Until Galileo and the Renaissance, man was firmly at the center of his universe, as defined and illustrated by scientists and philosophers alike. This belief was perhaps best shownin the geocentric model of the solar system, started by the Egyptian astronomer, Ptolemy, nearly two thousand years ago, to which many others contributed before it became the officially accepted version, blessed by the Church, in Galileo’s time. This model placeda fixedEarth at the center not just of the solar system but of the entire known universe, including the “sphere” of the fixed stars, with everything else in the heavens rotating around it, just as it appearsto anyone looking at the night sky.
This model meant that man, together with the Earth itself, occupied the most important position in the whole of the divine creation. Then came Galileo, who championed the Copernican model of the solar system, in which the center was occupied by the sun, not the earth. Man was not yet very far from the center, on the third “sphere” from the central sun, but nevertheless his importance in the scheme of things was greatly diminished.
The sciences of the new age, which started in the seventeenth century, then conspired to reduce man to ever greater insignificance. The only subjects of the new physics that Galileo recognized as fit for scientific inquiry were matter and motion, precisely for the reason that (in his opinion) man was notneeded for their existence in nature. They were independent of man. Then it became obvious that man was not nearly as old as the world.Far from being created only a few “days” after the rest of the world, he actually came into the picture at a very late stage of the earth’s development. The rest of nature had an independent history of its own,several billions of years older than the earliest appearance of man. Even more denigrating was the picture of man that emerged from this scientific study of his origins. Far from being created “in the image of God” he was, it turned out, nothing more than a slightly advanced ape. All science concentrated on finding similarities between him and this ancestral ape, rather than fundamental differences.
Later still came many theories questioning the uniqueness of our solar system, our galaxy or indeed the universe we can perceive. Mathematically, there were many other universes as possibilties. A recent article on string theory had this to say about man’s position in our world:
“The infinite number of solutions to string theory points to the most mind-blowing possibility of all: that the universe itself is not unique, but is just one example of a possibly infinite number of “universes”. It would be the ultimate downgrading of mankind. Far from being center-staged, as the first astronomers believed, humanity has already been shuffled gradually out of the limelight by each new consmological insight. An infinite number of universes would reduce it to utter cosmic insignificance.”
So here we have an apparently inexorable series of diminishments of man, from a giant of significance at the center of the entire creation, to someone who could barely be found with an electronmicroscope in a corner of a minor sun system, located in a rather dull and unspectacular galaxy among billions of others, in one ofan infinite number of possible universes. Mankind, as an interesting species, seemed about played out.
The implications of quantum theory dropped into this dispiriting scene, completely reversing its trend. It seemed that reports of the death of the significance of humanity had been greatly exaggerated. Quantum theory is not new: it started at the very beginning of the twentieth century, so its development was parallel to that of other branches of physics. It seems, however, that nobody cross-checked the data about the importance of man in different parts of physics. The very puzzling and indeed absurd sounding consequences of quantum mechanics can be found fully detailed in the literature on that subject, so only the bare results will be mentioned here. One of these consequences states that observation not only marks the objective observed, but actually brings it into existence. Before the observation, there was no physical objective. (Quantum experiments are usually conducted on subatomic particles, but the implications are general, both in theory and in view of the fact that largephysical objects consist entirely of these small particles). As a leading quantum cosmologist put it: “No microscopic property is a property until it is an observed property”. And who does this vital observing? None other than man himself, this otherwise despised and practically eliminated entity!
Of course, mere observation is not enough. A camera or a photographic plate also might be said tomake a record of an event. What is needed in addition is the human consciousness, and this is fully recognized in quantum mechanics. A popular book on the weirdness of quantum mechanics puts it like this:
“Quantum theory insists that our reasonable, everyday worldview [that objects are independently real] is fundamentally wrong. Different interpretations of what the theory tells us offer different worldviews. But every one of them involves the mysterious encounter of consciousness with the physical world……The encounter with consciousness arises directly in the quantum-theory-neutralexperimental demonstration. No mere interpretation of the theory can avoid the encounter.”
In the quantum mechanical universe, there is a disquieting speculation that man is not only important in the scheme of things but that he is apparently involved in the very appearance of the phenomena of the natural world. This is not only an abrupt reversal of his diminishing importance since medieval times, it actually raises his importance far above that of merely placing him in the center of the universe. When he occupied that central position, man was still very firmly a created being only and not involved in any way with the creation itself. In fact, above man and reaching far into the heavens, were the “spheres” of the planets and the stars, each one under the guidance (and motive power) of one of the angelic hierarchies, from the lowest (or ordinary) angels, who guided the moon, to the mightiest of all, the seraphim, in charge of the “primum mobile”, the region beyond the fixed stars. All these majestic hierarchies that stretched beyond lowly mankind and up to the divinity, were all still created beings. Now quantum mechanics is not simply reversing man’s insignificance,but raising him up to levels never before dreamed of. What is to be made of all these cross-currents? Wheredoes mankind really fit into the overall picture of creation?
Perhaps a review of ourideas of man’s origin might be useful. At present, the conventional view is that matter is the primary substancefrom which everything else, such as life or consciousness, evolved. Both modern physics in generaland quantum mechanics have come to the conclusion that matter, as perceived through the senses, is not independently real. It is no more than a subjective appearance so that the creation of life and man did not occur as a natural process on this earth, based on the increasing complexity of the protein molecule. If, as Heisenberg says, “the atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than of things or facts”, then the origin of matter must be looked for elsewhere. And if this is true for the origin of matter, it must also be true for the origin of life and man, because these do not exist on earth without matter.
This whole argument from quantum mechanics presents a serious challenge to presently accepted thinking about the early ages of this earth, before the appearance of man. According to this latest thinking, there is an inherentlyclose connection between man and nature. As one exponent put it: “Useful as it is under everyday circumstances to say that the world exists “out there” independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld. There is a strange sense in which this is a ‘participatory universe’.”
The extreme weirdness of quantum mechanics and the newly unsatisfactory status of man can be resolved only by a comprehensive review of reality in physics today, as the above quotation indicates. For most of us today, if we think casually, the independent existence of nature”out there” is still objectively real; it does not depend on the presence of human beings and their senses. Although this is what we feel in everyday life, physics no longer supports this view. “Participation”, on the other hand, implies subjectivity, that is the presence of man and his senses. If objective reality can no longer be applied to events and phenomena of the physical world, it might well be a property of a world of origins, by definition beyond the reach of our senses, but nevertheless real. Such an expansion of the framework within which physics operates might well be the essential step towards solving the various difficulties and inconsistencies mentioned in this article.
Werner Thurau was born in December 1927, in Havana, Cuba. In 1929, his family returned to his father’s native Germany. He spent the entire 1930s in Berlin, but came to England in 1939 and was then further educated in that country, ending with an engineering degree from London University. His further career took him all over the world on technical projects, moving first to Mexico and then to the United States, where he lives now. At school in England, he was exposed early in life to the world of ideas. Some of his teachers were friends of C.S. Lewis and Lewis’s Oxford group, the Inklings, and his father was a philosophical bookworm. Werner combined this background with a lifelong interest in physics, especially modern physics after it breached the atomic barrier. This interest extended to Galileo, the founder of our age, and what made him so different from others of his time, as well as to the effect physics has had on other related sciences, such as evolutionary theory (and its polar opposite, creationism). He came to see that the latest developments in physics bring in subjects not normally associated with a book on that science, such as consciousness, reality concepts and even ethics, involving an ever-changing role for man and his importance in the scheme of things. For more on these important questions, visit http://www.galileoshadow.com
Werner.
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