An Expanding Physicist

When I mentioned to someone recently that I had been trained as a physicist but no longer worked in that discipline, they asked with a knowing smile, “Oh, so you’re a recovering physicist?” But I didn’t say Yes. I said, “No, not quite. More of an expanding physicist.”

I’ve been pondering what I meant. When I think about physics (and science in general) these days, I have a sense that science is true, but incomplete. It is fine as it is, but misses something essential. I was drawn to science for a love of Nature, and a desire for Truth. To progress farther on that path, I must now look beyond science—at least, as it is practiced today.

I have been reading the work of Steven Talbott for nearly a decade (http://netfuture.org/). His keen perception of Nature rivals that of the ideal of science, but his conclusions are oriented at an angle to those of science, and often highlight the hidden assumptions of current scientific views. Over the years, his observations have coalesced into a vision for a more inclusive, humanistic, and conscious science. Now and then I find points where I would like further engagement with him in order to better understand this vision, but overall, his attempt to unify the mind with the heart speaks to my own heart.

His writing is dense. He is expounding a revolutionary transformation in the way we think about and do science. A redrawing of the boundaries that includes the human at the heart of Nature, and yet does not sacrifice rigor or appropriate objectivity. If you are intrigued, please set aside a couple of hours to read his latest compilation: The Language of Nature – it is published in three parts, and all three are linked from Part III.

Near the end, he summarizes why our own societal progress in science, from the Enlightenment forward, makes sense. Even though we have gone too far in terms of objectifying Nature, this was a natural overcorrection from the immaturity of many myth-based, magical, religious approaches we tried before. Now we are ready to correct back closer to center.

The only way to recognize the wholeness of nature in all its expressive power is to perceive it with the full range of expressive powers of the human being. The instrument of perception must be equal to its object. We will never develop a truly holistic science as long as the scientist must paralyze or imprison major human capacities -- for example, the capacity to recognize the very real unity of a great work of art.

When we accept the human being as the primary instrument of scientific understanding -- when we realize that we must discover within our own powers of speech what speaks in the world -- then the need for uncommon inner discipline becomes apparent. This is what Owen Barfield had in mind when he wondered (1977, p. 139) why there is any need “to make quite such a song and dance” about objectivity in the more usual sense. After all, it shouldn’t be so hard to get rid of personal bias if there is no genuine personal connection between ourselves and the things we’re investigating.

"To put it rudely," Barfield expostulated, "any reasonably honest fool can be objective about objects." But it’s altogether different when we must attend

"not alone to matter, but to spirit; when a man would have to practice distinguishing what in himself comes solely from his private personality -- memories, for instance, and all the horseplay, of the Freudian subconscious -- from what comes also from elsewhere. Then indeed objectivity is not something that was handed us on a plate once and for all by Descartes, but something that would really have to be achieved, and which must require for its achievement, not only exceptional mental concentration but other efforts and qualities, including moral ones, as well."

Indeed, the task may have been too great for humankind to attempt at the dawn of modern science. We can imagine there was a deep, unconscious wisdom in the resolve to shackle the greater part of the human instrument and subject ourselves to the discipline of mathematics, where a certain kind of rigor and objectivity are almost "handed us on a plate."

Without that preliminary training, it would have been nearly impossible to subdue the disorderly babel of voices still reigning in the human soul -- voices of magic and superstition, of myth and legend, of religion and irreligion, of ethnic pride and prejudice -- voices still capable of disrupting in childish ways the sober, geometric imaginations of Kepler, Galileo, and even Newton.

But we have completed this training -- more than completed it, for we have carried our mathematization of reality to the unhappy point were the world begins to disappear behind a ghostly veil of abstraction. This veil conceals the perceptible, testable world from us as effectively as the old metaphysics ever did. Today, if we would test the phenomena around us, we have the opportunity to bring to them not only our measuring rods and mechanical instruments, but our full-fleshed capacity to speak the living language of the phenomena, a capacity now chastened by our awareness that "even where we do not venture to apply mathematics we must always work as though we had to satisfy the strictest of geometricians" (Goethe 1995, pp. 11-17).

We do not, after all, have to accept a science lacking in rigor. We only need to realize that there are two different, almost opposite ways to seek ideal clarity and precision. One is by following the path we traced earlier, admitting into our science only what we can grasp unambiguously, only what we can lay hold of, immobilize, and tie down, only what can be isolated as a separate thing and analyzed strictly in terms of its external or mechanical relations with other isolated things. In such a spirit (rudely disturbed by the discoveries of the past century), physicists have always sought for "fundamental particles" -- particles lacking in qualities and accounting for the world’s phenomena solely through their aggregate configurations, that is, solely through their clean, mathematically describable, external relations.

We gain a very different kind of clarity, not by minimizing the qualitative, phenomenal content of our scientific descriptions, but by maximizing it. We illuminate a phenomenon from every possible side, in every different light, exploring its contextual relations and potential for transformation as fully as we can. This clarity is not attained by stripping reality down to a formal grammar. It’s the clarity produced by fullness of understanding rather than ease or simplicity of understanding.

Instead of obscuring phenomena with the blinding white light of abstraction, and so reducing them to a kind of black-and-white skeletal syntax, we open ourselves to receive the phenomena in all their full-throated color.

Sometimes I feel like Talbott is describing a kind of science that is already on the way out. Particle physics, and the reductionism upon which it is founded, is increasingly seen to be inadequate in capturing the essence of Nature. More and more we hear of emergence, interconnection, and observer-dependence.

And yet, how deeply do scientists really understand those words? Even as the evidence mounts that objectivity itself is not as simple as we have forced it to be, we continue with the same essential tactics of measurement, hoping that small modifications will suffice. Talbott asserts that genuine transformation is required.

I have great faith in science, and even greater faith in Nature, which produced science. We already have hints that the “scientific method” is working to uncover its own inadequacies. A system always contains the seeds of its own transformation because the system is always whole and dynamic, whether we perceive it that way or not. So let’s just keep looking.

I am an expanding physicist because physics is expanding.