One of the tendencies that bugs many “hard” scientists is the New Age use of physical processes to describe emotional and mental states, those subjects that involve the “soft” sciences. To make this clear, I’ll let a couple of “hard” scientists explain:
“All this has led…to widespread attempts to make science more spiritually meaningful. This is most evident in the “New Age” section of [Barnes and Noble], where writers combine scientific terminology with, typically, ‘Eastern’ mystical thought.” (ix) *
There are stereotypes for this, of course: On a perfect summer’s day a young woman waltzes through a field of flowers, a slight breeze blowing through hair held in place by a crown of daisies, some gentle herbivore grazing in the distance, and butterflies all aflutter; a western musical group sits at the foot of a guru as he utters the koan “Everyone knows the harmony of six guitar strings, but what is the harmony of a single string?” that inspires the writing of a song like “Let It Be”; an astronaut freely floating in space sees the Earth as Enya sings a song without words or discernible meaning; and, also, a spiritual leader holds a replica of a pyramid over the head of a follower while a tiny cymbal chimes until friction stops its vibrations.
This meaning stuff is difficult, isn’t it? It’s difficult because we know that we can divide types of meaning, separating, for example, poetic meaning from scientific meaning. And it’s made more difficult by all that gets thrown into the mix: Various psychologies, philosophies, arts, and sciences, all thrown at us in the context of our experiences in a particular culture. Eventually, we settle on one meaning that fits our worldview until we find that it doesn’t work as our worldview changes, and then we alter the nature of “meaning” slightly or abandon it altogether in favor of some new meaning. But what is the process by which we transition from one meaning to another?
A brief debatable history: Humans have never understood “IT All.” We began as animals seeking to maintain our individual and group survival. Early on, as evidenced from Neanderthal burial practices, we adopted various religious interpretations of matter and process, placing meaning outside ourselves. We were practical in our architecture and primitive in our initial efforts, but then tied the practical to the religious, even finding, as in the case of Pythagoreans, a meaning in numbers and mathematical standing. That led to the beginnings of science that we related to philosophy (making many mistakes explaining natural processes along the way). Then, to mark a point of departure, we had a birth of science during the so-called “Re-birth,” the Renaissance, typified by the work of Copernicus and then Galileo. From that point on, we centered our search for meaning in the “hard sciences” with Newtonian physics and the rise of a machine age. Then, during the time when story-telling gave way to philosophical poetry, we began to explain human behavior in terms of developing psychologies, such as Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy and then those psychologies of Freud and Jung that coincided with many misunderstandings of Darwinian evolution. When the scientists eventually recognized that all Nature is underlain by the mysteriously operating world of the very tiny that could only be described in terms of probabilities and entanglements, artists (writers, painters, sculptors) tied the rudiments of physics to the rudiments of psychology and philosophy and set the stage to make meaning very personal, to make it the province of everyone’s machinations. The New Age introduced us to full relativism, probably, as I have said elsewhere and Rothman and Sudarshan pointed out in their book Doubt and Certainty, as a result of Einstein’s work being called “The Theory of Relativity” as opposed to “The Theory of Invariance,” the important key to his work. Because several generations have now grown up with “relativity,” we are metaphorically tied to the concept of meaning as a variable concept. Oh! And when West met East, we decided that the exotic was more in tune with a universal harmony than the reductionism of Western science, so we just had to incorporate mysticism into our worldview.
As Rothman and Sudarshan point out, science has had an impact on philosophy and psychology, but it has had that impact as a consequence of metaphors and analogies. “There are no logical implications of science for anything except technology.” (266) Yet, if you peruse the New Age books in a Barnes and Noble, you’ll find authors who have somehow found a way to merge mysticism and science, just as an examination of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art reveals an apparent merger. Sometimes, I think I have fallen into the same kind of merging.
With understandable reason: Although we know that knowing itself is separate from what is known, we’ve become analogs of Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism: “The medium is the message.” We find ourselves believing that “knowing is meaning” and that it is not separate from “what is known.”
At the jeopardy of doing what I just described—making a New Age use of science—let me tie the physical and the non-physical. We know what phase changes are because early on in elementary school we had to learn the definition of solid, liquid, and gas. We learned that by adding energy in the form of heat to a substance like solid iron, we could turn it into a liquid. And, of course, there are those common experiences with freezing water or melting ice.
Now, a group at the University of Tokyo has studied a phase transition from one liquid state to another liquid state. ** The change occurs without a change in temperature and occurs in one of two ways, one by a process the authors call “nucleation and growth,” and the other by a process called spinodal decomposition. The former introduces a barrier between a change from a liquid to a glassy state (a kind of liquid phase in which the molecules are mobile, but less so than in the other liquid phase), whereas the latter provides no barrier. The substance undergoing the change was triphenyl phosphite. Getting the triphenyl phosphite to transition was smoother under spinodal decomposition than under nucleation and growth. Now, here’s that New Age analog.
Sometimes in changing our ostensible worldview, we actually just transition to a different version of the same thing. True, at other times, we completely reverse, accepting a view that counters our old view, but generally, it’s difficult for us to completely abandon something we have held for a long time. When we do change our views even so slightly, we often do so from a nuclei of an idea that already lies within our belief system because every thought and belief system contains the seed of its opposite. But often our change is a smooth transition, one that occurs even without our knowing that we are changing. It’s a spinoidal decomposition of the old in favor of, if not the new, at least the slightly different. We change little by little but seem to retain much of what we were.
Is that too New Age for you? Well, I thought you might like to think of all those transitions through which you have gone while remaining essentially the same. Some of those transitions required you to take a kernel of an idea or belief and break through it to a new version of your old phase, whereas other transitions were so smooth as to be unnoticeable—at least to you. Take an inventory, not of your changing philosophies and beliefs over your adult life, but rather of the transition periods that led to the changes. Were they instances of nucleation and growth like some water droplet in a cloud forming by condensation on hygroscopic nuclei like a particle of dust or pollen, or were they instances of spinoidal decomposition?
*Rothman, Tony and George Sudarshan. Doubt and Certainty. Reading, Massachusetts. Perseus Books (Helix Books), 1998. I have referred to this book in other essays on this website. It is essentially a fictional debate among many “famous” representatives of science, philosophy, economics, religion, and the arts, or as the subtitle runs: “The celebrated Academy debates on science, mysticism, reality, in general on the knowable and unknowable, with particular forays into such esoteric matters as the mind fluid, the behavior of the stock market, and the disposition of a quantum mechanical Sphinx, to name a few.” The book’s methodology is Socratic discussion ala Plato’s Dialogues.
**Ken-ichiro Murata, et al. Link between molecular mobility and order parameter during liquid-liquid transition of a molecular liquid. Reported on at Phys.org. March 26, 2019. A fascinating phase transition from one liquid state to another. Online at https://phys.org/news/2019-03-fascinating-phase-transition-liquid-state.html Accessed on March 26, 2019
“All this has led…to widespread attempts to make science more spiritually meaningful. This is most evident in the “New Age” section of [Barnes and Noble], where writers combine scientific terminology with, typically, ‘Eastern’ mystical thought.” (ix) *
There are stereotypes for this, of course: On a perfect summer’s day a young woman waltzes through a field of flowers, a slight breeze blowing through hair held in place by a crown of daisies, some gentle herbivore grazing in the distance, and butterflies all aflutter; a western musical group sits at the foot of a guru as he utters the koan “Everyone knows the harmony of six guitar strings, but what is the harmony of a single string?” that inspires the writing of a song like “Let It Be”; an astronaut freely floating in space sees the Earth as Enya sings a song without words or discernible meaning; and, also, a spiritual leader holds a replica of a pyramid over the head of a follower while a tiny cymbal chimes until friction stops its vibrations.
This meaning stuff is difficult, isn’t it? It’s difficult because we know that we can divide types of meaning, separating, for example, poetic meaning from scientific meaning. And it’s made more difficult by all that gets thrown into the mix: Various psychologies, philosophies, arts, and sciences, all thrown at us in the context of our experiences in a particular culture. Eventually, we settle on one meaning that fits our worldview until we find that it doesn’t work as our worldview changes, and then we alter the nature of “meaning” slightly or abandon it altogether in favor of some new meaning. But what is the process by which we transition from one meaning to another?
A brief debatable history: Humans have never understood “IT All.” We began as animals seeking to maintain our individual and group survival. Early on, as evidenced from Neanderthal burial practices, we adopted various religious interpretations of matter and process, placing meaning outside ourselves. We were practical in our architecture and primitive in our initial efforts, but then tied the practical to the religious, even finding, as in the case of Pythagoreans, a meaning in numbers and mathematical standing. That led to the beginnings of science that we related to philosophy (making many mistakes explaining natural processes along the way). Then, to mark a point of departure, we had a birth of science during the so-called “Re-birth,” the Renaissance, typified by the work of Copernicus and then Galileo. From that point on, we centered our search for meaning in the “hard sciences” with Newtonian physics and the rise of a machine age. Then, during the time when story-telling gave way to philosophical poetry, we began to explain human behavior in terms of developing psychologies, such as Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy and then those psychologies of Freud and Jung that coincided with many misunderstandings of Darwinian evolution. When the scientists eventually recognized that all Nature is underlain by the mysteriously operating world of the very tiny that could only be described in terms of probabilities and entanglements, artists (writers, painters, sculptors) tied the rudiments of physics to the rudiments of psychology and philosophy and set the stage to make meaning very personal, to make it the province of everyone’s machinations. The New Age introduced us to full relativism, probably, as I have said elsewhere and Rothman and Sudarshan pointed out in their book Doubt and Certainty, as a result of Einstein’s work being called “The Theory of Relativity” as opposed to “The Theory of Invariance,” the important key to his work. Because several generations have now grown up with “relativity,” we are metaphorically tied to the concept of meaning as a variable concept. Oh! And when West met East, we decided that the exotic was more in tune with a universal harmony than the reductionism of Western science, so we just had to incorporate mysticism into our worldview.
As Rothman and Sudarshan point out, science has had an impact on philosophy and psychology, but it has had that impact as a consequence of metaphors and analogies. “There are no logical implications of science for anything except technology.” (266) Yet, if you peruse the New Age books in a Barnes and Noble, you’ll find authors who have somehow found a way to merge mysticism and science, just as an examination of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art reveals an apparent merger. Sometimes, I think I have fallen into the same kind of merging.
With understandable reason: Although we know that knowing itself is separate from what is known, we’ve become analogs of Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism: “The medium is the message.” We find ourselves believing that “knowing is meaning” and that it is not separate from “what is known.”
At the jeopardy of doing what I just described—making a New Age use of science—let me tie the physical and the non-physical. We know what phase changes are because early on in elementary school we had to learn the definition of solid, liquid, and gas. We learned that by adding energy in the form of heat to a substance like solid iron, we could turn it into a liquid. And, of course, there are those common experiences with freezing water or melting ice.
Now, a group at the University of Tokyo has studied a phase transition from one liquid state to another liquid state. ** The change occurs without a change in temperature and occurs in one of two ways, one by a process the authors call “nucleation and growth,” and the other by a process called spinodal decomposition. The former introduces a barrier between a change from a liquid to a glassy state (a kind of liquid phase in which the molecules are mobile, but less so than in the other liquid phase), whereas the latter provides no barrier. The substance undergoing the change was triphenyl phosphite. Getting the triphenyl phosphite to transition was smoother under spinodal decomposition than under nucleation and growth. Now, here’s that New Age analog.
Sometimes in changing our ostensible worldview, we actually just transition to a different version of the same thing. True, at other times, we completely reverse, accepting a view that counters our old view, but generally, it’s difficult for us to completely abandon something we have held for a long time. When we do change our views even so slightly, we often do so from a nuclei of an idea that already lies within our belief system because every thought and belief system contains the seed of its opposite. But often our change is a smooth transition, one that occurs even without our knowing that we are changing. It’s a spinoidal decomposition of the old in favor of, if not the new, at least the slightly different. We change little by little but seem to retain much of what we were.
Is that too New Age for you? Well, I thought you might like to think of all those transitions through which you have gone while remaining essentially the same. Some of those transitions required you to take a kernel of an idea or belief and break through it to a new version of your old phase, whereas other transitions were so smooth as to be unnoticeable—at least to you. Take an inventory, not of your changing philosophies and beliefs over your adult life, but rather of the transition periods that led to the changes. Were they instances of nucleation and growth like some water droplet in a cloud forming by condensation on hygroscopic nuclei like a particle of dust or pollen, or were they instances of spinoidal decomposition?
*Rothman, Tony and George Sudarshan. Doubt and Certainty. Reading, Massachusetts. Perseus Books (Helix Books), 1998. I have referred to this book in other essays on this website. It is essentially a fictional debate among many “famous” representatives of science, philosophy, economics, religion, and the arts, or as the subtitle runs: “The celebrated Academy debates on science, mysticism, reality, in general on the knowable and unknowable, with particular forays into such esoteric matters as the mind fluid, the behavior of the stock market, and the disposition of a quantum mechanical Sphinx, to name a few.” The book’s methodology is Socratic discussion ala Plato’s Dialogues.
**Ken-ichiro Murata, et al. Link between molecular mobility and order parameter during liquid-liquid transition of a molecular liquid. Reported on at Phys.org. March 26, 2019. A fascinating phase transition from one liquid state to another. Online at https://phys.org/news/2019-03-fascinating-phase-transition-liquid-state.html Accessed on March 26, 2019
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