Day 314: Escape From Quantopia

Giordano Bruno discovered in the lights of the night sky a bottomless ocean of suns where others saw only sketches projected from human imagination. Alone among the pioneers of science, Bruno fully absorbed the lesson of Copernicus, something even the solar revolutionary himself failed to grasp. Not only is the cosmos not centered on Earth but the very idea of center has no physical meaning. There’s no more a privileged location from which all places are subject to objective measurement than a virgin or a goatfish in the sky.

“For there is in the Universe,” wrote the itinerant philosopher, “neither center nor circumference, but, if you will, the whole is central, and every point also may be regarded as part of a circumference in respect to some other central point.” If Earth seems like the center of all things, that’s only because we live on it. To lunar dwellers the Moon is center-stage. It’s all perspective.

Bruno never hesitated to announce his relativistic revelation to any and all. For this and other “impieties,” the church ordered him burned at the stake on Ash Wednesday 1600.

His successors lacked his penetrating insight. Following Isaac Newton’s observation that massive bodies attract each other at a distance, consensus opinion coalesced around the idea of a subtle kind of matter permeating space that mediates the force of gravity much as water mediates waves on the ocean. In the nineteenth century scientists updated this approach with their contention that electromagnetic waves propagate across a “luminiferous aether.” Aside from serving as a fixed framework establishing the boundaries and absolute center of the universe, the aether was thought to enable the cosmic machine to operate by contact mechanics, not unlike the contraptions we fashion down here on the terrestrial plane.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the great questions of existence seemed to be dissolving in the magic potion of science. The world had never been so clear, the ground never so solid and dependable.
Since then all center and substance have shattered. Bruno could at least count on God. Now we’ve got nothing, adrift in a void without reference points. The Great Wall of Certainty has collapsed under its own density. From the other side Bruno confronts us with crackling skin and blazing eye.

Up until 1897 the idea of material substance wasn’t generally regarded as a pre-scientific mirage. But in that year JJ Thomson cut the “uncuttable” atom. The solid core of matter turned out to be internally differentiated, with vast empty gulfs punctuated by occasional pinpricks of mass. An electron isn’t so much a thing as a field of possibilities across which a “particle” randomly bops around like a speck of static on a TV screen. It’s a dance whose steps can be calculated according to a probability wave. Let’s say an electron is trapped inside a perfectly sealed container. As it bounces off the walls, its probability wave gradually seeps out to the surrounding area until the electron itself is no longer inside the container.

This is why quantum physicists don’t speak of substance. Reality is composed of “information.” The randomness of the quantum level averages out to the predictability of the perceptual level. All that is solid melts into stats.

The de-centering of all centers began in 1887 when Albert Michelson and Edward Morley carried out an experiment designed to prove the existence of the aether. Their “interferometer,” a box containing a telescope and mirrors set at odd angles, could measure the speed of light on Earth relative to its speed in outer space. Since our planet is in motion, scientists reasoned that the light reaching us from a distant source should be either faster or slower than in the stillness of space, depending on whether we’re approaching the starlight or receding. But when Michelson and Morley looked at their results, they found no interference and therefore no difference in the speed of light relative to Earth’s motion.
For years their findings puzzled physicists, though Hendrick Lorentz wrote up some interesting equations meant to explain how the aether was somehow still relevant despite the no-show in ‘87. Not until Einstein came along did anyone see the true weight of the Michelson-Morley results. With a little tweaking of Lorentz’s equations, he demonstrated that space has no fixed framework, no center or circumference. As far as the universe is concerned, we are nowhere. Bruno was vindicated.

Whether you’re adrift in deep space or breezing along at 185,000 miles per second, light always travels faster, at 186,000 miles per second. light always travels 186,000 miles per second faster. Change your frame of reference and the flow of time changes along with it. Only the speed of light remains constant.

Or so we thought. Light has many different speeds, depending on what kind of medium it’s traversing. Water, for instance, slows it down by 75%. In the final days of the twentieth century, researcher Lene Vestergaard Hau imprisoned a beam of light in a frozen cloud of atoms, stopping it dead in its tracks and demonstrating, once and for all, that nothing is sacred.
...
You don’t have to consult Aristotle to realize something is holding all this up. You can’t have miles and miles of accident and no essence anywhere in sight. Something’s got to be substantial, not just informational. Absolute, not just relative. Even illusion is illusory only in contrast to reality. Who or what is hallucinating this hallucination?
For the answer we must go back, once more, to that magnetic moment when the world turned inside out. The clock is winding down on the nineteenth century as young Henri Bergson, a Polish Jew transplanted to France, studies philosophy at the Ecole Superier Normale. Captivated by the English positivist Herbert Spencer and his book, Progress: Its Law and Cause, Bergson is dazzled by the promise of a completely coordinated system of knowledge, a synthetic scheme founded on a single absolute principle: the persistence of force. Physical science, prophecies Spencer, shall render the world transparent, granting unimagined power to the human race.

Then one day Bergson is shaken by a terrible insight, as if the whole twentieth-century intellectual meltdown has appeared to him in a blast.

There’s no time in physics.

“Newton’s laws of motion,” according to physicists Christopher Hill and Leon Lederman, “make no distinction between past and future, and time can apparently flow in any direction.” On their website devoted to mathematician Emmy Noether and her principle of symmetry-breaking, Hill and Lederman describe the universe as a movie that could run through a projector in reverse as readily as forward. “When applied to simple systems, billiard balls colliding on the table, atomic collisions, etc., it would not be possible to tell in which direction the film was progressing. The motion we see satisfies laws of motion that are the same, whether run forward or backward.”5 Future and past are effectively interchangeable.

“Notice another peculiar aspect of physics,” write Hill and Lederman. “Nowhere in any formulation does the issue of a special point in time called ‘now’ ever occur. Yet, we humans sense something we call ‘now.’ Is it an illusion? We call this the ‘Now’ question.”

I can’t help but feel present. Even memories concern moments once present. To be human is to be temporal, informed by a past and oriented toward a future. Without ongoing presence our consciousness, the sensation of now, is null and void. Lacking real time, we aren’t real either.

~~Escape From Quantopia: Collective Insanity in Science and Society -by- Ted Dace

Day 179: Book Excerpt: The Lagoon- How Aristotle Invented Science

The district known as the Lyceum lay just beyond Athens’ stone walls. A sanctuary dedicated to Apollo Lykeios – Apollo of the Wolves – it contained, among other things, a military training ground, a racetrack, a collection of shrines and a park. The topography is uncertain. Strabo is vague, Pausanias is worse, and, besides, one wrote twenty years, the other two centuries after Sulla, a Roman general, had razed the place to the ground. Sulla also chopped down the ancient plane trees that lined its winding paths and built siege engines from their wood. Cicero, visiting in 97 BC, found only a waste. His visit was an homage to Aristotle who, more than two hundred years before, had rented a few buildings and set up his school there. It was said that Aristotle used to walk the Lyceum’s shady paths and that, as he did so, he talked.

He talked about the proper constitution of the city: the dangers of tyranny – and of democracy too. And of how Tragedy purifies through pity and fear. He analysed the meaning of the Good, to agathon, and spoke of how humans should spend their lives. He set his students logical puzzles and then demanded that they reconsider the nature of fundamental reality. He spoke in terse syllogisms and then illustrated his meaning with endless lists of things. He began his lectures with the most abstract principles and followed their consequences for hours till yet another part of the world lay before them dissected and explained. He examined his predecessors’ thought – the names of Empedocles, Democritus, Socrates and Plato were forever on his lips – sometimes with grudging recognition, often with scorn. He reduced the chaos of the world to order, for Aristotle was, if nothing else, a systems man.

His students would have regarded him with awe and, perhaps, a little fear. Some of his sayings suggest an acid tongue: ‘The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.’ ‘Educated men are as superior to uneducated as the living are to the dead.’ Of a rival philosopher he said: ‘It would be a shame for me to keep quiet if Xenocrates is still talking.’ There is a description too, and it isn’t an attractive one. It’s of a dandy who wore lots of rings, dressed rather too well and fussed about with his hair. Asked why people seek beauty in others he replied: ‘That’s a question only a blind man would ask.’ It is said that he had thin legs and small eyes.

This may be mere gossip: the Athenian schools were forever feuding and the biographers are unreliable. But we know what Aristotle talked about, for we have his lecture notes. Among them are the works – Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, Sophistical Refutations, the Metaphysics, the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics, Poetics, Politics – that loom over the history of Western thought like a mountain range. Sometimes clear and didactic, often opaque and enigmatic, riddled with gaps and rife with redundancies, they are the books that have made Aristotle’s name immortal. That we have them at all is mostly due to Sulla, who looted the library of a Piraeus bibliophile and took them back to Rome. But these philosophical texts are only a part – and not even the most important part – of what Aristotle wrote. Among the books that Sulla stole were at least nine that were all about animals.

Aristotle was an intellectual omnivore, a glutton for information and ideas. But the subject he loved most was biology. In his works the ‘study of nature’ springs to life for he turns to describing and explaining the plants and animals that, in all their variety, fill our world. To be sure, some philosophers and physicians had dabbled in biology before him, but Aristotle gave much of his life to it. He was the first to do so. He mapped the territory. He invented the science. You could argue that invented science itself.

At the Lyceum he taught a great course in natural science. In the introduction to one of his books there is a sketch of the curriculum: first, an abstract account of nature, then the motion of the stars, then chemistry, meteorology and geology in quick order, and then, the bulk of it, an account of living things – the creatures that he knew, among them, us. His zoological works are the notes for this part of the course. There was one book on what we call comparative zoology, another on functional anatomy, two on how animals move, one on how they breathe, two on why they die, one on the systems that keep them alive. There was a series of lectures on how creatures develop in the womb and grow into adults, reproduce and begin the process again – for there’s a book on that too. There were also some books about plants, but we don’t know what they contained. They are lost along with about two-thirds of his works.

The books that we have are a naturalist’s joy. Many of the creatures that he writes about live in or near the sea. He describes the anatomies of sea urchins, ascidians and snails. He looks at marsh birds and considers their bills, legs and feet. Dolphins fascinate him for they breathe air and suckle their young yet look like fish. He mentions more than a hundred different kinds of fishes – and tells of what they look like, what they eat, how they breed, the sounds they make and the patterns of their migrations. His favourite animal was that weirdly intelligent invertebrate, the cuttlefish. The dandy must have plundered fish markets and hung around wharves talking to fishermen.

But most of Aristotle’s science isn’t descriptive at all: it’s answers to questions, hundreds of them. Why do fishes have gills and not lungs? Fins but not legs? Why do pigeons have a crop and elephants a trunk? Why do eagles lay so few eggs, fish so many, why are sparrows so salacious? What is it with bees, anyway? And the camel? Why do humans, uniquely, walk upright? How do we see – smell – hear – touch? What is the influence of the environment on growth? Why do children sometimes look like their parents, and sometimes not? What is the purpose of testicles, menstruation, vaginal fluids, orgasms? What is the cause of monstrous births? What is the real difference between male and female? How do living things stay alive? Why do they reproduce? Why do they die? This is not a tentative foray into a new field: it’s a complete science.

~~The Lagoon- How Aristotle Invented Science -by- Armand Marie Leroi