certain mathematical rules that are familiar to all physicists.
There is no serious disagreement amongst physicists as to how to go about calculating these probabilities, and quantum mechanics is found to be an extremely effective theory in terms of its ability to describe a vast range of diverse phenomena. However, the nature of the process of the collapse of the wave-function is still the subject of much controversy amongst physicists, not least because it is unclear precisely what constitutes an ‘observation’ in quantum mechanics.
For example, we may ask, how important is it that an observation should involve a human observer at some stage? Or is the human observer irrelevant provided that the quantum mechanical system has been ‘measured’ by the inanimate measuring instrument that he or she uses to observe the system? There is no general consensus regarding the answers to questions such as these, although it does seem pretty certain that a measuring instrument that is itself subject to the laws of quantum mechanics (and one would have thought that this would be the case) is not sufficient to collapse the wave-function: something else must enter the picture at some point or other.
It is perhaps not too surprising that a few physicists have suggested that this crucial extra ingredient might be the mind of the human observer. The most extreme version of this idea supposes that the process of collapse can be accounted for by assuming that the human mind is somehow not subject to the normal laws of quantum mechanics. The consequence of this view is that the collapse of the wave-function is supposed to occur only when a conscious observer becomes aware of the result of the measurement.
This position is very much a minority view, even amongst that minority of physicists who take an active interest in such quasi-philosophical questions. Nevertheless, it has been advocated (albeit in a tentative fashion) by a Nobel prize-winning physicist (Eugene Wigner) and it certainly seems to be the interpretation of quantum mechanics that finds most favour amongst parapsychologists, probably because the curious ability of the mind to collapse wave-functions is vaguely reminiscent of psychokinesis and this seems to offer the possibility of an explanation of paranormal phenomena.
However, even if Wigner’s explanation of the collapse of the wave-function is valid it is difficult to see how it can account for the purported phenomenon of psychokinesis, for the only effect that the mind would have would be to collapse the wave-function of a quantum mechanical system, in accordance with the probabilities which are determined exclusively by the state of the system immediately prior to measurement. In particular, quantum mechanics (as currently understood) does not allow an observer to change these probabilities by some kind of act of volition, and so it is difficult to see how an observer can influence the actual outcome of an experiment by thought alone, as is required of any explanation of psychokinesis.
Another strange characteristic of quantum mechanics which has been held to be relevant to paranormal phenomena concerns the correlations between the results of observations which constitute one of the most important predictions of the theory. The existence of such correlations is not in itself particularly surprising: similar effects are predicted by classical mechanics and are in any case familiar from everyday experience.
For example, suppose that I arrive at work one day only to discover that I am wearing a pair of odd socks. Then it would be neither inexplicable nor particularly strange if on the same day my wife also discovered a similar pair of odd socks in the sock drawer back home. Clearly what happened was that I got two pairs of socks mixed up when I was dressing before leaving for work, and one pair of odd socks went with me whilst the other pair remained at home. Consequently, in order to explain such a correlation between my observation and my wife’s, I do not need to assume that it was the act of looking at my feet that somehow turned my socks odd nor that it was the act of looking that was somehow magically responsible for producing a pair of identical odd socks in the sock drawer back home! In this context such an explanation is clearly unnecessary and would be ridiculous.
Quantum mechanics also predicts correlations between observations which can be made at a wide distance from one another (and without any diminution of the effect with distance). This immediately provokes an explanation analogous to that which I used in order to explain the correlation between the two pairs of odd socks. Thus we might suppose that the physical systems described by quantum mechanics have definite properties (analogous to the pattern of the socks) which they carry about with them and which may be correlated with the properties of other physical systems. Observations simply enable us to learn about these properties but are not responsible for creating them and cannot exert any sort of magical ‘action at a distance’ effect.
However, despite this plausible explanation of quantum correlations, it turns out that the correlations predicted by quantum mechanics are in some sense ‘too strong’ to be explicable by this sort of mechanism. Consequently, if the correlations are to be explained at all, then we must invoke something like the ‘ridiculous’ explanation of the ‘sock-effect’ (where the simple act of looking at my feet is somehow responsible for producing a pair of odd socks in the sock drawer back home). Thus we must suppose that observations can affect the state of a quantum mechanical system, even over arbitrarily large distances! Such a phenomenon is perhaps the nearest thing to magic (or maybe the ‘acausal connecting principle’ of Jungian synchronicity?) that is known to orthodox science. A skeptical Einstein once referred to such effects as being analogous to telepathy, but there is now excellent experimental evidence that such effects are real.
But could such effects explain actual telepathy (assuming it exists)? Several parapsychologists seem to have supposed so, but there are at least two problems with this proposal. Firstly, the correlations predicted by quantum mechanics are in general extremely difficult to detect and it is not clear how one could devise a suitable mechanism using them that would be able to explain telepathic phenomena. Secondly, and more importantly, it turns out that although quantum mechanical correlations are too strong to be accounted for by the sort of ‘sensible’ explanation advanced in the case of the sock-effect, they are nevertheless too weak to allow for the transmission of actual messages over arbitrarily large distances. And so the use of such correlations as an explanation of telepathy seems entirely problematical.
Consequently, it is difficult to see how the collapse of the wave-function or quantum correlations can be used to furnish an explanation of either extrasensory perception or psychokinesis. In spite of this, I would not wish to deny that it might in principle be possible to modify the laws of physics as we currently understand them in order to account for paranormal phenomena. However, the few attempts which have so far been made in this direction seem to me to have a distinctly ‘half-baked’ feel about them and are really not very convincing. Moreover, when one takes into consideration the fact that most scientists dispute the very existence of the phenomena for which such explanations are devised then I can only conclude that attempts to co-opt modern physics on behalf of the paranormal are extremely premature.
Perhaps the only justification for raising the concepts of modern physics in the context of parapsychology is that whilst such concepts may be of no direct relevance to the paranormal they at least go some way towards overcoming the objections to the paranormal based on an appeal to ‘common sense’. The argument that paranormal phenomena defy common sense and can therefore be dismissed without further investigation has been advanced occasionally in one form or another by skeptics. But, it may be objected, the concepts of modern physics also defy our common sense intuitions concerning space, time and causality, and yet there are undeniably excellent reasons for accepting them nevertheless. Hence the ‘argument from common sense’ cannot be valid. This is no doubt true, but the argument from common sense is really a pretty unsound one in any case, and one hardly needs a knowledge of modern physics in order to recognise its falsity!
Bibliography
- John Briggs & F. David Peat, Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness (Fontana Paperbacks, 1985).
- John Briggs & F. David Peat, Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness (Harper & Row, 1989) .
- Bernard D’Espagnat, In Search of Reality (Springer-Verlag, 1983)
- Martin Gardner, Science: Good, Bad and Bogus (OUP, 1983), chapters 8, 17 & 36.
- Martin Gardner, ‘Parapsychology and Quantum Mechanics’ in Kurtz, Paul (Ed.) A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology (Prometheus, 1985).
- Dya Prigogine & Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’ s New Dialogue with Nature (Heinemann, 1984) .
