Theos-Talk Archives (May 1996 Message tl00318)

A wee bit of "substance" (-:):

On Fri, 3 May 1996 Richtay@aol.com wrote:
>
>What the Heisenberg principle shows, and what Bee's post re-
>affirms, is that the universe is NOT materialistically
>determined.  HPB said the same thing.
     That is most assuredly not what the Heisenberg principle
[of indeterminacy] shows.
          Much has been made in pop science of the so-called
"uncertainty principle" - but a lot of it is *bad* distortions of
this principle, from which are drawn completely untenable
inferences. A short discussion of this might be worth it to make
this point.
     Science had finally reached the point of postulating the
existence of atomic particles, electrons, protons & etc., but the
question that was naturally asked was *how* such things could
possibly be *observed*. Science was used to observing things
smaller than the range open to the naked eye - it had the
microscope. But there were problems with microscopes. To have one
high-powered enough to actually observe an electron, it would
require *extremely* short wave-lengths of light (the power of a
microscope being limited by the size of light waves - they cannot
resolve anything smaller than a wavelength), but, as both
Einstein and Planck discovered, the size of the frequency is
directly related to the energy of the photons.
     This is not something that ordinarily mattered in previous
uses of the microscope - but with the electron science was
finally dealing with the fact that a *single* photon (especially
a highly charged one) would be capable of *affecting* the thing
being observed. In fact to "see" an electron would mean it would
be necessary to *hit* the electron with a photon ... and
electrons are not only small, but light - they are
*substantially* altered - both their position and their velocity
(imagine "studying" a cow by standing on top of a mountain and
rolling small boulders down the hill at it ... both its location
at the time and the speed with which it was moving would be
considerably affected every time a "hit" was scored).
     While there is much more to this, a half-dozen "catch-22's"
.. Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy resolves essentially
to this: We cannot simultaneously know *both* position and
velocity with precision *even in imagination* (that is, he was
not just talking about the current technology of microscopes, he
was going further and imagining how good observation could be
even with a hypothetically "perfect" microscope - and still
coming up with the fact that there was no way around Planck's
constant).  To know position exactly alters velocity - to know
velocity we must disturb position. We can tweak experimental
variables to know position approximately, and also gain some idea
of velocity, but every gain in precision in the one comes at a
loss of precision in the other.
     This "translates" into pop science as the oft-heard
statement that the act of observing affects the observed. But the
*actual* "Heisenberg principle" was referring to the *atomic
scale* in terms of size. But its important to understand a couple
of things the principle does *not* mean - both of them alleged in
new-age circles to be "demonstrated" by Heisenberg:
     1) Heisenberg never thought that the uncertainty of
measurement at the atomic scale implied indeterminacy at the
macro scale - e.g., he would *not* have thought that the act of
looking at a golf ball somehow altered the golf ball. He was
talking purely about the scale at which the smallest imaginable
agent of measurement (a photon) was itself large enough to alter
the measured.
     2) He never implied that the uncertainty was a quality of
the *objective* world - i.e., his "uncertainty" meant that *human
scientists attempting to measure atomic particles* would
necessarily need to be uncertain about the variables used to
describe those particles - his indeterminacy meant that *humans
could not precisely determine the variables they wished to
determine*, not that the *particles themselves* were *behaving*,
if left to themselves, in a materialistically non-deterministic
fashion.

>MIND is what has a huge impact on matter and the course of
>evolution.  One can look at these experiments in quantum physics
>and be very impressed by the fact that HPB knew and discussed
>this decades before the actual proof came to us Westerners.
     I'd very much like to hear the "proof" that "MIND" has a
"huge"  impact on matter and the course of evolution. A mystic
might premise that  there is some such thing called a "Universal
mind", or a cosmic informing  principle of some sort (which was
certainly postulated by philosophers  millennia before HPB lived)
but I don't believe anyone has taken this as a *scientific*
hypothesis ... and most certainly no one has "proved" it.
     So far as what is called "mind" by humanity currently, other
than purely macro level manipulations (making trees into a
house), I suppose some of our  chemistry and physics is altering
matter in such a way as to slightly  affect evolution, but unless
one wishes to extend the definition of "mind"  to include things
like the DNA helix (which does hold and process  information, but
probably would have a hard time being called a producer  of
"thought"), evolution proceeded for vast stretches of time
without any  presence of "mind" at all.
     I believe it is a *huge* stretch to claim that the current
research and conclusions in quantum theory are somehow converging
with or confirming anything HPB claimed. This is *not* to say I
believe either HPB or quantum physics is right or wrong - simply
that they speak two *very* different languages. Quantum
physicists rarely attempt to translate their experimental
findings into the terms of Vedic allegory. HPB did try to
translate the religious allegory of old occult texts (that she
claimed contained veiled scientific knowledge) into the language
of modern science - but it was the modern science of *her* time.
     Additionally, she makes very few affirmative statements
about what "Occult science" would teach, and these are usually
brief plain statements that are backed up not by experimental
evidence, but by quotations from old spiritual/religious texts.
Most of her writings on science seem to have the intention not of
articulating a coherent scientific model that can be framed in
testable, repeatable form, but of deconstructing and criticizing
the materialism of late 19th century science. Well, fine, but
modern science cares little either for the stumbling conclusions
of that science *or* the criticisms of it (and the scientists of
that time actually produced far more vehement (and coherent - HPB
certainly did ramble) criticisms than she did.) It is now a moot
point.
     [At one point, for instance - I'll find the reference if
necessary - HPB, attempting to deconstruct the law of gravity ...
a law she claimed was *not* universal ... uses the fact that the
tails of comets always point away from the sun as an argument,
holding that a comet whose tail ignores the law of gravity even
in close proximity to the sun can hardly be said to be following
that law.
     At the time, of course, the existence of the solar wind was
unknown. The sun rotates on its own axis once every 25 days or so
at the equator, and 39 days or so at the poles (yes, it rotates
as a fluid body, not a solid one)  - *very* fast for a body that
huge - and as well as emitting electro-magnetic radiation, also
emits *particles* - electrons and protons - that as the result of
the sun's rotation leave the sun in spirals, like a huge lawn
sprinkler. These particles act as a sort of "wind" blowing away
from the sun in all directions. They are what is responsible for
"blowing" the comet's tail away from the sun, that is, they can
act on the vaporous tail in such a way as to supersede the
effects of gravity - but are far too small to supersede those
effects on the mass of the comet body.
     All of which is to say that whether she is ultimately right
or wrong about gravity, her argument against the scientific
conceptualization of the time turns out to have absolutely
nothing to do with gravity - and is simply fully explained by the
knowledge of the solar wind ... a factor that was unknown to the
scientists of the time (it wasn't until the first rockets
penetrated the atmosphere that the existence of actual
*particles* being radiated by the sun was discovered) - but that
was clearly *also unknown to HPB*.]
     It must be remembered that the *pace* of 20th century
science is historically unprecedented. (A friend of mine, a
chemist, told me that the "half-life" of chemistry's knowledge is
now about 3 years ... that someone who graduated from college and
did not work in the field for three years would find close to
half of his/her education obsolete - and in other branches of
science its even shorter). From the beginning of recorded
("exoteric" (-:) history until around the mid - 1800's *all*
energy our species used was produced by either muscle or fire ...
in less than one century we went from the deliberate production
of energy from a steam engine to unleashing the energy bound
within large atoms. In less than a century we went from the first
flight of a airplane to actually hitting the moon and coming
back.
     HPB spends a lot of time attacking the science of her time -
but a *lot* of what she wrote simply is no longer a relevant
argument. This is not a criticism of HPB - how could she have
criticized our current science? But there are several real
problems in trying to discover whether what she wrote is
confirmed or not confirmed by the science of our time.
     Modern science, at least a lot of the "hard" science - has
come to think and speak almost purely in the language of
mathematics. For instance, it is impossible to grasp the actual
*science* of quantum mechanics without understanding the geometry
of Riemann spheres and Hilbert space, and without a thorough
knowledge of both probability theory and the mathematics of
complex numbers. When people try to translate some of the
understandings into "plain english" (and there is a whole genre
of "pop science" out there just now) there is generally, even at
best, *significant* distortions introduced. The *reason*
mathematics are used is not (as in "occult" circles) to
deliberately "veil" secret information, but because the concepts
of the english language are simply not even vaguely precise
enough to think about the subatomic world with. Its like trying
to do neurosurgery with a pocket knife - the tool is just way too
big and blunt to make the necessary distinctions.
     So what kind of discussions are possible? We have HPB, who
translated oriental religious allegory into the english language
to deconstruct the scientific materialism of the late 19th
century, and we have the translations of modern science from the
language of mathematics into the current english language (few
Theosophists, I think, do very much work with multidimensional
complex vector space) - and with all this translating its a damn
miracle if anything even approaching anything other than the most
superficial relationships can even be postulated between HPB and
modern science. (See the following quantum example in post 2).
     Another significant problem in trying to understand HPB's
"science" has to do with the uneasy and conflicting feelings the
TS has concerning "inner powers". One of HPB's most frequent
claims is that the science of her time was only discovering
*phenomena*, while the science of the initiates concerned itself
with the nominal, *causal* world. She makes many claims for the
existence of beings and forces that she says cause a lot of the
things whose *effects* are what science perceives. And she says
that these beings and forces were discovered by, and can only be
verified by, *those who have developed supersensible perception*.
     Yet the disciplined development of such things (even with
the *intent* of *research or service*) is frowned upon in
Theosophical organizations (if not actually forbidden in some
circles), and any attempts by modern Theosophists to actually
report attempts *at that very verification* are met with at best
warnings about the "unreliable nature" of such a research tool,
and at worst warnings about how the use of such things threaten
to take one off the "path".
     I believe, in short, that unfortunately Theosophy itself has
created a situation in which neither modern scientists, nor
modern clairvoyants, find Theosophy a place that *invites* the
"investigation of unexplained laws of nature and the powers
latent in man" - but in fact both find Theosophy a place almost
deliberately inimicable to such investigation. [But I won't get
onto that (-:)]
							 -JRC