Interlude B
THE DANCING MOO-SHU MASTERS
DURING THE ENDLESS PROCESS of raising, and reraising, enthusiasm for the construction of the SSC (the Superconducting Super Collider), I was visiting the Washington office of Senator Bennett Johnston, a Louisiana Democrat whose support was important to the fate of the Super Collider, which is expected to cost $8 billion. Johnston is a curious kind of guy for a U.S. senator. He likes to talk about black holes, time warps, and other phenomena. As I entered his office, he stood up behind his desk and shook a book in my face. "Lederman," he pleaded, "I have a lot of questions for you about this." The book was The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav. During our talk, he kept extending my "fifteen minutes" until we had spent an hour talking physics. I kept looking for an opening, a pause or a phrase I could use as a segue into my pitch for the Super Collider. ("Speaking of protons, I have this machine...") But Johnston was relentless. He talked physics nonstop. When his appointments secretary had interrupted for the fourth time, he smiled and said, "Look, I know why you came. Had you given me your pitch I would have promised to 'do what I can.' But this was much more fun! And I'll do what I can." Actually, he did a great deal.
To me it was a little disturbing that this U.S. senator, hungry for knowledge, had satisfied his curiosity with Zukav's book. There has been a spate of books over the past several years— The Tao of Physics is another example—that attempt to explain modern physics in terms of Eastern religion and mysticism. The authors are apt to conclude rapturously that we are all part of the cosmos and the cosmos is part of us. We are all one! (Though, inexplicably, American Express bills us separately.) My concern was that a senator might get some anxious ideas from such books just before an important vote for an $8 billion-plus machine to be run by physicists. Of course, Johnston is science-literate and knows a lot of scientists.
The inspiration for such books is usually quantum theory and its inherent spookiness. One book, which shall go nameless, presents sober explanations of the Heisenberg uncertainty relations, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment, and Bell's theorem, then launches into a rapturous discussion of LSD trips, poltergeists, and a long-dead entity named Seth who communicated his ideas by taking over the voice and writing hand of an Elmira, New York, housewife. Evidently one premise of this book, and of many like it, is that quantum theory is spooky, so why not accept other strange stuff as scientific fact also?
Normally, one wouldn't care about such books if they were found in the religion, paranormal, or poltergeist sections of bookstores. Unfortunately, they are often placed in the science category, probably because words like "quantum" and "physics" are used in their titles. Too much of what the reading public knows about physics, it knows from reading these books. We'll pick on just two here, the most prominent of the lot: The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters, both published in the 1970s. To be fair, Tao, by Fritjof Capra, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna, and Wu Li, by Gary Zukav, a writer, have introduced many people to physics, which is good. And there's certainly nothing wrong with finding parallels between the new quantum physics and Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, or Hunan cuisine, for that matter. Capra and Zukav have also gotten a lot of things right. There is some good physics writing in both of these books, which gives them a feeling of credibility. Unfortunately, the authors jump from solid, proven concepts in science to concepts that are outside of physics and to which the logical bridge is extremely shaky or nonexistent.
In Wu Li, for example, Zukav does a nice job of explaining Thomas Young's famous double-slit experiment. But his analysis of the results is rather bizarre. As already discussed, because one gets different patterns of photons (or electrons) depending on whether one slit or two slits are open, an experimenter might ask herself, "How does the particle 'know' how many slits are open?" This, of course, is a whimsical phrasing of a question on mechanisms. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, a concept which is the basis of quantum theory, says that one cannot determine which slit the particle slithers through without destroying the experiment. By the curious but effective rigor of quantum theory, such questions are not relevant.
But Zukav gets a different message from the double-slit experiment: the particle does know whether one or two slits are open. Photons are smart! Wait, it gets better. "We have little choice but to acknowledge," Zukav writes, "that photons, which are energy, do appear to process information and to act accordingly, and that therefore, strange as it may sound, they seem to be organic." This is fun, perhaps even philosophical, but we have departed from science.
Paradoxically, while Zukav is ready to ascribe consciousness to photons, he refuses to accept the existence of atoms. He writes, "Atoms were never 'real' things anyway. Atoms are hypothetical entities constructed to make experimental observations intelligible. No one, not one person, has ever seen an atom." There's our lady in the audience again, challenging us with the question "Have you ever seen an atom?" To give the lady credit, she was willing to listen to the answer. Zukav has already answered the question, in the negative. Even on a literal level, he is now way off the mark. Since his book was published, many people have seen atoms, thanks to the scanning tunneling microscope, which takes beautiful pictures of the little fellows.
As for Capra, he's much cleverer, hedging his bets and his language, but essentially he's another nonbeliever. He insists that the "simple mechanistic picture of building blocks" should be abandoned. Starting with reasonable descriptions of quantum physics, he constructs elaborate extensions, totally bereft of the understanding of how carefully experiment and theory are woven together and how much blood, sweat, and tears go into each painful advance.
If the casual disregard of such writers turns me off, the true charlatans positively disconnect me. In fact, Tao and Wu Li constitute a relatively respectable middle ground between good science books and a lunatic fringe of fakes, charlatans, and crazies. These folks guarantee eternal life if you restrict your diet to sumac roots. They give firsthand evidence of the visit of extraterrestrials. They expose the fallacy of relativity in favor of a Sumerian version of the Farmer's Almanac. They write for the "New York Inquirer" and contribute to the crackpot mail of all prominent scientists. Most of these people are harmless, like the seventy-year-old woman who reported to me, in eight closely spaced handwritten pages, her conversation with small green space visitors. Not all are harmless, however. A secretary of the Physical Review, a journal, was shot to death by a man whose incoherent article was refused publication.
The important point, I believe, is this: all disciplines, all fields of endeavor, have an "establishment," be it the collection of aging physics professors in the prestige universities, the tycoons of the fast-food business, the senior officials of the American Bar Association, or the elder statesmen of the Fraternal Order of Postal Workers. In science the road to advancement is most rapid when giants are overturned. (I knew I'd get a good mixed metaphor out of this.) Thus, iconoclasts, rebels with (intellectual) bombs, are sought after zealously—even by the science establishment itself. Of course, no theorist enjoys having his theory trashed, and some may even react—momentarily and instinctively—like the political establishment in the face of a rebellion. But the tradition of overthrow is too strongly ingrained. The nurturing and rewarding of the young and creative is a sacred obligation of the science establishment. (The saddest report one can get about so-and-so is that it is not enough to be young.) This ethic—that we should remain open to the young, the unorthodox, and the rebellious—creates an opening for the charlatans and the misguided, who can prey upon scientifically illiterate and careless journalists, editors, and other gatekeepers of the media. Some fakes have had remarkable success, such as the Israeli magician Uri Geller or the writer Immanuel Velikovsky or even some Ph.D.'s in science (a Ph.D. is even less a guarantee of truth than a Nobel Prize) who push totally off-the-wall things like "seeing hands," "psychokinesis," "creation science," "polywater," "cold fusion," and so many ot
her fraudulent ideas. Usually the claim is that the revealed truth is being suppressed by the ensconced establishment, intent on preserving the status quo with all the rights and privileges.
Sure, that can happen. But in our discipline, even members of the establishment rail against the establishment. Our patron saint, Richard Feynman, in the essay "What Is Science?" admonished the student: "Learn from science that you must doubt the experts.... Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." And later: "Each generation that discovers something from its experience must pass that on, but it must pass that on with a delicate balance of respect and disrespect, so that the race ... does not inflict its errors too rigidly on its youth, but it does pass on the accumulated wisdom plus the wisdom that it may not be wisdom."
This eloquent passage expresses the deep training in all of us who have labored in the vineyard of science. Of course, not all scientists can summon the critical juices, the mixture of passion and perception that Feynman could bring to an issue. That's what differentiates scientists, and it is also true that many great scientists take themselves too seriously. They are then handicapped in applying their critical powers to their own work or, worse still, to the work of the kids who are challenging them. No discipline is perfect. But what is rarely understood by the lay public is how ready, how eager, how desperately the collective science community in a given discipline welcomes the intellectual iconoclast—if he or she has the goods.
The tragedy in all this is not the sloppy pseudoscience writers, not the Wichita insurance salesman who knows exactly where Einstein went wrong and publishes his own book on it, not the faker who will say anything to make a buck—not the Gellers or Velikovskys. It is the damage done to the gullible and science-illiterate general public, which can so easily be duped. This public will buy pyramids, pay a fortune for monkey gland injections, chew apricot pits, go anywhere and do anything to follow the huckster who, having progressed from the back of the wagon to the prime-time TV channel, sells ever more flagrant palliatives in the name of "science."
Why are we, meaning we the public, so vulnerable? One possible answer is that the lay public is uncomfortable with science, unfamiliar with the way it evolves and progresses. The public sees science as some monolithic edifice of unbending rules and beliefs, and—thanks to the media's portrayal of scientists as uptight nerds in white coats—sees scientists as stodgy old artery-hardened defenders of the status quo. In truth, science is a much more flexible thing. Science is not about status quo. It's about revolution.
THE RUMBLES OF REVOLUTION
Quantum theory becomes a ready target for writers who declare it akin to some sort of religion or mysticism. Classical Newtonian physics is often portrayed as safe, logical, intuitive. Quantum theory, counterintuitive and spooky, comes along and "replaces" it. It's hard to understand. It's threatening. One solution—the solution in some of the books discussed above—is to think of quantum physics as a religion. Why not consider it a form of Hinduism (or Buddhism, etc.)? That way we can simply abandon logic altogether.
Another way is to think of quantum theory as, well, science. And don't be taken in by this idea of its "replacing" what went before. Science doesn't toss out centuries-old ideas willy-nilly—especially if those ideas have worked. It is worth a short digression here to explore how revolutions in physics come about.
New physics doesn't necessarily vanquish old physics. Revolutions in science tend to be executed conservatively and cost-effectively. They may have staggering philosophical consequences, and they may seem to abandon the conventional wisdom about how the world works. But what really happens is that the established dogma is extended to a new domain.
Take that old Greek Archimedes. In 100 B.C. he summarized the principles of statics and hydrostatics. Statics is the study of the stability of structures like ladders, bridges, and arches—usually things that man has devised to make himself more comfortable. Archimedes' work on hydrostatics had to do with liquids and what floats and what sinks, with what floats upright and what rolls over; principles of buoyancy, why you scream "Eureka!" in a bathtub, and so on. These issues and Archimedes' treatment of them are as valid today as they were two thousand years ago.
In 1600 Galileo examined the laws of statics and hydrostatics, but extended his measurements to moving objects, objects rolling down inclined planes, balls tossed from towers, weighted lute strings swinging back and forth in his father's workshop. Galileo's work included Archimedes' work but explained much more. Indeed, his work extended to the features of the lunar surface and the moons of Jupiter. Galileo did not vanquish Archimedes. He engulfed him. If we were to represent their work pictorially, it would look like this:
Newton reached far beyond Galileo. By adding causation he was able to examine the solar system and diurnal tides. Newton's synthesis included new measurements of the motion of planets and their moons. Nothing in the Newtonian revolution threw any doubt on the contributions of Galileo or Archimedes, but Newton's revolution extended the regions of the universe that are subject to this grand synthesis.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scientists began to study a phenomenon that was outside normal human experience. It was called electricity. Except for the frightening occurrence of lightning flashes, electrical phenomena had to be contrived to be studied (just as some particles must be "manufactured" in our accelerators). Electricity was then as exotic as quarks are today. Slowly, currents and voltages, electrical and magnetic fields, were understood and even controlled. The laws of electricity and magnetism were extended and codified by James Maxwell. As Maxwell and then Heinrich Hertz and then Guglielmo Marconi and then Charles Steinmetz and many others put these ideas to use, the human environment changed. Electricity surrounds us, communications crackle in the air we breathe. But Maxwell's respect for all who went before was flawless.
There wasn't much out beyond Maxwell and Newton—or was there? Einstein focused his attention at the rim of the Newtonian universe. His conceptual ideas went very deep; aspects of Galilean and Newtonian assumptions troubled him and eventually drove him to bold new premises. However, the domain of his observations now included things that moved with extraordinary speeds. Such phenomena were irrelevant to observers of the pre-1900 era, but as humans examined atoms, devised nuclear instruments, and began to look at happenings in the earliest moments of the universe's existence, Einstein's observations became important.
Einstein's theory of gravity also went beyond Newton's to include the dynamics of the universe (Newton believed in a static universe) and its expansion from an initial cataclysmic happening. Yet when Einstein's equations are aimed at the Newtonian world, they give Newtonian results.
So now we had the whole schmeer, no? No! We had yet to look inside the atom, and when we did, we needed concepts far beyond Newton (and unacceptable to Einstein) that extended the world down to the atom, the nucleus, and, as far as we know, beyond. (Within?) We needed quantum physics. Still, nothing in the quantum revolution cashed in Archimedes, sold out Galileo, skewered Newton, or defiled Einstein's relativity. Rather, a new domain had been sighted, new phenomena encountered. Newton's science was found inadequate, and in the fullness of time a new synthesis was discovered.
Remember we said in Chapter 5 that the Schrodinger equation was created to deal with electrons and other particles, but when applied to baseballs and other large objects, it transforms itself in front of our eyes to Newton's F = ma, or thereabouts. Dirac's equation, the one that predicted antimatter, was a "refinement" of the Schrodinger equation, designed to deal with "fast" electrons, which move at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Yet when the Dirac equation is applied to slow-moving electrons, out pops ... the Schrodinger equation, but magically revised to include the spin of the electron. But discard Newton? No way.
If this march of progress sounds wonderfully efficient, it's worth pointing out that it generates a good deal of waste as well. As we open new areas to observation with our inventions and our unquench
able curiosity (and plenty of federal grants), the data usually stimulate a cornucopia of ideas, theories, and suggestions, most of which are wrong. In the contest for control of the frontier there is, in terms of concepts, only one winner. The losers vanish into the debris of history's footnotes.
How does a revolution happen? During any period of intellectual tranquility, such as occurred in the late nineteenth century, there is always a set of phenomena that are "not yet explained." The experimental scientists hope their observations will kill the reigning theory. Then a better theory will take its place and reputations will have been made. More often, either the measurements are wrong or a clever application of the current theory turns out to explain the data. But not always. Since there are always three possibilities—(1) wrong data, (2) old theory resilient, and (3) need new theory—experiment makes science a lively métier.
When a revolution does occur, it extends the domain of science, and it may also have a profound influence on our world view. An example: Newton created not only the universal law of gravitation but also a deterministic philosophy that caused theologians to place God in a new role. Newtonian rules established mathematical equations that determined the future of any system if the initial conditions were known. In contrast, quantum physics, applicable to the atomic world, softens the deterministic view, allowing individual atomic events the pleasures of uncertainty. In fact, developments indicate that even outside the subatomic world, the deterministic Newtonian order is really too idealized. The complexities that compose the macroscopic world are so prevalent that for many systems, the most insignificant change in the initial conditions produces huge changes in the outcome. Systems as simple as the flow of water down a hill or a pair of dangling pendulums will exhibit "chaotic" behavior. The science of nonlinear dynamics, or "chaos," tells us that the real world is not nearly as deterministic as was once thought.
The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? Page 25
