Published in 1975, The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra is an exploration of the parallels between modern physics and eastern mysticism.
Capra’s book contrasts modern physics and the religious and philosophical traditions of the Far East, including traditions from Hindu, Buddhist, or Taoist tradition while modern physics focuses on quantum theory and relativity theory.
The roots of physics, as of all Western science, is found in the first period of Greek philosophy in the sixth century BC, where a culture of religion and science were not separated. Only later did the dualism of the separation of spirit and matter become characteristic of Western philosophy. Capra explains that Western culture and science led to a separation of mind and body, I Think Therefore I Exist. The identity with the mind instead of the whole organism flourished. This thinking led to a “world out there, separate from me” and a “me versus anything out there” view. It leads to a view of I Am Important and Separate From Nature. This tree is a tree, and it’s not connected to me. (In my opinion, this way of divisive thinking has led to the destruction of our earth and climate change). Eastern traditions, however, emphasize the basic unity of the Universe – an aim to become aware of all things and the mutual inter-relational aspect of all things, to transcend the notion of an isolated reality.
Throughout history, it’s been acknowledged that the human mind is capable of two kinds of knowledge: the rational and the intuitive, and have traditionally been associated with science and religion, respectively. In the West, the intuitive is devalued, whereas the traditional Eastern attitude is generally the opposite.
Classical Physics
Before we dive into quantum physics, let’s back up to classical physics, which quantum physics is built upon. The stage of the Newtonian universe was the three-dimensional space, always at rest and unchangeable. All changes in the physical world were described in terms of a separate dimension, called time, which again was absolute, having no connection with the material world and flowing smoothly from the past to the present to the future. Newton stated that mathematical time was absolute and true and flows universally, without regard to anything external. The material particles moved through absolute time, and absolute space and Newton saw these as small, solid, and indestructible objects which all matter was made of. Newton said these particles were created by God and not subject to further analysis. The universe was set in motion and continued to run ever since, like a machine, governed by immutable laws. This is a mechanistic view of nature, rigorous determinism. Everything had a definite cause and gave rise to a definite effect with absolute certainty.
Yet it was less than a hundred years later that a new physical reality was discovered which showed the limitations of the Newtonian model apparent and showed that none of its features had absolute validity.
Michael Faraday and Clerk Maxwell discovered a force called the field. When looking at the interaction between a positive and a negative charge, they found each charge creates a ‘disturbance’ or a ‘condition’, in the space around it so that the other charge, when it is present, feels a force. The condition in space which has the potential of producing a force is called a field. It exists whether or not another charge is brought in to feel its effect. Today we know that radio waves, light waves or X-rays, are all electromagnetic waves, differing only in the frequency of their oscillation, and that visible light that we see is only a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Then came Einstein with his relativity theory that space is not three-dimensional and time is not a separate entity: both are intimately connected and form a four-dimensional continuum, ‘space-time’. We could no longer talk about space without talking about time and time is not a universal flow. Different observers will order events differently in time if they move with different velocities relative to the observed events. Time is relative. Now we understand that mass is nothing but a form of energy, and even an object at rest (like a rock) has energy stored in its mass.
Rutherford came along and discovered that atoms consist of vast regions of space in which extremely small particles - the electrons - moved around the nucleus, bound to it by electric forces. It’s not easy to get a sense of how small atoms are, so here’s a mind blowing visualization:
Imagine an orange blown up to the size of the Earth. The atoms of the orange will then have the size of actual cherries. Myriads of cherries tightly packed into the globe of the size of Earth – that’s how small atoms are. But, wait. Atoms, these previously described insanely small particles, are HUGE compared to the nucleus in its center. In the cherry-sized atom, the nucleus of an atom will be so small we couldn’t see it. To see the nucleus, we would have to blow up the atom to the size of the biggest dome in the world. In an atom the size of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, the nucleus would be the size of a grain of salt! And in and between that grain of salt and the dome is vast space. Most atoms are made of an insanely large amount of space.
Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and a few others shaped one of the most exciting periods in modern science, when they brought into our knowledge - the strange and unexpected reality of the subatomic world. They kept asking questions and nature answered with a paradox.
The subatomic units of matter are very abstract entities which have a dual aspect. Depending on how we look at them, they appear sometimes as particles, sometimes as waves; and this dual nature is the same for light – which can be a wave or a particle. At the subatomic level, matter does not exist with certainty at definite places, but rather shows ‘tendencies to exist’, and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show ‘tendencies to occur’. This is mind-blowing: nothing was definite. Matter, made up of subatomic particles, couldn’t exist with certainty but just had a tendency to exist.
Quantum theory said objects dissolve into wave-like patterns of probabilities, and these probabilities are interconnected. Remember at the beginning of this essay, the Far East traditions stated everything was interconnected. More on that later.
Quantum theory reveals a basic oneness of the universe because we cannot decompose the world into small units, nothing is isolated building blocks, but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. Everything is interrelated. On top of everything being interrelated, these relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer affects these interactions. Therefore the “I and the World” view is no longer valid because nature cannot be spoken about without speaking about ourselves: it’s all interconnected.
Quantum physics shows that the properties of a particle can only be understood in terms of its activity – of its interaction with the surrounding environment – and that the particle, therefore, cannot be seen as an isolated entity, but has to be understood as an integrated part of the whole. There exists nothing independently, it’s all part of the whole.
In modern physics, the universe is thus experienced as a dynamic, inseparable whole which always includes the observer in an essential way.
So, we’ve learned the tenets of quantum theory: everything is interconnected, the observer affects the interactions, there exist only probabilities and tendencies. Now, let’s turn our focus to the Far East traditions and see what the ancient texts have revealed and how that relates to modern physics.
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