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<font size="4">Physics 
or philosophy</font></b></p>
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<FONT SIZE=3>WHAT is the world that we see really like? Is it mental,
is it material? This is a question, we know, philosophers are
familiar with, and they have answered and are still answering, each
in his own way, taking up one side or other of the antinomy. There is
nothing new or uncommon in that. The extraordinary novelty comes in
when we see today even scientists forced to tackle the problem, give
an answer to it, – scientists who used to smile at philosophers,
because they seemed to assault seriously the windmills of abstract
notions and airy concepts, instead of reposing on the <I>terra firma
</I>of reality. The tables are turned now. The scientists have had to
start the same business – the <I>terra firma </I>on which they
stood as on the securest rock of ages is slipping away under their
feet and fast vanishing into smoke and thin air. Not only that, it is
discovered today that the scientist has always been a philosopher,'
without his knowledge – a crypto-philosopher, – only he has
become conscious of it at last. And further – <I>mirabile dictu ! –</I>
many a scientist is busy demonstrating that the scientist is, in his
essence, a philosopher of the Idealist school!</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Physical Science in the nineteenth century did indeed
develop or presuppose a philosophy of its own; it had, that is to
say, a definite outlook on the fundamental quality of things and the
nature of the universe. Those were days of its youthful
self-confidence and unbending assurance. The view was, as is
well-known, materialistic and deterministic. That is to say, all
observation and experiment, according to it, demonstrated and
posited:</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3><I>First, </I>that this universe is made up of particles
that push and pull each other, the particles having certain constant
values, such as in respect of mass and volume.</FONT><BR>
			</P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 310</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3><I>secondly</I>, that the laws governing the relations
among the particles, in other words, their push and pull, are laws of
simple mechanics; they are fixed and definite and give. us
determinable and mensurable quantities called co-ordinates – by
which one can ascertain the pattern or configuration of things at a
given moment and deduce from that the pattern or configuration of
things at any other moment: the chain that hangs things together is
fixed and uniform and continuous and is not broken anywhere.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>The scientific view of things thus discovered or
affirmed certain universal and immutable facts – axiomatic truths –
which were called constants of Nature. These were the very basic
foundations upon which the whole edifice of scientific knowledge was
erected. The chief among them were: (I) conservation of matter, (2)
conservation of energy, (3) uni&shy;formity of nature and (4) the
chain of causality and continuity. Above all, there was the
fundamental implication of an independent – an absolute – time
and space in which all things. existed and moved and had their being.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>The whole business of experimental science was just to
find the absolutes of Nature, that is to say, facts and laws
governing facts that do not depend for their existence upon anything
but themselves. The purely objective world without any taint of an
intruding subject was the field of its inquiry. In fact, the
old-world or Mediaeval Science – there was a Science even then –
could not develop properly, did not strike the right line of growth,
precisely because it had a strong subjective bias: the human factor,
the personal element of the observer or experimenter was
unconsciously (at times even deliberately) introduced into the facts
and explanations of Nature. The new departure of Modern Science
consisted exactly in the elimination of this personal element and
making observation and experiment absolutely impersonal and
thoroughly objective.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Well, the old-world spirit has had its revenge complete
and absolute in a strange manner. We are coming to that presently.
Now, the constants or absolutes of which we spoke, which were the
bed-rock of Modern Science, were gradually found to be rather shaky –
very inconstant and relative. Take, for example, the principle of
conservation of matter. The principle</FONT><BR>
			</P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 311</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>posited that in a given system the quantity of matter is
constant in and through all transformations. Modern Science has found
out that this law holds good only in respect of gross matter
belonging to man-size Nature. But as soon as we enter into the domain
'of the ultimate constituents of matter, the units of electric
charges, the infinitesimals, we find that matter is destroyed and is
or can be recreated: material particles are dematerialised into light
waves or quanta, and light quanta are precipitated back again into
electric particles of matter. Similarly, the law of conservation of
energy – that energy=<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">&frac12;</FONT> mv<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">&sup2;</FONT>
<I>(m </I>being mass, <I>v </I>velocity) – does not hold good in
respect of particles that move with the speed of light: mass is not a
constant as in Newtonian mechanics, but varies with velocity. Again,
in classical mechanics, position and velocity are two absolute
determinates for all scientific measurement, and Science after all is
nothing if not a system of measurements. Now, in the normal size
world, the two are easily determined; but in the sub-atomic world
things are quite different; only one can be determined accurately;
the more accurate the one, the less so the other; and if both are to
be determined, it can be only approximatively, the closer the
approximation, the hazier the measure, and the farther the
approximation, the more definite the measure. That is to say, here we
find not the exact measures of things, but only the probable
measures. Indeed, not fixity and accuracy, but probability has become
the central theme of modern physical calculation.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>The principle of indeterminacy carries two revolutionary
implications. First, that it is not possible to determine the
movement of the ultimate particles of matter individually and
severally, it is not possible even theoretically to follow up the
chain of modulations of an electron from its birth to its dissolution
(if such is the curve of its destiny), as Laplace considered it quite
possible for his super-mathematician. One cannot trace the complete
evolution of each and every or even one particular particle, not
because of a limitation in the human capacity, but because of an
inherent impossibility in the nature of things. In<B> </B>radioactive
substances, for example, there is no ground or data from which one
can determine which particle will go off or not, whether it will go
off the</FONT><BR>
			</P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 212</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>next moment or wait for a million years. It is mere
chance that seems to reign here. In radiation too, there is no
formula, and no formula can be framed for determining the course of a
photon in relation to a half-reflecting surface, whether it will pass
through or be reflected. In this field of infinitesimals what we know
is the total behaviour of an assemblage of particles, and the laws of
nature are only laws of average computation. Statistics has ousted
the more exact and rigid arithmetics. And statistics, we know, is a
precarious science: the knowledge it gives is contingent, contingent
upon the particular way of arranging and classifying the data.
However, the certainty of classical mechanistic knowledge is gone,
gone too the principle of uniformity of nature.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>The second element brought in in the indeterminacy
picture is the restoration of the &quot;subject&quot; to its honoured
or even more than the honoured place it had in the Mediaeval Ages,
and from which it was pulled down by young arrogant Science. A
fundamental question is now raised in the very methodology of the
scientific apparatus. For Science, needless to say, is first and
foremost observation. Now it is observed that the very fact of
observation affects and changes the observed fact. The path of an
electron, for example, has to be observed; one has then to throw a
ray of light – hurl a photon – upon it: the impact is sufficient
to deflect the electron from the original path. If it is suggested
that by correction and computation, by a backward calculation we can
deduce the previous position, that too is not possible. For we cannot
fix any position or point that is not vitiated by the observer's
interference. How to feel or note the consistency of a thing, if the
touch itself, the temperature of the finger, were sufficient to
change the consistency? The trouble is, as the popular Indian saying
goes, the very amulet that is to exorcise the ghost is possessed by
the ghost itself.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>So the scientists of today are waking up to this
disconcerting fact. And some have put the question very boldly and
frankly: do not all laws of Nature contain this original sin of the
observer's interference, indeed may not the laws be nothing else but
that? Thus Science has landed into the very heart – the bog and
quagmire, if you like – of abstruse metaphysics. Eddington says,
there is no other go for Science today but to</FONT><BR>
			</P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 313</FONT><BR>
			</P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>admit and delcare that its scheme and pattern of things,
as described by what is called laws of Nature, is only a mental
construct of the Scientist. The &quot;wonderful&quot; discoveries are
nothing but jugglery and legerdemain of the mind – what it puts out
of itself unconsciously into the outside world, it recovers again and
is astonished at the miracle. A scientific law is a pure deduction
from the mind's own disposition. Eddington goes so far as to say that
if a scientist is sufficiently introspective he can trace out from
within his brain each and every law of Nature which he took so much
pains to fish out from Nature by observation and experiment.
Eddington gives an analogy to explain the nature of scientific law
and scientific discovery. Suppose you have a fishing net of a
particular size and with interstices of a particular dimension; you
throw it into the sea and pull out with fishes in it. Now you count
and assort the fishes, and according to the data thus obtained, you
declare that the entire sea consists of so many varieties of fish and
of such sizes. The only error is that you could not take into account
the smaller fishes that escaped through the interstices and the
bigger ones that did not at all fall into the net. Scientific
statistics is something of this kind. Our mind is the net, and the
pattern of Nature is determined by the mind's own pattern.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Eddington gives us absolutely no hope for any knowledge
of an objective world apart from the objectification of mind's own
constructs. This is a position which a scientist, <I>qua </I>scientist,
finds it difficult to maintain. Remedies and loop-holes have been
suggested with what result we shall presently see.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Einstein's was, perhaps, the most radical and
revolutionary solution ever proposed. Indeed, it meant the reversal
of the whole scientific outlook, but something of the kind was an
imperative need in order to save Science from inconsistencies that
seemed to be inherent in it. The scientific outlook was vitiated,
Einstein said, because we started from wrong premises; two
assumptions mainly were responsible for the bank-ruptcy which befell
latter-day Science. First, it was assumed that a push and pull – a
force (a gravitational or, more generally, a causal force) existed
and that acted upon isolated and independent particles strewn about;
and secondly, they were strewn about in an independently existing
time and</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 314</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>an independently existing space. Einstein has
demonstrated, it seems, successfully that there is no Time and no
Space actually, but times and spaces (this reminds one of a parallel
conception in Sankhya and Patanjali) , that time is not independent
of space (nor space of time) but that time is another co-ordinate or
dimension necessary for all observation in addition to the three
usual co-ordinates (or dimensions). This was the explanation he found
of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment which failed to detect any
difference in the velocity of light whether it moved with or against
a moving object, which is an inconsistency according to the
mechanistic view.! The absolute dependence of time and space upon
each other was further demonstrated by the fact that it was
absolutely impossible to synchronise two distant clocks (moving with
different speeds and thus forming different systems) with perfect
accuracy, or determine exactly whether two events happened
simultaneously or not. In the final account of things, this relative
element that varies according to varying particulars had to be
eliminated, sublated. In order to make a law applicable to all fields
– from the astronomical through the normal down to the microscopic
or sub-atomic – in an equally valid manner, the law had to divest
itself of all local colour. Thus, a scientific law became a sheer
'mathematical formula; it was no longer an objective law that
governed the behaviour of things, but merely a mental rule or
mnemonics to string together as many diverse things as possible in
order to be able to memorise them easily.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Again, the generalised law of relativity (that is to
say, laws governing all motions, even accelerated motion and hot
merely uniform motion) that sought to replace the laws of gravitation
did away also with the concepts of force and causality: it stated
that things moved not because they were pulled or pushed but because
they followed the natural curve of space (they describe geodesics,
<I>i.e., </I>move in the line of least distance). Space is not a
plain surface, smooth and uniform,</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="Luxi Serif">-------------------------------------------</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">&sup1;</FONT> The constancy of
the velocity of light, it must be noted, is not altogether an
objective fact: it is a supposition by which Einstein tried to
explain certain</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>anomalies in previous theories. It is really, as some
have pointed out <I>(e.g. </I>Hans <I>Reichenbach-Atom and Cosmos-po
</I>136), a mental formula, part of a built-in structure, arbitrary
to a certain extent which is so arranged that the speed be&shy;comes
constant and equal for systems in different states of motion.</FONT><BR>
			</P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 315</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>but full of dimples and hollows, these occurring in the
vicinity of masses of matter, the sun, for instance, (although one
does not see how or why a mass of matter should roll down the
inclined plane of a curved surface without some kind of push and pull
– the problem is not solved but merely shifted and put off). All
this means to say that the pattern of the universe is absolutely
geometrical and science in the end resolves itself into geometry: the
laws of Nature are nothing but theorems or corollaries deduced and
deducible from a few initial postulates. Once again, on this line, of
enquiry also the universe is dissolved into abstract and
psychological factors.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Apart from the standpoint of theoretical physics
developed by Einstein, the more practical aspect as brought out in
Wave Mechanics leads us into no less an abstract and theoretical
domain. The Newtonian particle-picture, it is true, has been
maintained in the first phase of modern physics which specialised in
what is called Quantum Mechanics. But waves or particles – although
the question as to their relative validity and verity still remains
open – do not make much difference in the fundamental outlook. For
in either view, the individual unit is beyond the ken of the
scientist. A wave is not a wave but just the probability of a wave:
it is not even a probable wave but a probability wave. Thus the
pattern that Wave Mechanics weaves to show the texture of the
ultimate reality is nothing more than a calculus of probabilities. By
whichever way we proceed we seem to arrive always at the same
inevitable conclusion.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>So it is frankly admitted that what Science gives is not
a faithful description of actuality, not a representation of material
existence, but certain conventions or convenient signs to put
together, to make a mental picture of our sensations and experiences.
That does not give any clue to what the objective reality mayor may
not be like. Scientific laws are mental rules imposed upon Nature. It
may be asked why does Nature yield to such imposition? There must be
then some sort of parallelism or commensurability between Nature and
the observing Mind, between the pattern of Nature and the Mind's
scheme or replica of it. If we successfully read into Nature things
of the Mind, that means that there must be something very common
between the two. Mind's readings are not</FONT><BR>
			</P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 316</FONT><BR>
			</P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>mere figments, hanging in the air; for they are
justified by their applicability, by their factual translation. This
is arguing in a circle, a thorough-going mentalist like Eddington
would say. What are facts? What is life? Anything more than what the
senses and the mind have built up for us?</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Jeans himself is on the horns of a dilemma.1 Being a
scientist, and not primarily a mathematician like Eddington, he
cannot very well acquiesce in the liquidation of the material world;
nor can he refute successfully the facts and arguments that Science
itself has brought forward in favour of mentalism. He wishes to keep
the question open for further light and surer grounds. In the
meanwhile, however, he is reconciled to a modified form of mentalism.
The laws of Nature, he says, are surely subjective in the sense that
astronomical or geographical concepts, for example, such as the
system of latitudes, longitudes, equator and axis, ellipse and
quadrant and sextant, are subjective. These lines and figures are'
not drawn physically upon the earth or in space: they are mental
constructs, they are pointers or notations, but they note and point
to the existence and the manner of existence of real objects in a
real world.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>In other words, one tries to come back more or less to
the common-sense view of things. One does not argue about what is
naturally given as objective reality; whatever the mental gloss over
it, it is there all the same. One accepts it, takes it on trust, if
you like – one can admit even that it is an act of faith, as
Russell and the Neo-Realists would maintain.</FONT></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.39cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>But Jeans' position is remarkable and very significant
in one respect. When cornered in the process of argument, feeling
that the world is inexorably dematerialised and mentalised, he
suggests an issue which is natural to a philosopher, a mystic
philosopher alone. Well, let him state his position in his own words,
the passage, I repeat, is so remarkable and significant:</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>&quot;When we view ourselves in space and time, our
conscious&shy;nesses are obviously the separate individuals of a
particle-picture, but when we pass beyond space and time, they may
perhaps form ingredients of a single continuous stream of life. As it
is with light and electricity, so it may be with life; the phenomena
may be individuals carrying on separate existence 1 </FONT>
</P>
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<BR>
</P>
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<FONT SIZE=3><I>-------------------------------------</I></FONT></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<FONT SIZE=3><I>Physics and Philosophy)', </I>by Sir James Jeans.</FONT><BR>
			</P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 317</FONT><BR>
			</P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>in space and time, while in the deeper reality beyond
space and time we may all be members of one body. In brief, modern
physics is not altogether antagonistic to an objective idealism like
that of Hegel.&quot; (p. 204)l</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3><I>A la bonne leure</I>! That runs close to Upanishadic
knowledge.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>It means that the world is objective – it is not the
figment of an individual observer; but it is not material either, it
is consciousness in vibration. (Note the word &quot;consciousness&quot;
is Jeans' own, not mine).</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Jeans is not alone to have such a revolutionary and
unortho&shy;dox view. He seems to take courage from Dirac also. Dirac
too cannot admit an annihilation of the material world. His proposal
to save and salvage it follows a parallel line. He says that the
world presented or pictured by physical science may not be and is not
the actual world, but it posits a substratum of reality to which it
conforms: the pattern presented by subjective laws is so composed
because of a pressure, an impact from an analogous substratum. There
is no chain of causal relation in the pattern itself, the relation of
causality is between the substratum reality and the pattern that it
bodies forth. Here again we find ourselves at the end of physical
inquiry driving straight into the tenuous spaces of spiritual
metaphysics. We have one more example of how a modern physicist is
metamorphosed into a mystic. What Dirac says is tantamount to the
very well-known spiritual experience that the world as it appears to
us is a vesture or symbol of an inner order of reality out of which
it has been <I>broadcast-sah paryag<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">Ä</FONT>t-and
</I>the true causes of things are not on the surface, the so-called
antecedents, but behind in the subtler world called therefore the
causal world, <I><FONT FACE="Arial Narrow, sans-serif">k<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">Ä</FONT>rana
jagat.</FONT></I></FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Even Eddington is not so absurd or impossible as it may
seem to some. He says, as we have seen, that all so-called laws of
Nature can be discovered from within the mind itself, can be deduced
logically from psychologically given premises: no empiricial
observation or objective experimentation is necessary to arrive at
them: they are found <I><FONT FACE="Arial Narrow, sans-serif">a
priori </FONT></I>in the subject. Now, mystic experience always lays
stress on extra-sensory knowledge: it declares that such a knowledge
is not only possible, but that this alone is the right and correct
knowledge. All </FONT>
<BR>
</P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 318</FONT><BR>
			</P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>things – matter and mind and life and all – being
but vibrations of consciousness, even as the colours of a spectrum
are vibrations, electro-magnetic waves of different frequency, mystic
discipline enables one to enter into that condition in which one's
consciousness mingles with all consciousness or with another
particular consciousness (Patanjali's term is <I>samyama), </I>and
one can have all knowledge that one wishes to have by this inner
contact or concentration or identification, one discovers the
knowledge within oneself, no external means of sense observation and
experimental testing, no empirical inductive process is needed. We do
not say that Eddington had in view anything of this kind, but that
his attitude points in this direction.</FONT></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.39cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>That seems to be the burden, the underlying
preoccupation of modern physical science: it has been forced to grope
towards some kind of mystic perception; at least, it has been put
into a frame of mind, due to the crumbling of the very fundamentals
of the past structure, which is less obstructive to other sources and
spheres and ways of knowledge. Certainly, we must admit that we have
moved very far from Laplace when we hear today a hard-boiled
rationalist like De Broglie declare:</FONT></P>
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</P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>The idealisations more or less schematic that our mind
builds up are capable of representing certain facets of things, but
they have inherent limitations and cannot contain within their frames
all the richness of the reality.<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">&sup1;</FONT></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<BR>
</P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>The difficulty that modern Science encounters is not,
how-ever, at all a difficulty: it may be so to the philosopher, but
not to the mystic, the difficulty, that is to say, of positing a real
objective world when all that we know or seize of it seems to be our
own mental constructions that we impose upon it. Science has come to
such a pass that it can do no more than take an objective world on
trust.</FONT></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=LEFT STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>Things need not, however, be so dismal looking. The
difficulty arises because of a fundamental attitude-the attitude of a
purely reasoning being. But Reason or Mind is only one layer or vein
of the reality, and to see and understand and </FONT>
</P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<BR>
</P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>---------------------------</FONT></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=LEFT STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3><I><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">&sup1;</FONT>La Physique
Nouvelle pt les Quanta, </I>by Louis de Broglie, p. 12.</FONT><BR>
			</P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 319</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>explain that reality through one single track of
approach will naturally bias the view, it will present only what is
real or immediate to it, and all the rest will appear as secondary or
a formation of it. That is, of course, a truth that has been clearly
brought out by the anti-intellectualist. But the vitalist's view is
also likewise vitiated by a similar bias, as he contacts reality only
through this prism of vital force. It is the old story of the
Upanishad in which the seeker takes the Body, the Life and the Mind
one after another and declares each in its turn to be the only and
ultimate reality, the Brahman.</FONT></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.42cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>The truth of the matter is that the integral reality is
to be seized by an integral organon. To an integralised consciousness
the integral reality is directly and immediately presented, each
aspect is apprehended in and through its own truth and substance. The
synthesis or integration is reached by a consciousness which is the
basis and continent of all, collectively and severally, and of which
all are various formations and expressions on various levels and
degrees. This is the knowledge and experience given by the supreme
spiritual consciousness.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN="center" STYLE="text-indent:0.42cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">

<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 320</FONT></P>
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