an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 13, Winter 2016/2017, ISSN 1552-5112
God’s
Casino, or Faith in Physics at the Chelsea Hotel
“There is no universe.”
David Bowie (1947 –2016)
A mathematician/astronomer/minister and
philosopher/artist get together for a fireside chat about dark matter, spirituality
and faith in physics, art and philosophy. (Part I)
RMC: I don't know where to start about dark matter. I have been reading a lot
lately on Jewish and early Christian mysticism so when I start to think about
the intersection of theology and physics my mind wanders toward the
Polkinghorne book because of the parallels he draws between quantum mechanics
(which was his field before abandoning physics and becoming a priest) and
theology. But "when push comes to shove" his defense-at-all-costs of
the Trinitarian view of things starts to get iffy.
NRIII: We can’t find it! (laughter)
Seriously, though the XENON100 dark matter experiment failed to find dark
matter, some scientists remain optimistic, arguing that with bigger detectors,
there is still much hope that dark matter may be found.[1]
Pollkinghorne et al. all seem to approach the ‘argument’ regarding the
relationship between science and religion from a proselytizing point of view. That
sort of view is rarely indicative of facts, and most often serves to pin down
tenets of faith, meaning that nothing is solved or resolved in conclusion
regarding a religion vs. science debate. Such argument is not logical, nor
scientific – it’s creative and artistic, and there is nothing wrong with it,
where it serves a creative experiential context.
One must recognize that science is an entirely different
enterprise, which by definition seeks to relieve itself from artistic duties in
favor of reproducible facts and experiences; something art-infused endeavor can
never be. One’s experience of God and Ganesh, or Led Zeppelin and the
RMC: Dark
matter is only known to us through the
force of gravity. I find it not unreasonable to entertain the thought that
our knowledge of physics may simply be incomplete - as is certainly the case
when we try to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics! It is
essentially only through our modeling of galactic dynamics, our assumptions of
how objects “should” gravitationally interact with each other on large-scales,
that the need for dark matter is forced upon us. But we are arrogant creatures
of the universe, so the argument for a modified physics seems to have been
firmly given the back-seat (in this case only, it would seem) to the pursuit of
some strange new matter to explain our observations. Taking my cue from that
nuclear sage Heisenberg, who said: “Not
only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think,”[2] I wonder
if your view of mysticism is really all there is to say on the subject? What do
we mean by mystical visions, for example, anyway? Some scholars argue that we
must distinguish such experiences from, say, hallucinations (which is what I
used to attribute them to). For example, it has been argued that hallucinations
are delusions in which nothing real corresponds to what is reported. OK. In a
vision, however, the quality of the experience often suggests that the “content
of the perception is real, a direct, unmediated contact with a non-ordinary aspect of reality that is
external and independent of the observer[3].” Spooky action
at a distance, anyone? That the net result of much of the writing on the
complimentary nature of science and religion by Polkinghorne, et al., often
ends up being proselytizing and hand-waving, there is no doubt. His arguments,
though, resulting from the humbling and bewildering implications of quantum
mechanics, do seem to point to something more, something ‘just beyond’ our
comprehension through the internal rational schema that we seem designed to
view the world with; I ask, can our finite hominid minds really grasp the
infinite? I think Heisenberg really was on to something.
NRIII: It sounds like you’re saying that
reality has an unknown component, which is probably a safe bet, in any case.
There’s always a ‘just beyond’ what is known. We cannot ‘know’ everything, I
think. (laughter)
However,
if the immeasurable or the unknown is ‘undetectable’ – here is where a problem
lies.
My
intuition tells me that questions regarding dark energy and dark matter, and
quantum entanglement, may be related to questions of faith and spirituality,
since they seem to share what appears to be an ‘undetectable’ or an observed,
but poorly differentiated nature given our instrumentation; and they also
appear to be everywhere, if you will. I do not dismiss the idea of mysticism,
rather I believe that mysticism is analogous to a leap of faith; that it is a
‘creative’ leap, in the sense that when a person acknowledges the ‘just beyond’
or ‘unknown’ and attempts to engage it – then one is necessarily bound to the
idea of its ‘creative’ construction, since what lies ‘just beyond’ is truly
unknown, and perhaps immeasurable and/or undetectable. And since we cannot
identify the ‘just beyond’ objectively, the only alternative is to identify it
subjectively, which is to say, we participate in its creation through
intelligent speculation and where possible, experimentation.
I imagine
that as an intellectual category, or example, the ‘just beyond’ may function
sort of like many categorical examples in particle physics, where we cannot
observe an entity, or particle, without affecting it. Or for example, as in
Erik Verlinde’s argument that dark matter does
not exist. Verlinde suggests instead that dark matter is an illusory
side-effect of observed dark energy and the emergent nature of spacetime and
gravity, where both spacetime and gravity are actually emergent properties of quantum entanglement
within a holographic image that arises out of quantum matter.[4]
In such
thinking, our entire universe is simply an incredibly sophisticated image,
albeit a very complex one that we, astonishingly, inhabit!
Moreover,
entanglement is a necessary condition of such a theoretical holographic
framework. Perhaps an engagement with the ‘just beyond’ may involve simply ‘thinking’
about it, and may include other means of engagement such as meditation, prayer,
etc. I do wonder how all of these subjects (e.g. dark matter, prayer, dark
energy, meditation, etc.) may interact, if at all.
Scientific
experimentation shows that “everything on Earth, everything ever observed with
all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the
universe” and even NASA quips, “Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn't be
called ‘normal’ matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the
universe.”[5] When we
talk about ‘spooky action at a distance’ we’re really talking about quantum
entanglement, or the principle of quantum nonlocality. We expect things to work
in ways we can understand: microscopically, macroscopically and otherwise – but
often, we cannot understand much of what we observe. Research on prayer and
mediation is ambiguous, and the same is also true of research on quantum
entanglement and nonlocality. Is that because many of the universe’s
machinations are hidden in the 95% of dark energy and dark matter, or within
the universal holographic schema suggested by some physicists? Why not? Does
that correlate with faith and spirituality? Perhaps. But how so? Arguably, we
might expect that quantum entanglement would have to function through something, through some sort of
material process, no? At the same time, spirituality, faith, psychic phenomena
(now commonly referred to collectively as ‘psi’ research) - essentially, all of
what heretofore was known as metaphysics, would also have to function through something as well. What if these
things share something ‘physical’ in common? Something to do with dark energy
and dark matter, quantum entanglement and nonlocality?
This is not unfamiliar territory,
but it is controversial: physicist Wolfgang Pauli and psychologist Carl Jung
covered this ground in the 1930s through the 1950s, and referring to the
phenomenon of material, psychological or even spiritual relatedness and
coincidence, Jung used the term synchronicity
to describe the phenomenon, conceptualizing with Pauli that it functioned
through a quantum field of some kind. Perhaps we are better placed now to ask
similar questions, given new data and understanding. Charlene Burns discusses
some of what was at stake in Pauli and Jung’s work in an article from 2011:
Jung
and Pauli were convinced that synchronistic events reveal an underlying unity
of mind and matter, subjective and objective realities. Synchronicity was (and
continues to be) a prime target for criticism of Jung that for decades bordered
on outright dismissal by many in the scientific and academic communities. For
example, historian of science Suzanne Gieser writes that she finds Pauli’s
interest in Jung “unusual” because “most of those with an academic or scientific
background dismiss Jung totally.”
Following Pauli’s death in 1958, Pauli’s wife actively opposed including
any of his correspondence with Jung in the collections of his papers. The chairman of CERN’s Pauli Committee
recently wrote that, “inclusion of letters dealing mainly with psychology … was
much debated by the committee.” In the end, they did decide to publish the
correspondence, explaining that, “it is of no importance what we think of Jung
and his psychology. The important thing is that Pauli was a convinced adherent
of Jung’s teachings.” A brief look at the evolution and content of the
decades-long correspondence between these two men will reveal the possibilities
and problems inherent in efforts of even the most brilliant of specialists to
transcend disciplinary limitations.[6]
Interestingly,
Burns too, like you, includes a quote from Heisenberg at the front of her
essay!: “The same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms
are also responsible for the structure of our minds.” Burns’ quote comes from
Heisenberg’s book, Physics and Beyond
(1971). Sounds like reasonable mysticism to me!
TO BE CONTINUED…
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 13, Winter 2016/2017, ISSN
1552-5112
Notes