The light of wholeness
The title and cover of this book reflect an aspiration to recover the light of wholeness. Wholeness, it is said, contains everything about itself, within itself. Wholeness is a quality one recognises as the impetus to one’s actions, or the motivation behind the scenes, without ever revealing itself fully. Wholeness is what one meets on a journey, as the source and end of adventure.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, science set out to discover a path, about which everything at every stage could be exactly known. The sense of mystery into which one journeyed was replaced by the static elements of reason by which one could explain the world. The twentieth century needed an instrument to harness wholeness into useable theorem. So a method was developed to tease this light of wholeness into the dark containment of a pure rationality.
The debate around quantum theory naturally focused on wholeness, since there was no complete definition of individual existence independent of context. Wholeness was conceived of as a mathematical artefact. The world only had reality as it was brought into being through the act of measurement. Measurement is a very limited application of something much wider which is ‘seeing’. True seeing is not about the measurement of a quantity, but the engagement into a situation to discover its ‘meaning’ – that is, the convergence of content and happening on a form.
So having declared measurement as the way of interacting with the world, very conveniently one has dropped off the end of physics without anyone noticing all those difficult possibilities to do with unmeasurable routes to meaning.
It seems then that we have done the impossible: we have placed the realisation of meaning inside knowledge and nothing can ever happen to disprove this assumption! It seems a cast-iron case. Only the expectation that knowledge already has about the world is a legitimate basis for experience.
Once physics has made the step of sealing meaning into knowledge, nothing can ever happen to test whether that step was indeed justified. After all, our knowledge is our own, our institutions are free to set their own academic standards, so what else is there to even challenge whether this step was legitimate?
Surely then this book is simply another commentary on the futility of the move to seal meaning into knowledge, unable as we are to penetrate into the protective containment of our conceptual hold on the world? The attempt we make to face this paradox cannot be solved from within the method of cause and effect.
As every child knows, wholeness is the route to life. When I was six years old, I had a desk. I had many precious things in it and I thought, ‘Well, it is not really safe having them all in this desk because I have a key here… And though it’s locked, somebody can take the key and unlock it.’ I had the idea of putting the key into the drawer that was locked, through a small crack that was there. So, nobody could get to it.
My desk locked by a single key, became securely protected at the moment when, fitting the key through the slit between the locked drawers, all opening was prohibited. This event reflects what has happened to science. Rather like my desk drawer with key inside it, the conceptual world of science has closed about its own capability to understand precisely what its theories may statically describe.
The present book reopens the question of meaning that lives in paradox and retakes a path into the unknown, to find where we are beyond mere measurement.
Method
The chapters which follow, like the faces of a dice, are not chronological, but each opposition fits to add to the significance of the previous ones. The story is built up through the points of view of physicists that reflect one another. The understanding accumulates through reflections that play on one another, to give a suggestion of the whole quality pointed to beyond. All the perspectives develop an understanding about the world and our place in it, without having to fix what it is we are describing. The book is as a juxtaposition of faces that together hold the chance of existence acting into order.
The first section is called The Dice of Existence. This section details a series of opposing faces in the history of physics. The mirror reality of the atom is reflected in the many faces implicated in its discovery. Bohr meets with Heisenberg on the edge of global destruction; Pauli meets with Jung in the dreams of creation; Bohm meets with Bortoft in the quest of existential unification. The next chapter jumps to the origin of physics. Newton meets Leibniz in the courtroom of the Royal Society to judge over who first invented calculus. The dispute of philosophies is between Newton’s insight into material motion and Leibniz’s foresight of the existential fulfilling of unity. Einstein resolves the dispute by placing another mirror on the world, the immutable speed of light. The third chapter is about Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism. Light has two faces, one seeding a causal and the other a prophetic account. The lived tension of these oppositions is illuminated throughout in the way significance writes chance into coherence.
In a dice, the separate faces require opposition to present their particular possibility. And similarly here, the paradoxical opposition of various theories and predictions of physics face their partial perspectives to a deeper, whole truth of experience.
In the second section, The Dice of Renewal, the future is engaged as a practical test. The action moves to fateful happening concerned directly with the world. Right at the heart of physics, chance is the yeast that brings through the established parts of the first section, the movement into the whole of the second section. The method knows from within its own process how the partial elements of potential are drawn into whole expression. The logicians Spencer Brown and Lou Kauffman, in the sixth chapter, see the world as a movement whose arbitration is either wholeness or emptiness. Kauffman describes this as ‘the concept of a system whose structure is maintained through the self-production of its own structure.’ (Kauffman 2015, p. 12). The way of working with this logic is to travel inward through the method’s paradoxical premise, making connection until arriving at the essence of nature that retrospectively defines where we have come from. This method whittles away towards an essence that is the worth of the journey of inquiry.
In the third section, Creation, time faces energy in the specific account of meaning. The last chapter finds an unexpected third reflection on the story of the first chapter. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker travelled with Heisenberg to meet Bohr in Copenhagen to discuss the feasibility of developing an atomic bomb. Von Weizsäcker later went on to write The Unity of Nature. In this book, he exposes the shortcomings of a normal view of time in physics. Instead he suggests returning to an alternative conception of time that fulfils the separate faces we have explored as a new holder of events, not only between the concepts and ideas of physics, but between physics and theology!
The Dice of Existence
We travel through paradoxical dimensions. The understanding through this book is that where there are tensions in physics, as in descriptions through unity or division, darkness or light, past or future, and so on, physics finds a way to balance a theory at the very edge of this tension, where both states are ambiguously possible.
In Chapter 1, Bortoft invokes phenomenology by entering the paradox of seeing both division and unity as simultaneous attributes of quantum phenomena.
In Chapter 2, Einstein takes the tension between Newton’s view of matter as dominating over change and Leibniz’s view of change realising itself in unities of dynamic identity. Einstein plays within the paradox of having matter itself operate on the medium of space and time through which matter moves. The result is relativity.
In Chapter 3, Maxwell’s equations have two solutions: the retarded forward-moving wave of light and another advanced backward resolution to a formative darkness. Feynman and Wheeler’s solution is to combine these tensions in the balance of a dynamic illumination. Their model is taken up in the quantum potential field and the bi-metric theory of relativity, as explanation for dark matter.
Physics, in each case, works with paradox by applying at one stage of an argument, one direction of the ambiguous alternative, and at the other stage, another. So in quantum theory, the aspect of unity where all potentials are considered universally overlaps with the statement of each individual separately. In relativity, light is both universal and specific. For Feynman and Wheeler, radiation goes both forward from the past and backward to the future.
Each of these paradoxes relate to the others. Although they are applied individually in terms of quantum theory, relativity and electromagnetism, their dimensions of tension also work in combination.
There is a relatedness of form between the ambiguous tensions that contains the essence of each paradoxical statement in the other two. The paradox of division/unity does not complete itself in its own statement of quantum theory. Rather the paradoxical nature of this one ambiguity requires the other two ambiguities to fully frame its own power of application. The world does not collapse through theories into a self-explanation. The experience of the spirit is to fulfil all these independent articulations in a composite story of unity. The relatedness is not in a common factor to which the three theories reduce; the relatedness is the quality of an association that expands experience from fragmentation into unity (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. The Dice of Existence
The Dice of Renewal
We can now do something similar with the second section. Each of these chapters/dimensions is a similar paradoxical element that proposes an ambiguous route of becoming.
The nature of the dice combining paradoxical tenets is that it adds chance into an order that is more than just a linear deduction of earlier states, as shown in Chapter 4.
The fulfilment of chance brings whole form to manifest differently according to circumstance, as shown in Chapter 5.
Right at the heart of physics, chance is the yeast that brings through the established parts of the first section, the movement into the whole of the second section. For Bohr, probability or chance was central to the particle world. The section, The Dice of Renewal, explores chance as the risk of the individual to realise through its journey the outcome of wholeness. The individual surrenders itself, outside any predefined structure, to a journey of discovery, where order is introduced only at the end by the fulfilment of wholeness. Chance ceases to be something mathematical, that which contains existence in the predictive walls of a theory, and becomes something experiential, that which transforms the finite through surrender to an infinite outcome. Bortoft, Goethe, Hiley, Kauffman, Spencer Brown, all developed science to navigate this other notion of chance. The surrender from initial definition delivers the partial elements of potential into whole expression. As cited above, Kauffman describes this as ‘the concept of a system whose structure is maintained through the self-production of its own structure’.
Again we put these together into the Dice of Renewal (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. The Dice of Renewal
Creation
To combine these two statements of existence and renewal, we use a third step of Creation, involving the holding of the paradoxical ambiguity between energy and time (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. Creation
Creation makes the double movement between mystery and causality. Two aspects of time, the mythological and the chronological, oversee the whole cycle of existence, in the fulfilling of the experiential, participative journey into the nature of wholeness.
Journey
One day in a bookshop, in 1994, I happen to stray from the physics section into the neighbouring theology section. Somehow as happens in these cases, the whole feeling of a journey to be undertaken is communicated to me in one feeling of connection. All the turbulence between the questions of the physics and theology sections come to rest in this one offered resolution.
The instances of my experience to do with science (learning, puzzling, solving) and those to do with spirit (travelling, discovery, rebirth) live a movement where something becomes apparent before the separation into the two disciplines.
My first impression is concentrated, complete, a vision of something full and finished. The feeling lacks any structure. It is the whole, in its full exhibition, without any division into parts. The concepts which I need to articulate the feeling are totally missing. The first impression impels me to work towards the realisation. My involvement is actively included as participatory factor. The unity of what world and writer can achieve together discloses a genuine and novel illumination out of darkness.
After this introduction, I begin to visit the bookshop regularly. Gradually the form of the book begins to emerge through specific questions that become in their turn the focus of more broad explorations. The parts form themselves through those questions that carry the whole meaning, as disclosed in the first impression. The concepts that are to give structure to the project become apparent.
For instance, one night in 1995 I cannot sleep trying to understand where the split between science and spirit happened. My thought focuses on Bohr as the critical character in this separation. The next day, with little rest, I travel to the bookshop. The first series of books I meet on the shelf is The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr in three volumes. It is brought home to me, without being able to articulate fully at the time, that Bohr mixes up two questions: ‘what is there?’ and ‘what happens?’ The definition determines henceforth the scope of what science sets itself up to explore.
The parts of the book are presented as questions, or enigmas, that carry in them the essence of the whole project. The parts are ideally suited to deliver the full meaning, but their characters are also derived from the whole. Each of the three main theories of physics – quantum theory, relativity and electromagnetism – holds in itself the question of the interpretation of physics.
All the chapters that you are going to read are not trying to build up a single argument about physics. They have each suggested themselves as dynamic ways to carry the question of the interpretation of physics in its entirety to collective significance.
My encounter in the bookshop initiated me on a journey through physics, using my mathematics degree as an aid to navigate me on what was at the start, completely unchartered terrain. It felt like one of those moments where one sets out into the night, realising it is very unlikely one will get a lift, but being drawn nevertheless by the adventure into the challenge of the forbidding journey ahead.