The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (16 page)

seriously
enough to suppose that atoms might exist,
even though no one had actually observed them.
James B. Conant claims that a theory is only overthrown by a better
theory, never merely by contradictory facts. Certainly the contradictory
facts for atoms were many and severe. But the "questions" had been
asked, and a long series of believers set about directly and indirectly
contributing to the gathering of material for the answer. The unfolding
history covered many generations and gives a fine example of the
question-answer function in cultural form, moving over many lives,
a cultural drift taking on power and characteristics. That people took
the idea
seriously
enough was the key.
Only a sustained passionate belief could have leaped the logical gap
between that "imagined," created within the mind's eye, imaged from
possibility in spite of the lack of sensory evidence, and the final
answer, translated into reality through enormous expenditures of time,
effort, group belief, money, and with even the passionate urgency of
war to hasten its final birth.
Interestingly enough, Newton's laws of motion could not cover the new
atoms, and the emerging postulates of Einstein and Planck shook the early
twentieth-century physicists who had felt satisfied with the world system
long since discovered and formulated. Weaver mentions how the new ideas
recharged all the scientific fields. Journals and learned magazines
which were thin and anemic burgeoned into fat and exciting adventures
in every issue.
Today atomicity is the energy basis of all things, commonplace, taken for
granted. Newton's cosmic egg has been expanded enormously, but resealed
with splendid logic. Now we see the current egg as an a priori structure.
This always was, this is the way the sun works, billions of years of
development were involved, this is the very underpinning of all things.
Was this a breakthrough of Pauli's "cosmic order"? Was it a truth glimpsed
through some temporary freeing of the cave-encompassed mind and brought
back as light into our sphere? In fact, can we claim something really
different and not speak madness? Yes. If we
cannot
see beyond this
apparent chasm, we will miss something vital.
Exploring Bohm's "qualitative infinity of nature" a bit further I found
Bohm postulating that the universe may have existed, and in his system
must either
once
have existed or necessarily will
someday
exist on
a basis totally unrelated to atoms, molecules, and such aggregates
of energy. (Gerald Feinberg cannot rule out such a possibility on
purely logical grounds, but is content to wait, skeptically, for such
a development. He feels we have arrived at a final understanding of
the basic stuff of which our world is made.) Thus Bohm postulates his
'sub-quantum' theory of an "infinite substructure of matter." No matter
how fine a breakdown of particles we ever achieve, there will be that
many more -- and there is always the possibility of their eventual
reorganization in non-molecular atomic form.
Where, then, would be the cosmic order? Or is it not also a
process
, a
process of change and possibility? Are both men, Bohm and Pauli, correct
in their own ways? Is the true cosmic order some law like Bohm's that
might thus, as an abstraction, always be independent of the products of
its function? Wherever we are, whatever we may be, that which we
are
is
the true and objective reality. Is that process itself a cosmic order?
Several years before Bohm's work, Teilhard spoke of man's dream
being mastery of the ultimate energy,
beyond all atomic or molecular
affinities
. And I think of William Blake's great romantic affirmation:
"More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul. Less than all will never
satisfy man."
In these poetic, quasi-religious, and scientific expressions there is a
question tentatively and ever more strongly asserting itself. A seed
of possibility is being planted into the continuum of potential.
Bohm talked about
new
sources of energy from this "infinite process of
becoming." New energy might be available even now when atoms, molecules
and so on continue to exist. Bohm points out that in the last century only
mechanical, chemical, thermal, electrical, luminous, and gravitational
energies were known. Today we have at our disposal
nuclear
energy,
a far larger reservoir of energy.
Bohm then follows with a statement that creates, in effect, a kind of
rudimentary shaping of the question into tighter form. For he muses that
the infinite substructure of matter very probably contains energies
that are as far beyond nuclear energy as that great force is beyond
chemical energies.
What follows this is both the rough formulation of a possible direction
for the question to move in which will help determine the nature of the
question and the basis for the first tentative steps in the gathering
of materials for an answer. For Bohm next shows how, by computing the
"zero point" energy due to quantum-mechanical fluctuations, something
on the order of 10^38 ergs is attained in "even one cubic centimetre
of space." As I wrote when citing this assertion in my first chapter,
this comes out to the explosive energy of roughly ten billion
tons
of uranium fission.
Bohm qualifies by saying this kind of energy provides a constant
background not available under present conditions, but he dreams that,
as conditions change, a part of it might be made available at our level.
Does Bohm believe that man will
wait
for conditions to change in order
to have new energy? Did conditions in the universe change for man's atomic
age to come about? Or for the discovery and development of the laser? No.
Man's conceptual level changed, and the kind of universe with which he
dealt proved to be different from that of previous dealings. No amount of
waiting would have ever brought about man's atomic age
naturally
. There
is no such nature.
The evolving processes of an "infinite substructure of matter," or
whatever it may be called, evolve around suggestions, ideas, and notions
passionately adhered to, triggers for what might be. Eventually Bohm's
postulate, or one by another Bohm or Feinberg or whoever,
will
formulate
an equation that
will
break into some future mind as a
Eureka!
revelation. Scoffed at for lack of evidence, perhaps, it will find its
passionate believers, those who simply like the notion and see it a way
to their own expression, their own ambition's fulfillment. They will
start driving piles into shaky ground, working out the correspondences,
trying to develop a mathematics to cover all the contingencies. Some day
they will make the translations, they will achieve the testings, and the
results in reasonable facsimile will be produced. Then the technicians,
the mechanics, the brass-tack realists who deal with the obvious and
evident, will start exploiting and exhausting the possibilities --
filling in the new circles of reason.
Max Planck once wrote that when an experimental result contradicts
an existing theory in some way, progress is in sight, for the theory
is even then in process of being changed and improved. Consider then,
the discovery of that tiny 'quasar' (i.e. seemingly a stellar object)
3C-273. Pouring through it, or from it, or something, is energy enough
to power up to 1000 times the usual sized galaxy like our Milky Way. At
least, that was the estimate in 1965, when Dr. Herbert Friedman, head
of the Atmosphere and Astrophysics Division of the U.S. Navy Research
Laboratory, reported on it, saying that the release of such energy
fits nothing in modern physics at all, and that we may be witnessing an
entirely new souroe of energy.
Since then pulsars have been discovered, which apparently incorporate an
energy far exceeding the speed-of-light limit demanded by the Einsteininn
universe in which we live at present. These new phenomena have triggered
off an immense excitement of speculation. Probably no single topic in
decades has stimulated such an outpouring of theorizing among astronomers,
physicists, and men of all the sciences. Each month the new offerings
come forward in large quantity.
Consider now that ideas of radical energies were assumed as a matter
of course by Teilhard, back in the 1940's before development of the
hydrogen bomb. Bohm's proposal was published in 1957, about four
years before the great quasar show began. Indeed, Bohm's notion and
quasar 3C-273 seem made for each other. At any rate, it is not simple
fortuitousness that these ideas were in the domain
before
people began
to "see" quasars and pulsars.
Teilhard saw thought "artificially perfecting" the thinking instrument
itself. We rebound forward under the collective effect of our
reflection. And, he prophesied, we foster the dream of that "energy of
which all other energies are merely servants." Teilhard saw mankind
"grasping the very mainspring of evolution, seizing the tiller of
the world."
Do you not see that our Catholic paleontologist and our Jewish physicist,
each in his own sphere, explore the same capacity for potential, funneled
through their prism of prejudice, their molds for world-making, and their
heart's desire? Can we do other than acknowledge Blake's dictum from
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
that "The Worship of God is: Honouring
his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the
greatest men best: those who envy or calumniate great men hate God;
for there is no other God."
Bohm searches beneath the
quantum
; Jung talks of the psyche speaking
about the psyche; Teilhard said the Great Stability is not at the bottom,
in the infra-elementary sphere of quantums and their sub-levels, but at
the top, in the ultra-synthetic sphere of thought. They are all really
talking about the same process, for at some point along the way the
categories dissolve and things merge.
Teilhard claimed that what is "spontaneously psychical" is no longer
merely an "aura around the soma," but a part, even a principal part,
of the phenomenon. Intellectual synthesis is no longer speculation,
he speculated, but is creation.
Now the passion, the belief, the imagination, the intuitive analysis,
and the insight that brought about the logical gap that could then
be leapt to bring into being man's atomic age were all psychic
phenomena. Imagination and idea preceded, and in fact created, this
new age which is, in turn, transforming and reshaping the whole of our
reality. We are the determinant, the prism that shapes inner and outer
into a meaningful pattern that is the only reality we shall ever know.
David Bohm's idea, or a compatible equivalent, as H-bombs or atomic
generating stations are at best rather strained equivalents of Democritus'
idea, may eventually produce its own structure. Infinite changes are
taking place as consciousness enters into contingencies, altering courses,
searching for a way to interpret, to broaden, to explore.
At our present rate, who dares suggest how far this interference might
extend in, say, another century. That attractive seizing of the tiller
is there -- perhaps cloaked as 10^38 ergs. Surely it does not
exist
;
there is no such animal except as a dream-figure in some physicist's
creative mind.
Yet from there it will be translated, sooner or later, into reality. And
the reality into which it will be translated will be a reality that has,
itself, been translated, or transformed, into terms compatible with the
new desire. The "ecological" satisfactions demanded by the new idea and
its radiating contingencies will somehow be met. The vast network of
our reality will make adjustments for inclusion and support of the new
concept. The infinite process of change will have its logical, normal,
and reasonable working out. The action of psyche and 'physis' will have
gone full circle.
Then, at that point, the new will become obvious. We will say: "Why, of
course. This is the way the
universe
works. This is the real secret of
the sun, and the stars. This was obviously a priori, for its processes
involve billions of years. We simply never had the proper tools, the
proper insight, we did not understand the Laws."
Laws there will be, and the only breaking of them will be through that
crack-forming procedure. What we will have loosed on earth will have
been loosed in heaven. Theologians will grudgingly admit, in a kind of
sour-grapes way: that the scientists have discovered more of God's eternal
secrets by which He built the universe. And the laws will be "true" ones,
of the only truth there can be. They will be universal. They will reflect
the cosmic order. They will be the underpinnings of the very ground on
which we stand. The level between our idea and the resultant fact will
be difficult to assess, for the very ground from which the assessment
must be attempted will be, then as now, itself a product of the function
of mirroring in question.
6
fire-burn
In the
Atlantic Monthly
of May, 1959, appeared an article by
Leonard Feinberg, Ph.D., University of Illinois, on fire-walking in
Ceylon. Feinberg had observed several fire-walkings while serving as
an officer in the South Pacific during World War II. As a Fulbright
Professor to the University of Ceylon in 1956-1957, he had the opportunity
to follow the full development of the chief ceremony held on that island.
Preparations for this annual affair, held in honor of the god Kataragama,
lasted three months. The applicants lived that entire time under
the constant surveillance of the priests of the god, and in the main
temple. It was a time of abstinence, vegetarianism, drinking only water,
daily baptisms in the holy river, constant sprinklings with holy water,
continual religious instruction, prayer, meditation, and communion with
the god.
It was a serious undertaking, a 24-hour a day investment of self. If the
believer did all these things, he would finally achieve the proper state
of mind, an absolute and unquestioning belief in Kataragama, a seizure
by the god himself. Then he could walk the fire unafraid and unharmed.