Theos-Talk Archives (May 1996 Message tl00337)

See JRC's essay below.  This is excellent and should be the kind
of material I would like to see posted more often on Theos-l.  JRC, you
are very knowledgeable in this area and a good writer, too!  Thanks for the
information
and insights.

Daniel



>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
>
>