Science and Advaita - 1

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Science and Advaita - 1

 

Introduction

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This is the first of a series of postings that are intended to show

how a variety of scientific disciplines are related to advaita

enquiry.

 

The first two postings (this one and the next) will consider modern

developments in mechanics: Newtonian, quantum and relativistic.

 

Two further postings (the third and the fourth) will go on to organic

sciences: as conceiving of a living energy that is experienced

through the ordered and intelligible functioning of nature, in our

microcosmic personalities and in their macrocosmic world.

 

A fifth posting will consider the humanities: as educating sciences

that cultivate our expression and interpretation of meaningful

information.

 

A sixth posting will be concerned with psychology: as expanding mind

through meditation, and as refining character through ethical and

motivational discernment.

 

And a final posting will conclude with philosophy: as reflecting

reason skeptically back into a relentless questioning of our assumed

beliefs.

 

As I understand it, advaita enquiry is basically concerned with a

reflective reasoning that turns all questions back upon the

assumptions from which they rise. And the questioning is aimed at an

unprejudiced truth that is completely free from any slightest

compromise with unexamined habits of belief.

 

All scientific disciplines need to be learned through a degree of

reflective questioning, which clarifies a learner's understanding of

underlying principles. It's on the basis of such principles that any

scientific theory is built and applied towards the achievement of

objectives in the world.

 

What then makes advaita special? And what is its relationship with

other sciences? What makes it special is its aim. It is not aimed at

the achievement of any objects that may be perceived or thought or

felt in the physical or mental world.

 

Advaita questioning is aimed at true knowledge alone. It is aimed at

an impartial and unbiased knowing that is plainly and simply true,

without any ifs or buts that compromise its truth with restricting

conditions and confusing uncertainty.

 

Such an impartial and unbiased truth must be utterly unmixed with any

partial objects or unexamined prejudice. That truth can only be

achieved at a depth of knowing which underlies all scientific

disciplines, as they attempt to achieve their variety of differing

objectives. At that common depth of knowing, no limiting partiality

nor any undermining prejudice remains. It is just that depth which is

sought by the reflective questioning of advaita enquiry.

 

Each discipline has its own way of reflecting back towards that depth

of knowing, in the education of its scientific practitioners. In this

series of postings, an attempt is made to give some idea of how such

a scientific reflection may be approached, through a variety of

different disciplines.

 

 

Newtonian mechanics

-------------------

 

The foundations of modern mechanics have been established largely by

two individuals: Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.

 

Newton described a world of material objects, distributed in three-

dimensional space. In this description, objects are related through

forces of action and reaction that they exert upon each other. Here,

Newton's laws describe how objects move through space, accelerated by

their interacting forces. Thus, smaller objects are related together

into larger structures, whose movement and change may be predicted in

the course of time.

 

This Newtonian description is fine when two objects are observed to

come into contact with each other -- as when a billiard ball is hit

by a cue-stick, and is thus impelled to strike against another

billiard ball. But Newton acknowledged a serious problem with forces

like gravity and electromagnetism -- as they appear to be transmitted

mysteriously, by a discontinuous jump across an intervening gap of

empty space.

 

Here, Newton recognized that his material description was inadequate.

In particular, it did not give any satisfactory account of what

happens in between two separated objects, so that force may be

transmitted from one to the other. In the absence of such an account,

he rather guessed at an inverse square law.

 

This guess comes out of an intuitive assumption that force is

radiated outward somewhat like a material flow, whose intensity must

get reduced in proportion to its expanding surface of dispersal. Such

an intuition is a little confused; because we are describing empty

space, in which no flow of matter is observed. We are talking here of

an immaterial transmission of material force, which is a bit self-

contradictory.

 

Despite this conceptual problem, the inverse square law has turned

out to be remarkably accurate, in describing the elliptical motion of

planets round the sun. Newton noted the success of the calculations,

but insisted that there was something basically wrong with the

conception. He said (in his 'Letters to Bentley') that 'the cause of

gravity is what I do not pretend to know, and therefore would take

more time to consider it.' On this question, his position

was: 'Hypothesis non fingo.' ('I make no hypothesis'.)

 

After Newton, Faraday and Maxwell developed the theory of

electromagnetism into what is called a 'field description', where

each point of space is conditioned by a mathematically specified

value. Here, the conditioning of space was described to exert a force

on the objects that are located in it. But the conditioning was still

materially conceived. It was attributed to a material substance

called the 'ether', which was said to pervade all space and thus to

enable the passage of light and other electromagnetic waves through

it.

 

 

Relative observations

---------------------

 

Einstein's great contribution was to see that the 'ether' was not a

material substance, added from *outside* into space and time.

Instead, it is an immaterial continuity which carries on essentially

*within* all space and time, throughout all differing places and all

changing moments. Einstein saw that all space and time are relative

measurements, which differ from one observer to another. From each

observer's point of view, space and time are measured from an

unmoving frame of reference, while other observers carry their

various frames of reference along with them.

 

But all observers see the same continuity of space and time through

which light travels, carrying information from one place and time to

another. That continuity is shared in common by all observers, as

they travel differently through it and as they exchange information

with one another.

 

In Einstein's theory of relativity, that common continuity is called

the 'space-time continuum'. And the travelling of light is an

essential principle, throughout the entire continuum. That travelling

of light is what essentially connects the different parts of the

continuum and its differently moving observers. The paths on which

light travels and the speed of light are thus fundamental to the

continuum. They must be the same for all observers, no matter how

these observers move in relation to each other.

 

Through this line of reasoning, Einstein took the speed of light to

be an invariant principle: found everywhere the same, by all

observers. This was the basis of his special theory of relativity,

which showed that not only space and time but also matter and energy

are relative measurements. Moreover, it was shown that matter and

energy are not quite as different as they seem. They are more

accurately differing perspectives, from which an object may be

described.

 

As shown by the equations of special relativity, when an object

moves, its mass is increased a little bit, by the added energy of

movement. Einstein interpreted this to show that mass is a condensed

form of energy. At first, it seems that an object's mass of inertial

matter is quite different from its energy of moving activity. But it

turns out that the difference is one of perspective only. The same

object may be viewed alternatively: on the one hand as a piece of

structured matter, and on the other as an energetic system of dynamic

activity.

 

 

Particles and waves

-------------------

 

Considering these alternative perspectives, Einstein reasoned that

just as matter is described to be made of particles like electrons,

so also energy may be described as made up of small steps through

which a dynamic system may increase or lower its activity. Such steps

had been called 'quanta' by Max Planck, in analysing the blackbody

radiation of light waves from a heated cavity.

 

Einstein used Planck's analysis to ask how light waves in general

could be described as emitted and absorbed in these 'quantum' steps

of energy. By following this line of thought, Einstein came up with a

strangely mixed and prevaricating description. Where light is emitted

or absorbed, it behaves as though it were made of material particles,

with a mass and a momentum that are determined by the electromagnetic

frequency and wavelength. But, in between the emission and

absorption, light travels through space as though it were a wave-

motion in the electromagnetic field.

 

This is a hybrid description that mixes up two different

perspectives, the material and the energetic, without a proper

resolution of their conflicting difference. Thus, Einstein and other

physicists regarded it as merely provisional, on the way to some

better description that must replace it.

 

Despite its conceptual difficulties, the hybrid description was

rather successful in describing the photoelectric effect, where light

knocks electrons out of the surface of a metal and thus creates a

small electric current. This led to the development of quantum

theory, which shows us that Newton's material mechanics fails and

ceases to apply at very small scales of size.

 

In modern mechanics, we have come to describe the world rather

differently at different scales of size. At tiny scales, within small

molecules and atoms, we use quantum mechanics. At medium scales,

between small molecules and our planetary system, we use mainly

Newtonian mechanics. And at larger scales, we make more and more use

of Einstein's space-time geometry.

 

Thus, quantum mechanics is our small-scale description of the

microscopic world; and space-time geometry is our large-scale

description of the macrocosmic universe. This will further be

described in the next posting.

 

Ananda