The Dancing Wu Li Masters (14 page)

In short, classical physics says that there is one world, it is as it appears, and this is it. Quantum physics allows us to entertain the possibility that this is not so. The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics eschews a description of what the world is “really like,” but concludes that whatever it is like, it is not substantive in the usual sense. The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics says that different editions of us live in many worlds simultaneously, an uncountable number of them, and all of them are real. There are even more interpretations of quantum mechanics, but all of them are weird in some way.

Quantum physics is stranger than science fiction.

Quantum mechanics is a theory and a procedure dealing with subatomic phenomena. Subatomic phenomena, in general, are inaccessible to all but those with access to elaborate (and expensive) facilities. Even at the most expensive and elaborate facilities, however, we can see only the effects of subatomic phenomena. The subatomic realm is beyond the limits of sensory perception.
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It is also beyond the limits of rational understanding. Of course, we have rational theories about it, but “rational” has been stretched to include what formerly was nonsense, or, at best, paradox.

The world that we live in, the world of freeways, bathtubs, and other people, seems as remote as it can be from wave functions and interference. In short, the metaphysics of quantum mechanics is based upon an unsubstantiated leap from the microscopic to the macroscopic. Can we apply these implications of subatomic research to the world at large?

No, not if we have to provide a mathematical proof in each instance. But what is a proof? A proof only proves that we are playing by the rules. (We make the rules, anyway.) The rules, in this case, are that what we propose about the nature of physical reality (1) be logically consistent, and (2) that it correspond to experience. There is nothing in the rules that says that what we propose has to be anything like “reality.” Physics is a self-consistent explanation of experience. It is in order to satisfy the self-consistency requirement of physics that proofs become important.

The New Testament presents a different point of view. Christ, following His resurrection, proved to Thomas (who became the proverbial “Doubting Thomas”) that He really was He, risen from the dead, by showing Thomas His wounds. At the same time, however, Christ bestowed His special favor on those who believed Him
without proof
.

Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of western religion. Rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of western science. In other words, religion has become a matter of the heart and science has become a matter of the mind. This regrettable state of affairs does not reflect the fact that, physiologically, one cannot exist without the other. Everybody needs both. Mind and heart are only different aspects of
us
.

Who, then, is right? Should disciples believe without proof? Should scientists insist on it? Is the world without substance? Is it real, but divided and dividing into countless branches?

The Wu Li Masters know that “science” and “religion” are only dances, and that those who follow them are dancers. The dancers may claim to follow “truth” or claim to seek “reality,” but the Wu Li Masters know better. They know that the true love of all dancers is dancing.

In the days before Copernicus discovered that the earth revolves around
the sun, the common belief was that the sun, along with the rest of the universe, revolved around the earth. The earth was the fixed center of everything. At a still earlier time in India, this geocentric position was given to people. That is, each person, psychologically speaking, was recognized as being the center of the universe. Although this sounds like an egotistical point of view, it was not since
every
person was recognized as a divine manifestation.

A beautiful Hindu painting shows Lord Krishna dancing in the moonlight on the bank of the Yamuna. He moves in the center of a circle of fair Vraja women. They are all in love with Krishna and they are dancing with him. Krishna is dancing with all of the souls of the world—man is dancing with himself. To dance with god, the creator of all things, is to dance with ourselves. This is a recurrent theme of eastern literature.

This is also the direction toward which the new physics, quantum mechanics and relativity, seems to point. From the revolutionary concepts of relativity and the logic-defying paradoxes of quantum mechanics an ancient paradigm is emerging. In vague form, we begin to glimpse a conceptual framework in which each of us shares a pater
nity in the creation of physical reality. Our old self-image as impotent bystander, one who sees but does not affect, is dissolving.

We are watching perhaps the most engaging act in our history. Amid the powerful purr of particle accelerators, the click of computer printouts, and dancing instrument gauges, the “old science” that has given us so much, including our sense of helplessness before the faceless forces of bigness, is undermining its own foundations.

With the awesome authority that we have given it, science is telling us that our faith has been misplaced. It appears that we have attempted the impossible, to disown our part in the universe. We have tried to do this by relinquishing our authority to the Scientists. To the Scientists we gave the responsibility of probing the mysteries of creation, change, and death. To us we gave the everyday routine of mindless living.

The Scientists readily assumed their task. We readily assumed ours, which was to play a role of impotence before the ever-increasing complexity of “modern science” and the ever-spreading specialization of modern technology.

Now, after three centuries, the Scientists have returned with their discoveries. They are as perplexed as we are (those of them who have given thought to what is happening).

“We are not sure,” they tell us, “but we have accumulated evidence which indicates that the key to understanding the universe is
you
.”

This is not only different from the way that we have looked at the world for three hundred years, it is
opposite
. The distinction between the “in here” and the “out there” upon which science was founded, is becoming blurred. This is a puzzling state of affairs. Scientists, using the “in here—out there” distinction, have discovered that the “in here—out there” distinction may not exist! What is “out there” apparently depends, in a rigorous mathematical sense as well as a philosophical one, upon what we decide “in here.”

The new physics tells us that an observer cannot observe without altering what he sees. Observer and observed are interrelated in a real and fundamental sense. The exact nature of this interrelation is not
clear, but there is a growing body of evidence that the distinction between the “in here” and the “out there” is illusion.

The conceptual framework of quantum mechanics, supported by massive volumes of experimental data, forces contemporary physicists to express themselves in a manner that sounds, even to the uninitiated, like the language of mystics.

Access to the physical world is through experience. The common denominator of all experiences is the “I” that does the experiencing. In short, what we experience is not external reality, but our
interaction
with it. This is a fundamental assumption of “complementarity.”

Complementarity is the concept developed by Niels Bohr to explain the wave-particle duality of light. No one has thought of a better one yet. Wave-like characteristics and particle-like characteristics, the theory goes, are mutually exclusive, or complementary aspects of light. Although one of them always excludes the other,
both
of them are necessary to understand light. One of them always excludes the other because light, or anything else, cannot be both wave-like and particle-like at the same time.
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How can mutually exclusive wave-like and particle-like behaviors both be properties of one and the same light? They are not properties of light. They are properties of our
interaction
with light. Depending upon our choice of experiment, we can cause light to manifest either particle-like properties or wave-like properties. If we choose to demonstrate the wave-like characteristics of light, we can perform the double-slit experiment which produces interference. If we choose to demonstrate the particle-like characteristics of light, we can perform an experiment which illustrates the photoelectric effect. We can cause light to manifest both wave-like properties and particle-like properties by performing Arthur Compton’s famous experiment.

In 1923, Compton played the world’s first game of billiards with
subatomic particles, and, in the process, confirmed Einstein’s seventeen-year-old photon theory of light. His experiment was not conceptually difficult. He simply fired x-rays, which everybody knows are waves, at electrons. To the surprise of most people, the x-rays bounced off the electrons as if they (the x-rays) were particles! For example, the x-rays which struck the electrons glancing blows were deflected only slightly from their paths. They did not lose much energy in the collision. However, those x-rays which collided more nearly head-on with electrons were deflected sharply. These x-rays lost a considerable amount of their kinetic energy (the energy of motion) in the collision.

Compton could tell just how much energy the deflected x-rays lost by measuring their frequencies before and after the collision. The frequencies of those x-rays involved in near head-on collisions were noticeably lower after the collision than before it. This meant that they had less energy after the collision than they had before the collision. Compton’s x-rays were impacting with electrons exactly the way that billiard balls impact with other billiard balls.

Compton’s discovery was intimately related to quantum theory. Compton could not have revealed the particle-like behavior of x-rays if Planck had not discovered his fundamental rule that higher frequency means higher energy. This rule permitted Compton to prove that the x-rays in his experiment lost energy in a particle-like collision (because their frequencies were lower after the collision than before the collision).

The conceptual paradox in Compton’s experiment shows how
deeply the wave-particle duality is embedded in quantum mechanics. Compton proved that electromagnetic radiations, like x-rays, have particle-like characteristics by measuring their frequencies! Of course, “particles” don’t have frequencies. Only waves have frequencies. The phenomenon which Compton discovered is called Compton scattering, in honor of what happens to the x-rays.

In short, we can demonstrate that light is particle-like with the photoelectric effect, that it is wave-like with the double-slit experiment, and that it is both particle-like and wave-like with Compton scattering. Both of these complementary aspects of light (wave and particle) are necessary to understand the nature of light. It is meaningless to ask which one of them, alone, is the way light really is. Light behaves like waves or like particles depending upon which experiment we perform.

The “we” that does the experimenting is the common link that connects light as particles and light as waves. The wave-like behavior that we observe in the double-slit experiment is not a property of light, it is a property of our interaction with light. Similarly, the particle-like characteristics that we observe in the photoelectric effect are not a property of light. They, too, are a property of our interaction with light. Wave-like behavior and particle-like behavior are properties of
interactions
.

Since particle-like behavior and wave-like behavior are the only properties that we ascribe to light, and since these properties now are recognized to belong (if complementarity is correct) not to light itself, but to our interaction with light, then it appears that light has no properties independent of us! To say that something has no properties is the same as saying that it does not exist. The next step is this logic is inescapable. Without us, light does not exist.

Transferring the properties that we usually ascribe to light to our interaction with light deprives light of an independent existence. Without us, or by implication, anything else to interact with, light does not exist. This remarkable conclusion is only half the story. The other half is that, in a similar manner, without light, or, by implica
tion, anything else to interact with,
we do not exist!
As Bohr himself put it:

By “agencies of observation,” he may have been referring to instruments, not people, but philosophically, complementarity leads to the conclusion that the world consists not of things, but of interactions. Properties belong to interactions, not to independently existing things, like “light.” This is the way that Bohr solved the wave-particle duality of light. The philosophical implications of complementarity became even more pronounced with the discovery that the wave-particle duality is a characteristic of
everything
.

When we left off telling the story of quantum mechanics, the tale had progressed as follows: In 1900, Max Planck, studying black-body radiation, discovered that energy is absorbed and emitted in chunks, which he called quanta. Until that time, radiated energy, like light, was thought to be wave-like. This was because Thomas Young, in 1803, showed that light produces interference (the double-slit experiment), and only waves can do that.

Einstein, stimulated by Planck’s discovery of quanta, used the photoelectric effect to illustrate his theory that not only are the processes of energy absorption and emission quantized, but that
energy itself
comes in packages of certain sizes. Thus physicists were confronted with two sets of experiments (repeatable experiences) each of which seemed to disprove the other. This is the famous wave-particle duality which is fundamental to quantum mechanics.

While physicists were trying to explain how waves can be particles, a young French prince, Louis de Broglie, dropped a bomb which demolished what was left of the classical view. Not only are waves particles, he proposed, but particles are also waves!

De Broglie’s idea (which was contained in his doctoral thesis)
was that matter has waves which “correspond” to it. The idea was more than philosophical speculation. It was also mathematical speculation. Using the simple equations of Planck and Einstein, de Broglie formulated a simple equation of his own.
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It determines the wavelength of the “matter waves” that “correspond” to matter. It says simply that the greater the momentum of a particle, the shorter is the length of its associated wave.

This explains why matter waves are not evident in the macroscopic world. De Broglie’s equation tells us that the matter waves corresponding to even the smallest object that we can see are so incredibly small compared to the size of the object that their effect is negligible. However, when we get down to something as small as a subatomic particle, like an electron, the size of the electron itself is smaller than the length of its associated wave!

Under these circumstances, the wave-like behavior of matter should be clearly evident, and matter should behave differently than “matter” as we are used to thinking of it. This is exactly what happens.

Only two years after de Broglie presented this hypothesis, an experimenter named Clinton Davisson, working with his assistant, Lester Germer, at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, verified it experimentally. Both Davisson and de Broglie got Nobel Prizes, and physicists were left to explain not only how waves can be particles, but also how particles can be waves.

The famous Davisson-Germer experiment, which was done by accident, showed electrons reflecting off a crystal surface in a manner that could be explained only if the electrons were waves. But, of course, electrons are particles.

Today, electron diffraction, an apparent contradiction in terms, is a common phenomenon. When a beam of electrons is sent through tiny openings, like the spaces between the atoms in a metal foil, which are as small or smaller than the wavelengths of the electrons (isn’t this ridiculous—“particles”
don’t have
wavelengths!), the beam diffracts
exactly the way a beam of light diffracts. Although, classically speaking, it can’t happen, here is a picture of it.
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