Science, Materialism, Mysticism

Science Materialism Mysticism

by

Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna)

Foreword to the second Edition

The Clear Ray Trust, Pondicherry, is happy to publish the second Edition of Amal Kiran's book "Science Materialism, Mysticism".

The Issue Materialism versus Mysticism now seems to be an important point of intellectual debate and this book throws a considerable amount of light on the subject and helps to clarity many concepts relating to the subject.

Did Classical Physics Bear Out Materialism?

One of the distinguishing marks of the present century is the revolution in physics. This revolution has swept away many of the old theories, and the new ones that have replaced them have brought an extreme mystery which does not rule out the possibility of even a mystical conception of the universe. But when we declare that relativity theory and quantum theory permit us to ask whether matter be not a phenomenon of something other than material, must we assume as we generally do that classical physics which knew nothing of them barred the way to a non-materialistic philosophy? No doubt, the majority of classical physicists were opposed to such a philosophy; yet it may not follow that the actual findings of classical physics had no significant features conducive to uncertainty and mystery, features perilous to dogmatic materialism. Might not those physicists have somehow indulged in a tremendous illogicality that has deluded even us to take as legitimate the interpretation they put on their data?

Electricity, the Ether and the Atom

Let us begin with the frequent assertion that, while modern physics has moved away from the mechanical view of the world, classical physics was wedded to it. This is hardly true. Several physicists were anxious that every process of nature should allow a mechanical model to be made of it, but long before the advent of relativity or quantum physics the mechanical model was found insufficient. For, what after all renders such a model possible? Galileo and Newton believed that all events could be reduced to forces which act between particles along lines connecting the particles and which depend only on distance. This belief and nothing else is in physics the mechanical view of the world and it is summed up in the equations set down by Lagrange towards the end of the eighteenth century. 3

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Whatever conforms to these equations can be made a mechanical model of and whatever fails to conform to them contradicts the mechanical view and transcends the mechanical model. The first non-conformity was found by Oersted when experimenting with a voltaic battery and was stressed by Rowland's experiment with a charged sphere; it amounted to the fact that the electric force acted not along the line but perpendicularly to it and depended on the velocity of the electric charge instead of only on the distance. The second non-conformity arose in connection with light. The mechanical view of light led to a jellylike ether which, paradoxically, was found to interact with matter when light passed through glass and water but offered not the least resistance to the motion of the planets. With the coming of Faraday and Clerk Maxwell, it was realised that not the charges nor the particles but the space or the "field" between the charges and the particles was essential for the description of physical phenomena. The field-concept harmonised what the mechanically viewed ether had left disparate, and Clerk Maxwell's equations were divested of all mechanicality by Hertz, while in the hands of Lorentz they resulted in the electromagnetic description of matter itself. So we can see from any history of physics that it is not relativity theory or quantum theory that first questioned the applicableness of the mechanical model to the whole of nature and suggested processes no engineer could ever satisfactorily duplicate, processes intelligible only in abstract mathematical terms.

Even when the mechanical model was sought to be extended everywhere, the results were not such as should lead to any complacence about reality. The physicists seem to have been pretty complacent in the main but we would be deluding ourselves if we thought that physics was in tune with this complacence. The ether, as mechanically conceived, got credited with a hundred conflicting properties. Among other things, it had to be denser than the densest solid and yet so "void" that we could pass through it without feeling anything; it had to be elastic but could not be

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distorted; it had to be mobile but its motion could never be detected; it could exert force on matter but matter could exert no force on it. Could such a self-contradictory substance make for peace of mind or give rise to a clear unchallengeable

materialism?

And it was this mysterious ether which was also regarded as the world's substratum. We commonly think that nineteenth-century physics rested with what is usually termed matter as the stuff constituting the atom. Newton, as page 375 of his Optics (4th edition, 1730) will prove, did believe that the atom was composed of matter. But the nineteenth century put not matter but the ether first. Lord Kelvin was representative of the general mind when he brought forward in 1867 in the Philosophical Magazine (vol. 34, page 15) the concept of the atom as a spinning vortex ring in the ether, something like a smoke ring in air. As Paul Heyl puts it on page 16 of New Frontiers of Science: "In this concept Kelvin reversed the Newtonian idea that hard particles might make soft bodies and taught us to look for the explanation of the hardness of matter in the rapid motion of something soft and yielding." And when we know what a paragon of paradox the ether was we see how matter, instead of remaining matter-of-fact, retreated into a mystery.

Nor was the ether the sole headachy item. Some years ago Professor Arthur Smithelis called attention to a controversy which took place as far back as 1882. In that year a book was published entitled The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics, written by an American, J.B. Stallo. Commenting on the controversy, Herbert Dingle writes in Through Science to Philosophy (page 91): "Stallo was not a physicist - he was a judge; but (or should I say therefore?) he had an extremely logical mind, and with rigorous exactitude he pointed out the inconsistencies in the scheme of thought which physicists everywhere adopted. His book was reviewed in Nature by P.G. Tait, one of the most prominent practising physicists of the time.... On one hand, there is Stallo.. .having a right royal time exposing the contradictions in which the kinetic theory

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of gases had become involved; and on the other, Tait, unable to answer the arguments because they were indeed unanswerable, but yet knowing as Stallo could not know that the kinetic theory of gases was an instrument which science could not possibly abandon." The state of affairs Stallo disclosed was, in short, that from one angle science had to regard the atom as perfectly elastic and from another as perfectly inelastic, from one angle as something which was wanted to explain hardness and from another as something which already had the very hardness sought to be explained by it! Could such a glaring contradiction in matter itself be said to leave everything clear and unperplexing?

Apropos of the property of elasticity in reference to the atom we may offer a few observations which take us from apparently clear, obviously materialistic conceptions straight into the cryptic and the inconceivable. If one had asked a classical physicist how he would explain the compression that is possible of even a seemingly close-packed piece of solid matter he would have answered: "The original packing represented a porous mass: the molecules were so packed as to leave interspaces, like the holes in a sponge." If we had asked him again why, after moderate compression, the solid resumed its original shape and volume, he would have replied: "The material was elastic." But now comes the rub. As F.M. Denton puts it: "We can hardly say that the empty pores do themselves exert forces; the forces must be due to the walls of these pores, and these walls at any rate must consist of close-packed particles. The elasticity of a mass of close-packed particles then has to be attributed to the particles themselves. If these particles are the molecules we know that they have a structure; they are built up of atoms and built so loosely that the atoms move about within the molecules. We might attribute elasticity to change in the closeness of the packing of the atoms, but to the atoms themselves must then be attributed the real elasticity." Consider the implication of these words. If the atom is, as many classical physicists believed, the ultimate brick of the

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universe, how can it be elastic? Elasticity would mean that the atom is capable of being compressed and afterwards of resuming its original shape and volume. But if it is thus capable it cannot be structureless, it cannot be without component parts. Without its having parts the idea that it can suffer a change in volume is preposterous. If we suppose it to have suffered a compression of, say, 1% of its original volume, that little element of volume must have been occupied, previously, by a part of the atom - an idea that is inconsistent with the assumption that the atom has no component parts. Neither can we suppose a structureless atom suffering change of shape. Change of shape means re-arrangement of component parts.

The nineteenth-century physicist, with his atomic theory of the constitution of matter, lands plump into an obscure and unphysical conception the moment you probe the most simple-seeming property of things. And it would have helped him as little as it would help us now if the atom were given a structure and its compression made comprehensible by regarding it as a very loosely packed system of electrons. For then the electron would have to be itself elastic and possess parts! Otherwise the property of elasticity would have no physical explanation. But even if we went beyond the findings of modern physics which takes the electron to be structureless, we should not be out of the wood: the electron's components face us with the same predicament. We shall have to go on ad infinitum - the property of elasticity getting ascribed to the last member of an unending series of ever diminishing particles. As Denton says: "The ultimate particle of matter presents great difficulty: it need not be the electron - probably it is not - but the atomic notion of the constitution of matter does surely demand an ultimate particle, and such reasoning as has been suggested shows that to this ultimate particle no properties of any sort - not even magnitude - can be assigned." The atomic theory, whether it stops with the nineteenth-century atom or with the twentieth-century electron or with any minute grain that

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is the final brick of the universe, ends with matter becoming a total mystery. Nor can the alternative of pushing the responsibility on to the last member of an interminable series of particles be said to satisfy the mind with a clearly physical or dogmatically materialistic view of nature. The scientific mind fails and we are in the realm of magic, and some power which is not bound by our mind's capacity of physical conception but can achieve the impossible and whose working can be grasped by only some speech-transcending faculty such as the mystics claim confronts us as soon as we question the commonest scientific notion entertained by even the most materialistic physicist of the nineteenth century.

The Force of Gravitation

Beating the atom and even the ether in mysteriousness was Newton's force of gravitation. We are often told that the straightforward mechanical pulls contemplated in the old theory of gravitation are gone now and bodies are deviated from their straight path by the "curved" condition of the medium in which they move and not by a force exerted on them by a distant body. Is it not, however, plain that this new explanation is actually less mysterious than the Newtonian? As Denton points out on page 39 of Relativity and Common Sense, the Newtonian explanation "is one which involves a process impossible of conception - namely, that of 'action at a distance'. We can conceive of a force acting through a medium, but Newton's explanation of the force of gravitation demands no medium; two masses attract each other with a force proportional inversely to the square of their distances apart, even though the masses be separated by empty space or, if there happens to be an intervening medium, Newton's explanation allows this to interfere in no way with the transmission of the force. Human minds - or at any rate many very reputable human minds - revolt against the notion of such 'action at a distance', regarding it as

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absurd." L. Bolton on page 144 of An Introduction to the Theory of Relativity stresses the same fact: "If the new point of view which Einstein invites us to adopt presents a difficulty, it is useful to remember that the Newtonian view presented no less difficulty to philosophers in his day. Their great objection was that it involved action at a distance, attributing to bodies a power to act where they are not. It seemed incredible that the sun acted across intervening space and pulled a planet out of the straight path which it would otherwise follow. Only the clearest evidence that this theory actually did give an explanation of the planetary motions and presented a picture of what, in fact, went on in the solar system, surpassing by far in adequacy and accuracy any theory previously advanced, induced philosophers as a body to accept such action as possible." Bolton, of course, is asking us not to reject Einstein on the score of contradiction of common sense or logic; but his reference to Newton serves excellently our purpose of showing that the suggestion of the supra-physical or occult is as strongly ascribable to Newtonian gravitation as to Einstein's curving of planetary motion by means of the "curved" medium around. Sullivan on page 77 of Limitations of Science develops the hint dropped by Bolton, in the passage already quoted, that Newtonian gravitation is not hampered by any intervening agent: "No- thing acts as a screen to it. We have substances that stop light, that stop heat, that stop the electric and magnetic forces, that stop even X-rays, but we know of nothing that stops gravitation. A body held up in the air weighs just as much however many bodies we interpose between it and the surface of the earth. The pull of the earth on it is not affected in the slightest." A page earlier Sullivan casts into relief another strange aspect of the gravitational force as conceived by Newton: "It seems to act instantaneously. Light, as we know, takes time to travel. So does every other form of radiant energy. But all efforts to bring gravitation into line with the other forces proved ineffectual." Added to the fact of action at a distance without any ether capable of transmit-

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ting it, the fact of an instantaneous action and of an action unaffected by any screen renders Newtonian gravitation the most mysterious, the most unphysical agency science can ever posit.

Russell on page 140 of The ABC of Relativity refers to the oddness of the old gravitational concept. "Aristotle," he writes, "thought that heavy bodies fall faster than light ones. Galileo showed that this is not the case, when the resistance of the air is eliminated. In a vacuum, a feather falls as fast as a lump of lead. As regards the planets it was Newton who established the corresponding facts. At a given distance from the sun, a comet, which has a very small mass, experiences exactly the same acceleration towards the sun as a planet experiences at the same distance. Thus the way in which gravitation affects a body depends only upon where the body is and in no degree upon the nature of the body. This suggests that gravitation is a characteristic of the locality, which is what Einstein makes it." In pre-relativity physics, therefore, there was the glaring oddity that in a given gravitational situation all bodies behave exactly alike. The modem concept is, in a certain way, far more close to commonsense. The old oddity got covered up for succeeding generations of scientists by the formula they had learned from childhood about the equality of inertial and gravitational mass. Part of Einstein's anxiousness to dispense with Newton's gravitational concept was due to his keen aware- ness of its supra-scientific metaphysicality. And we may remark that Einstein's aversion especially to action at a distance is itself a lingering attachment to the mechanical view. This view receives its greatest blow from untransmitted instantaneous action at a distance, and the blow was given not by modem but by classical physics. Surely Einstein has not played more strikingly than Newton a new St. Paul, crying: "Behold, I tell you a mystery!"

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Absolute Space and Time

In connection with the physics of Einstein and the Newtonian physics by which the nineteenth century of materialism swore, it is curious to note that Einstein's first criticism of the latter was on the ground that there was too much metaphysics in the ideas of absolute space and absolute time. Sullivan well remarks in the introduction to his Three Men Discuss Relativity: "We can say that changes in the scientific scheme have gradually converged towards a system of interpretation where none but observable factors are considered as in causal dependence. We must not interpret the word 'observable' too narrowly in this statement. It would be more correct to substitute for 'observable' definable in terms of physical processes. If an entity is to be considered as a scientific entity we must be able to say what physical processes would enable us to detect it. This is the basis of Einstein's objection to Newton's absolute space and absolute time. There are no physical operations, according to Einstein, which enable us to distinguish absolute space. As regards absolute time, Newton himself confessed that there may be no natural processes which enable us to measure it. We can never, in the nature of things, say whether we are dealing with absolute time or not. Both these entities therefore are described by Einstein as metaphysical, with no real place in science. Newton said that the centrifugal force developed by a rotating body was due to the body's relation to absolute space. Here an unobservable factor, absolute space, is involved as the cause of an observed physical phenomenon. According to Einstein, science could not invoke such an entity as the cause of anything. Absolute space and time, so far as science is concerned, belong to the same class of entities as the Will of God, Beauty, the Principle of Evil and so on. They may even be realities, and some kinds of knowledge may find it necessary to assume them, but since they are not definable in terms of physical processes, since we know of no physical apparatus which can measure them

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or even detect their existence, they are not to be imported into scientific descriptions."

These words of Sullivan's suggest two features of modem scientific procedure. On the one hand, it is implied that science is a game played according to certain rules which deliberately limit its scope and thereby indirectly grant the possibility of other types of inquiry leading to truth, though not to scientific truth. This is a definite pricking of the balloon of scientific dogmatism. On the other hand, however, nineteenth-century physics is shown to be functioning with a loose scientific conscience and hobnobbing with types of inquiry that arrived at entities like the Will of God, Beauty, or the Principle of Evil: in short, its procedure, unlike that of modern physics, was essentially akin, in several respects, to that of non-scientific religion, aesthetics and ethics! If that is so, dogmatic materialism has in classical physics no leg to stand on.

Entropy

With mention of the Will of God we may bring in the subject of what is termed Entropy. About the middle of the last century, Clausius, the discoverer of the mechanical theory of heat, was impressed by the fact that when mechanical energy is converted into heat, a large part of it is never reconverted. He argued that a time must come when all energy would exist in the form of heat and all activity other than the vibration of molecules would cease: there would at last be no utilisable energy left. The process towards this state is called Entropy. As it is well known that the stars are radiating away heat, a heat-death of the universe may be expected, one dead level of temperature, a condition of maximum disorganisation in which all energy will be dissipated. In the nineteenth century there was no possibility of arguing from any natural facts that the maxi- mum disorganisation could ever be counteracted. But the progressive disorganisation involves that the further back we

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go in time the energy of the universe is to be considered more and more highly organised. Can the higher and higher organisation proceed indefinitely? The answer of science was "No " We must reach a moment of time when the energy was wholly organised with none of the random element in it. In Eddington's phrases: "The organisation we are concerned with is exactly definable, and there is a limit at which it becomes perfect. There is not an infinite series of states of higher and still higher organisation: nor is the limit one which is ultimately approached more and more slowly." This means that science, if unable to contradict the law of Entropy, has to admit a moment of maximum organisation which could not have been preceded by any other of less organisation since Entropy was taken to be irreversible, a moment which also must have immediately been followed by a less organised state since Entropy was seen to go on unchecked. How are we to regard such a puzzling moment? Nineteenth-century physics has no scientific explanation for its origin. Nothing within the system of nature could account for it. We should have to say that the moment was veritably the birth of time and some eternal power other than nature created or emanated the universe and, winding it up to the full, set it going. Or we should have to opine that the universe always existed but with a power other than nature immanent in it and this Pantheos miraculously did the winding up. Or else we should hold that a power other than nature was coeval supra-cosmically with the ever-existing universe and wound it up by special intervention from beyond. Most of the classical physicists did not favour the Will of God, but here their atheism and materialism flew flagrantly in the face of the indication to be found in the data of physics. Even today scientists are hard put to it to deny Entropy or explain away its philosophical consequences. Yet some alternative to the Will of God may, in this particular connection, be considered as scientifically formulable, how- ever lamely, at the present; in the last century it was absolutely out of the question.

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In view of the various points of uncertainty and mystery and at least one point of actual mysticism, which we have brought out in the old scientific scheme, the dogmatic materialism of most of its adherents must be adjudged an unparalleled aberration in the history of the human mind. And, emboldened by this judgment on the materialistic doctrine in its very heyday, we may well ask whether, on the strength of any findings and theories, physics can ever bear out materialism.

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