Where did the original scope of physics in our modern scientific age come from?   Galileo, the founder of modern physics, laid down the rules which governed the scientific method to be used.  These rules were based in the first place on Galileo’s conviction that he, as the observer of physical phenomena, had no connection whatever with the objects observed.  These physical objects were quite independent of him.  They had their own history, their own development, which he merely observed.  Therefore anything that connected him, as a particular person, to the phenomena was not sufficiently objective for science and had to be rejected.  This included anything that came to him through the sense organs of hearing, smell, taste and touch.  These human sense organs ensured that all such information was hopelessly subjective and could not be part of the new science of physics.  The removal of these sense organs in his opinion did leave some information about the world, which he classified as objective and labeled as the “primary qualities”.  Only these were fit for science.

The principal primary qualities were matter and motion.  Rene Descartes famously said that if he were given matter and motion he could construct the universe.  All the majestic synthesis of physical laws, laid down by Newton, concerned only matter and motion.  The scope of physical inquiry was thus constricted and focused by Galileo and the subsequent founders of our age, on the mathematical expression of laws dealing exclusively with these two “qualities”.  This method was deemed sufficient to penetrate and expose all the secrets of nature.

Then came the upheavals of the early twentieth century.  It seemed that Newton did not, after all, have all the answers.  Some of his predictions turned out to be wrong and the need to explain these anomalies formed the bases for both relativity and quantum theory, the two branches of physics that dominated the later twentieth century.  Physicists began to chafe at the limits imposed on their science.  Arthur Eddington commented unfavorably on the exclusive treatment given in physics to Galileo’s primary qualities: “ ….  ideally, all our knowledge of the universe could have been reached by visual sensation alone – in fact by the simplest form of visual sensation, colorless and non-stereoscopic.”   Bertrand Russell grumped that “Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about nature but because we know so little:  it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.”  J.W.N. Sullivan wrote a whole book on this subject, The Limitations of Science, in which he concludes: “Science deals with but a partial aspect of reality and …. there is not the faintest reason for supposing that everything science ignores is less real than what it accepts.”

Physics was moving beyond the certainties of the Newtonian era.  It had all seemed so simple:  the physical objects of nature were there whether we perceived them or not.  They had their own, independent existence and history.  The basis of these objects was matter and motion, with atoms as the ultimate constituent of matter.  Atoms were just like the ordinary matter in objects, but just very, very tiny.  All these common sense notions were now being dismantled by the progress of physics.  Among the first to go was the idea that the atom was the ultimate, smallest possible, indivisible constituent of matter.  The atom could be broken into ever smaller particles in an “atom smasher” or particle accelerator and the final size of particle depended on the amount of energy available, so that nobody could say definitively that this particular particle could never be divided further.

Even more disturbing was the discovery that these subatomic particles were not just ordinary bits of matter on a very tiny scale.  They were not matter at all.  Werner Heisenberg, one of the giants of physics in the early twentieth century, called them “potentialities” or “probabilities” and said that the “particles themselves are not real.”  But ordinary material objects were just very large aggregations of these same subatomic particles, so if these objects were “real” and their particle constituents were not, where did reality begin?  This brought the whole subject of reality into a discussion of physics, something not covered at all by matter and motion, nor by Lord Kelvin’s nineteenth century dictum that science should concern itself only with what was quantifiable and measurable and thus subject to experimental verification.

Physics came up with a solution to the problem of the ultimate matter particle by defining this to be not like a tiny dot but more like a piece of string:  the string particle.  This is also defined as having only one dimension, length, so it cannot exist in the natural world as something to be perceived through any of our five senses.  As, however, the string particle is supposed to represent the ultimate, indivisible particle of matter, it must be “real” in some fashion.  It is also truly independent of the observer, since it cannot be perceived by him.  This complete separation from the observer brings to mind Galileo’s definition of his “primary qualities”, matter and motion.  Modern physics, however, has come to see that Galileo’s reasoning here was fundamentally flawed because the investigation of matter and motion still had to involve the sense of sight and thus could not be independent of the observer.  The Platonic term “objective reality” was used in the philosophy of the seventeenth century to designate something completely free and independent of human participation and Galileo had mistakenly used this Platonic designation to describe matter and motion. 

Modern physics has come to realize that everything that can be perceived in the universe through our senses has to be of a subjective reality in which we, the observers, actively participate.  As John Wheeler, a quantum cosmologist 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 objects we perceive in nature are in fact subjective appearances with which we are intimately involved and not objective realities which exist quite apart from us.  Quantum mechanics goes so far as to say that only the observed properties of microscopic objects exist.  Before they were observed they did not exist.  Whatever we may think of such a statement, it certainly expands the scope of physics beyond the traditional matter and motion!

It is however the implications of string theory that really focus the mind on new possibilities.  As we have seen, modern physics has rejected Galileo’s contention that objective reality can be applied to anything in the physical world.  Whatever can be perceived through the senses, involving our participation, must be considered subjective.  However, the string particle cannot, by definition, be perceived by our senses but, as the origin of matter, it must be “real”.  Its reality must therefore be, in the Platonic sense, objective.  This means that such a particle can exist only in a real but immaterial world, one which is beyond the human senses and beyond human participation.  In philosophical terms, such a world would be the world of origins, of limitless potential rather than actual existence limited by our three spatial and one time dimensions.  The fact that physics has reached the stage where such a world is needed for a full explanation of the phenomena it investigates, underscores the need to provide an expanded focus for it beyond matter and motion.

If a world of objective reality underlies our world of subjective reality, there must be a border region between the two.  Modern physics, in its pursuit of ever smaller particles, has actually reached that border when it got to the quark.  It is known theoretically that, at very high energy levels, all particles, be they force or matter particles, will lose their individual identities and merge into a common stream of energy.  This loss of individual identity is already apparent in the quark.  A separate, individual quark has never been seen.  It appears in stable form only as a combination of three quarks, when it is either a proton or a neutron.  Anything smaller than a quark would probably belong already to the other “unseen” realm, beyond the border referred to, where the high energy stream originates, containing the potential for all particles.

Other examples may be quoted, where modern physicists mention the need for such an immaterial but real realm, such as Helen Quinn’s recent reference to “scientific metaphysics”, but the emergence of the concept goes back to the 1930’s, when Arthur Eddington said that “the stuff of the world is ‘mind’ stuff” (poor Lord Kelvin!) and James Jeans was even more specific:  “Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality.”

If it becomes accepted by mainstream physics that the subjective reality of physical phenomena is the limited manifestation of the objective reality of a non-material world of limitless potential, the various enigmas and conundrums of particle and quantum physics become much more rational.  For instance it need no longer be said that the observation of a microscopic object causes it to come into existence.  In the world of quantum mechanics, the elementary particles would simply pass from a real but unseen region, where they are not yet defined, through an intermediate phase on the borderline between the two worlds, where they appear in their “waveform”.  On observation, the waveform then “collapses” into the discrete particle, which is now firmly on our side of the border.

In the same way, the reality of the existence of elementary particles can now be accepted.  If the particles are in the form of “potentialities” or “probabilities”, they are still in the process of passing from the objective to the subjective world of reality.  They become ever firmer, ever more solid-appearing the larger the object.  Up to the size of an atom (and even some molecules) it is still easy to turn an elementary particle into its waveform, where it can be made to appear in two places at once and do other befuddling tricks.  But while everything, from particles to ordinary objects (which are very large accumulations of such particles) could be expressed theoretically as in either wave or particle form (the wave-particle duality of matter), this duality is undetectable in objects much larger than an atom.  The de Broglie wavelength of a baseball traveling at 90 mph is more than 100 billion trillion times smaller than the diameter of a hydrogen atom, so it can safely be left out of any calculation involving normal objects in nature where only particles need be considered.

The real but immaterial region postulated here would also be, among other things, the source of the original, primal energy that exploded into (or formed) the universe at the moment of the Big Bang, so the creation of the world would not be out of nothing as proposed by some ex nihilo theories today.  Something, especially something as complex as the universe, created out of nothing presents a considerable philosophical problem.  What was the impulse for this creation and where did it come from when, as Stephen Hawking has pointed out, science cannot point to any event before the Big Bang?

When it comes to expanding the focus of physics and providing a new framework for the future development of this science, there is one urgent question that also needs attention.  How and why did things turn out the way they did?  Standard evolutionary theories need prior conditions to build on and long periods of time for changes.  At the beginning of the universe there were no prior conditions and everything had to absolutely right the first time or the whole bag of tricks would have collapsed long before reaching its present age.

The odds against the survival of the expanding universe are staggering, as are the odds against the initial formation of matter in just the one right way, the supposed correction of the initial Big Bang conditions in the “expansionary universe” and other mind-boggling events.  Stephen Hawking mentions the odds of just one aspect of this entire process:  “If the rate of expansion [of the universe] one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size.”  All this points to the concept of purpose (if it is an inherent part of the fabric of the universe) as a possible and attractive alternative to blind and random chance.

If the physics of the future would recognize, in addition to our subjective sense perceptions, the need for an objective reality in the scheme of things, leading to the concept of a real but non-material world guided by an overall purpose (of which we can otherwise know nothing), the long-awaited experimental verifications from the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva might become much more interesting - after of course first finding the Higgs boson.  By now, there are some very strange theories out there, including one that suggests some kind of time-traveling impulse from the future, affecting the discovery of the Higgs, rather like a person traveling back in time, to murder his grandfather and thus prevent his own birth.  The bystander can only hope that real, verifiable science will be the guide to the future, even if this future development might seem as strange and new as relativity and quantum theory did to the classical Newtonian physicist.

The message from Quantum Mechanics is very clear: man and nature are intimately connected in mutual participation.  Man’s presence is in fact indispensable when it comes to the existence of natural phenomena and there is no way to interpret quantum theory without encountering consciousness.  All this runs counter to our ordinary experience of the world, which is still that of Galileo and Newton.  We still see the world as existing “out there”, quite separate from us and with a separate history of its own.  This separate history goes back to the beginning of the planet, when it was formed between four and five billion years ago.  At a very late period in this history man appeared and took his place in the unfolding drama, but there is no evidence that this appearance in its early stages caused any changes in the drama of nature.  It is only in the last few hundred years, as far as we know, that man has become powerful enough to disturb the processes and the balance of nature.  This disturbance is caused by what he does not by what he is.

This view of the relationship between man and nature can no longer be defended by science.  If man is now considered to participate in natural processes, even to the extent of causing their existence, the whole past history of the earth before the advent of man must come under new scrutiny.  Evolutionary theory requires very long periods of time for changes to take place, such as adapting the bodies of aquatic animals to life on land. The processes involve millions of largely undisturbed years, where very small, incremental changes can gradually add up to major changes in the evolutionary ladder of being. That is the view of traditional science, based on classical Newtonian physics.  If this is now no longer valid and we must take man into consideration when it comes to natural processes, we will have to look at how man has perceived earth’s history from his own point of view.  It is true that man cannot look very far into the past of the planet, but the little he can see does not indicate vast stretches of time where very little happens and the evolutionary process is allowed to operate undisturbed.  What man has any knowledge of regarding the past of the earth indicates great drama and upheaval in a very short period of time, speaking in terms of evolutionary time.

It seems that even the few thousand years that we can look at of the earth’s history are filled with sudden changes and catastrophes.  The mammoths that were dug out of the frozen tundra of Siberia were so well preserved that their last meal, which they were in the process of eating when they were struck down, was seen to consist of semi-tropical herbs and grasses.  To instantly deep-freeze a very large animal, covered with thick fur, so that there is still identifiable meat on the bones some 10,000 years later, would require a process of nature which can only be guessed at, perhaps a sudden reversal of the poles.  Whatever it was, it was very sudden and catastrophic.  The same can be said of the universal legends of the Flood: whatever it was and whenever it really took place, it was something very sudden and catastrophic.  The latest ice age, apparently one of several in our recent past, represents another sudden change in climate, flora and fauna.

The times involved in all these happenings is also very short, compared to what the evolutionary processes require.  There were several early cultures that studied the stars and felt that there was some connection between human fate and history and the cyclic movements they could perceive in the heavens.  The longest of these cycles was the time it took for the equinox to move westward along the ecliptic through the entire zodiac circle of fixed stars, a process known as the precession of the equinoxes because it moved in a direction opposite that of the sun.  This time is approximately 26,000 years, known as a Great or Platonic Year, a very time long indeed in human historical terms but a mere blink of the evolutionary time needed to make significant changes in animals. 

Is there simply a huge disconnect between human cultural evolution and human biological evuolution in terms of time?  Human technology might be said to have started when someone found out that copper could be alloyed with tin to give bronze, about 6,000 BCE.  Technology advanced to the point of being able to destroy the world in 1945, less than 8,000 years later.  What are 8,000 years in biological evoluionary time? Did the human brain perhaps evolve more than anything else in these 8,000 years?  In that case, what happened to this same brain during the vastly longer Stone Age that preceded the Bronze Age?  But perhaps there is something else going on.  Our own human tally of orally transmitted and written records, legends and race memories makes no mention of ever more primitive societies in remote pre-history.  On the contrary, from Plato’s Dialogues to the histories of Berosus and Alexander Polyhistor, such records are full of ancient, very advanced civilizations and races, as well as various cataclysms going back in time beyond Atlantis to the destruction of a great continent in the Pacific Ocean. But is would be very surprising if all these human legends and histories of higher civilizations and violent upheavals go back more than a single Great Year of 26,000 years.  In terms of human culture, that is a very long time indeed.  Whatever “really” happened in all those years, we can relate to the stories coming out of our prehistory, we feel some kinship, however remote, with Atlanteans and others beyond written records. 

The same cannot be said about what science tells us.  Hundreds of thousands of years, or even millions and tens of millions, are lengths of time we can do nothing with.  What happened “really” during all these freezing wastes of time? Yes, we can speculate that a giant meteor, landing near the Yucatan peninsula, finished off the dinosaurs.  But that was 65 million years ago! Our legends and prehistorical musings have more than one cataclysm within 26,000 years and huge changes in humanity’s culture in less than 8,000 years. If the latest physics now tells us that the traditional scientific picture of an independently evolving nature cannot translate into an account of what really happened historically speaking, the question of time becomes important.  Geological records must of course be accepted, but at the moment geological times and evolutionary times are on one scale and our cultural time is on another scale completely.  We have always assumed that the geological and evolutionary time clock must be the right one because it was scientific, whereas our memories and legends were not.  What we are now being told is that this history of the world, quite independent of mankind, is not a true picture of what actually happened, so that the time frame, associated with this picture, must also be newly suspect.

Our measurement of time depends on assumptions of invariability of certain natural processes, like the rate of radioactive decay and some microscopic vibrations.  We assume that, because measurements of these processes give us very accurate time intervals today, that they have always done so in exactly the same way.  We also assume that the land, the sea, the rocks, the air and so on that exist in our world today were fundamentally the same about 3.8 billion years ago, when our planet first cooled down enough to start supporting some very primitive life forms in the ancient seas of that remote epoch.  It seems that there might be some fundamental flaw in this entire picture of our ancient earth history, that any events before the presence of man might not be so easy to visualize as we had thought.

Physics now tells us that what we perceive through our senses is a highly subjective appearance and not an independent, objective reality. Such appearances, on a large scale, obey the classical laws of physics.  On a microscopic scale, they elude us to the extent that some physicists deny the reality of their existence.  It looks as though we must now start also to rethink some conventional positions relating to the evolutionary history of the earth.  If we could get into one of those Wellsian time machines and go backwards in time, we now know that we cannot expect to see the changing earth unfold before us, like watching it on film, where we are quite separate from the picture.  We know that we participate in this picture at every turn.  So what would we see, especially when we pass the point when man first made his appearance on earth?  What would the dinosaurs “really” have looked like then, when they inhabited the earth, not as we now reconstruct them from their fossil bones?  Such records changed together with everything else on earth from what they were 65 million years ago to what they are now.  Today they form part of our present-day set of appearances, perceived with our present-day senses and interpreted by our present-day consciousness.  All that was missing 65 million years ago.  Something supported the dinosaurs and the rest of that world then, long before the existence of man, so that their entire world was objective to man, that is it did not depend on man’s existence.  That objectivity must clearly still exist today.  The Southern Seas existed before Captain Cook was the first man to see them, or so we must suppose if we think rationally.  But this objectivity is missing in science today.  It certainly does not appear in quantum mechanics.  Perhaps the time has come to take another look at this traditional Platonic principle.

If we could get into one of those wonderful Wellsian time machines, all shining oak and glass, with polished brass handles and instruments, and ride it back to some time in the latter half of the nineteenth century, we would encounter a very different world from the one of today.  Especially for Americans, it is difficult to conceive of a world where the United States counted for very little on the world stage.  The same applied even more to all the other countries of the Americas.  Except for Canada and Cuba, the whole continent had won political independence from Europe during that century, but it was still perceived as an extension of European cultures, with little input in world affairs.

The whole world was run, in effect, from a handful of Western European countries, led by Britain which, even without the United States, had an empire that covered about one quarter of the globe.  Furthermore, it was by far the leading manufacturer of machinery, armaments and textiles in the world, with the Bank of England holding most of the gold used in world trade.  France also had a very large empire and so did some very small European countries, like Holland, Belgium and Portugal.  Germany and Italy were occupied for many years during this period with unifying their countries under one central authority and therefore missed out on most of the empire building activity, but Germany especially was rapidly catching up with Britain as a leading manufacturing nation by the end of that century.

Looking at the size of all these European countires on the map, one can only wonder how it came about that they were running most of the world at that time.  What made their influence so overwhelming when, only a few centuries before, they had seemed on the verge of extinction from the black death?  The answer to this question leads into the subject of this article.

What made the small Western European nations invincible at that time were the practical applications of natural laws, contained in Newton’s monumental synthesis, the Principia Mathematica, published in 1687.  Only four years before that date, Western Europe had been very nearly overrun by the Ottoman Turks and was only saved by the opportune arrival of the king of Poland, Jan Sobieski, who rode his cavalry to the aid of the beleagured Duke of Lorraine and his Christian coalition, fighting a desperate battle bfore the gates of Vienna.  And a scant two hundred years later, the flood of inventions derived from applying the basic laws of physics enabled these same endangered little countries to rule the world.

Was that all there was to the story?  If we had made our time machine land somewhere in England during this period, the latter half of the nineteenth century, we would have encountered some appalling and, to us today, totally unacceptable social conditions.  But there would have been something else.  English society at that time exuded an underlying  confidence and certainty that we can only envy today.  They were looking to science to solve all their problems by simply continuing along the same path they had been following for over a hundred years.  And by science they meant the scientific way of looking at things, which meant not only building batter steam engines, roads, railroads and ships, but also better social systems and laws, founded not on hereditary privilege but on usefulness to the community.  They knew they still have plenty of work left but they felt they were on the right path and the coming twentieth century would bring very great benefits and solutions to problems.

Where did this “scientific way of looking at things” come from and why did it suddenly provide such an impetus to a few Western European nations?  The answer lies not with Newton but beyond him, to Galileo.  Galileo founded modern physics by providing the axiomatic postulates that defined this “scientific way” for the future.  He first of all secularized science by removing God from the picture and installing nature and her laws in His place.  Nature was all that was needed to explain the physical world in mathematical (scientific) terms.  Then he concentrated the focus of his new physics on just matter and motion.  What causes a change in motion is a physical force and these are the realities dealt with by Newton.

Galileo was a revolutionary innovator when it came to viewing the world.  He looked at it analytically, without feeling any personal connection with the objects he was analyzing.  This change from the medieval, participatory, experience of the world enabled Galileo and later thinkers like Newton to express natural phenomena and natural laws in mathematical, logical terms.  The previously impenetrable laws of nature were explained in simple, rational ways that ordinary people could understand.  They could see that, if you confined God and the upper world to a realm of belief only, the only reality you had to deal with in nature consisted of the physical objects that, in Lord Kelvin’s phrase, were “quantifiable” and “measurable”.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the whole of nature was becoming a well-lighted room, with every new advance in science adding to the brightness of the illumination.  It was fully expected that physics would finish its theoretical work very soon.  As the same Lord Kelin said in the 1880s:  “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now; all that remains is more and more precise measurment”.

Here, then, is the origin of that confidence and certainty which was such a feature of Victorian society, which could be seen in any portrait of the plump and prosperous persons of the new moneyed classes of the time.  There was complete harmony between the way people experienced the world as the only solid reality and the way science explained this world in laws that were predictable and logical, with causes leading to their calculable effects as certainly as billiard balls colliding on a table.

Then came the twentieth century and physics breached the atomic barrier.  The solid reality of physical objects (which Newton dealt with) disintegrated in the subatomic world of particles.  It became obvious that these particles were not just very small bits of the same matter that people were familiar with.  As time went on and quantum mechanics kept gaining ground, the very reality of the existence of such particles as separate entities became doubful.  One of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, Werner Heisenberg, put it this way:

“In the experiments about atomic events we have to do with things and facts, the phenomena that are just as real as any phenomena in daily life.  But the atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than of things or facts”.

But any object in nature that Newton dealt with is simply composed of a very large number of these “atoms or elementary particles”.  If these are not real and the objects themselves are real, where does reality begin?  Is reality merely a function of the number of atoms you can put together?  We can begin to see why we no longer enjoy that feeling of certainty and confidence in having the right answers which our Victorian ancestors laid claim to.

We still, or at least most of us do, feel the world as Galileo did.  We still feel that the physical objects of nature  are the only solid reality, and this includes gases, which may not be visible but which we know consist of just those same “atoms and elementary particles” whose reality can, apparently, no longer be taken for granted.  Our science today no longer reflects the way we feel about the world.  The old harmony is gone.  However, most of us still have faith in science’s ability to explain the world to us.  In Newton’s time, science was readily understood by educated people.  His laws could be taught to schoolchildren.  Even if he could not really explain what gravity actually was, he proved mathematically that its operation could be explained successfully by saying that it worked in direct proportion to the masses of the bodies involved and in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between them.  Today, the mathematics of physics has become so difficult that only a small group of specialists can understand it.  Ordinary people, even if they are reasonably well acquainted with science, can no longer contribute to the debate in terms of the mathematical work involved.

However, physics has now reached the point where in both theory and practice in, for instance quantum mechanics, the consequences and implications of the work done are philosophical as well as mathematical.  This may have the effect of bringing this very remote and difficult science once more into an area of more public debate.  The mathematics would, of course, remain off-limits to ordinary mortals, but the conceptual structure that Galileo bequeathed to later thinkers, especially with regard to reality, might need revision and others besides theoretical physicists might usefully be brought into the picture.  Galileo, like most educated people of his time, was well versed in the Platonic concepts of reality.  To Plato, the knowledge to be gained from the physical world was fleeting and unreliable, being merely the subjective result of our sense perceptions.  Real, true knowledge, which did not depend on human senses and was therefore objective,  was to him a property only of the upper, divine world.  However, when Galileo came to stating his axiomatic postulates regarding future scientific methods, he felt that matter and motion - and only matter and motion - were suitable for science because they did not depend on any human presence or any human senses.  He felt that these two “qualities” were independently (and therefore objectively) real.  His thinking in this regard affected the course of the entire future of physics, though in time, not just matter and motion but all physical phenomena came to be regarded as independently (and therefore objectively) real, as we have seen. 

However, physics, in its own, normal development in the last hundred years, has come to realize that all physical phenomena, perceived through the senses, must be subjective in nature.  Even matter and motion involve the sense of sight and Galileo erred in thinking that these two qualities of the physical world could somehow be considered objective, or independent of man’s senses.  But if everything we perceive in nature has, by definition, to be subjective, then no physical phenomena can have an independent identity or history of their own, which would cause very serious rethinking about the early periods of this earth, before the appearance of man.   For these reasons, it seems reasonable to suppose that our concepts of reality in modern physics are the ones that most need new thinking, so that a revised framework of concepts might be worked out, within which the physics of the future can operate.

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 shown in 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 placed a fixed Earth 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 appears to 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 not needed 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 electron microscope in a corner of a minor sun system, located in a rather dull and unspectacular galaxy among billions of others, in one of an 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 large physical 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 to make 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-neutral  experimental 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?  Where does mankind really fit into the overall picture of creation?

Perhaps a review of our ideas of man’s origin might be useful.  At present, the conventional view is that matter is the primary substance from which everything else, such as life or consciousness, evolved.  Both modern physics in general and 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 inherently close 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.

For Albert Einstein, arguably the greatest physicist of the twentieth century, everything in the physical world had to have an independent reality.  That is, it had to exist independently of any observation or measurement of it.  This applied to large objects as well as to particles, like the electron.  This concept of an independent realityof the physical world originated with Galileo in the seventeenth century.  He did two things which affected all subsequent science.  First, he removed the entire divine world of Greek and medieval philosophy from science.  Up to then, this had been a real world, though one which was quite independent of human participation.  Its reality, therefore, had been objective, while the reality of the physical world, which did depend on human perception through the senses, was of subjective reality.  After Galileo, the upper, divine world became one of belief only.

That left only the physical world for investigation.  Galileo agreed with the Greek philosophers that the subjective nature of sense impressions made them so dependent on purely personal factors that they were unsuitable for any scientific investigation.  This led to his second fundamental change:  he divided all natural phenomena into two classes, or sets of “qualities”.  His “secondary qualities” included the majority of what we perceive in nature, namely all that is known through the senses of smell, touch, taste and hearing.  He felt that all these perceptions needed the presense of sense organs in human beings, so that they were hopelessly subjective and therefore had to be excluded from science.  That left only his “primary qualities” as subjects fit for science.  These primary qualities were very few in number and Rene Descartes later reduced them to just two, matter and motion.  For Galileo, the matter and motion of objects persisted even without a human presence.  He therefore felt that their reality was objective, even though they belonged to the physical world.

Although Galileo focused his new science of physics on just matter and motion, he thought that these two qualities alone could unlock all the secrets of nature and explain completely the behavious of all objects.  Later thinkers agreed with him.  Descartes famously said, “give me matter and motion and I will create the universe”.  All Newton’s laws involved only matter and motion.

As time went on, physicists began to ascribe this independent, objective reality to everything physical, not just the matter and motion aspects of objects.  By the end of the nineteenth century, for anything to be considered “real” it had to be physical and the only reality was the physical world.  This exactly explains Einstein’s feelings and assumptions.  He, the observer, was quite independent of the object observed, and his observations or measurements of the object did not influence or interfere with the independent existence of that object.

Most of us feel the same way as Einstein, in fact this whole argument up to now might seem to be belaboring the obvious.  So here comes the point:  modern quantum physics has shown that Einstein was wrong!  There is no objective world of independently existing objects.  All natural phenomena are perceived through our senses and thus have no more than a subjective reality.  They are appearances, not realities.  Galileo had made a fundamental philosophical error in assigning an objective reality to his “primary qualities”: he ignored the fact that you still needed the sense of sight to perceive matter and motion, so that these were just as subjective in nature as anything else perceived through any of the other senses.  He was led to make this error by his genuine feeling that he, the observer, no longer had the kind of connections that the medieval man felt with observed nature.  There was no more unseen but felt participation with the processes in the natural world.  Galileo, the first modern man, saw nature analytically, as a specimen on a slab, to be examined with a view to finding a mathematical explanation for what was going on.  As he put it: “The language of nature is mathematics”.  Later thinkers, like Descartes and Francis Bacon, agreed with him.  Newton’s laws were mathematical expressions of processes involving matter and motion which, to him, were enough to lay bare all the secrets of nature. 

Later developments in physics in the early part of the twentieth century, when relativity and quantum mechanics showed the limitations of Newtonian physics, never addressed Galileo’s errors specifically, so that even a luminary like Albert Einstein (together with most ordinary people) still felt that the world had to be independently real.  What finally broke the spell was the increasing dominance of quantum mechanics, a branch of modern physics that Einstein himself, ironically, helped to found.  Its most vocal proponent, Niels Bohr, was engaged in a decades long argument with Einstein and the final proofs, giving Bohr the victory, did not emerge until the 1970s, after the death of both of these friendly rivals.

The implications of quantum mechanics are so outrageous and counterintuitive that physicists for the most part have ignored them and concentrated instead on the highly successful mathematical explanations of events and their experimental proofs.  Quantum mechanics is the most successful system in physics today.  None of its predictions has ever been proved wrong.  It has become the bedrock of the modern science.  Yet it states flatly that observation not only marks the behaviour of the object observed, it also brings it into existence.  As one eminent quantum cosmologist put it:  “No microscopic property is a property until it is an observed property”.  Before the observation, there was no object, but after the observation the object existed for everyone else also.  Furthermore, quantum theory states that events in one location can instantaneously “influence” events in another, even one far away, say in another galaxy.  This runs counter to the accepted truism that nothing in the universe can be transmitted faster than the speed of light. 

It is clear that these developments in quantum mechanics have a devastating impact on our sense of reality.  Werner Heisenberg (the author of thePrinciple of Indeterminacy) put it this way:  ” In the experiments about atomic events we have to do with things and facts that are just as real as any phenomena in daily life.  But the atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”

But the “things” or facts of daily life that Heisenberg refers to are merely accumulations of enormous quantities of elementary particles.  If these particles are not real, how can the “things” of which they are composed be real?   It is clear that the “reality” which Heisenberg refers to is the same as Einstein’s “reality”, that is the independent reality of physical objects.

If our observations are as important as quantum theory states, it is clear that any explanation of events in the physical world comes up against our consciousness, if we are trying to explain what is going on, that is to find the meaning of events.  No mere interpretation of quantum theory can avoid the encounter with consciousness.  As another thinker 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’.”

All these conclusions and all this language of the latest quantum mechanical musings is beginning to sound eerily familiar.  To start with, Galileo’s worldview (still reflected by Einstein), has now been decisively overturned by quantum mechanics.  Before Galileo, the Greek worldview prevailed, right through the Middle Ages.  This worldview was highly “participatory”, with man and nature connected in many ways.  The latest physics is now returning to this view.

Modern physics has also overturned other Galilean axioms, like the one saying that mathematics is the language of nature.  The Platonic view of mathematics was that is was purely a construct of the human mind, without any outside reality.  This is once more the view of modern physics, which maintains that a hypothesis, no matter how many times it is proved right, will always remain nothing more than a hypothesis, which might be overturned the next day by new facts or arguments.

What we are seeing is that modern physics is showing a very complete agreement not with Galileo, the founder of the science, but with the very Greek traditions which Galileo was at such pains to overthrow in the seventeenth century.  For the Greeks, all physical phenomena, perceivable through our senses, were not independent (that is objective) realities but merely subjective appearances.  Using different language, modern physics agrees with this position. 

Greek thinking about these “appearances” also included the concept that they were the “actual forms”, on earth, representing the “potential forms”, existing in the immaterial, objective world of the divine.  The subjective, physical world had its origin in this objective, immaterial world.  Heisenberg’s use of the word “potentialities” to describe the microscopic world, which is not “real”, is telling.

Physics has tried to find the origin of matter within our world of nature.  For hundreds of years it has looked for the ultimate, irreducible matter particle, this origin of matter, by dividing matter into ever smaller particles.  Classically, the atom was thought to be this ultimate particle.  It was not.  The proton was not.  Finally, it was realized that the size of a particle really depended on the amount of energy that could be directed at it, to smash it into even smaller particles.  The end of this process was not within this world of nature because, at a certain energy level, all matter and force particles would merge into an undifferentiated stream of energy.  This realization led to the concept of the string particle, as the ultimate matter particle, by definition.  The string particle is a one-dimensional particle which, as such, cannot exist in our phenomenal world of nature.  If it is to be the origin of matter, however, it must be “real” in some fashion, which suggests a further convergence with Greek thought.  If the string particle were to be the objectively real origin of matter, in an immaterial world, it would fit well into a long-established philosophical framework, with which modern physics agrees in every other way.

The other outrageous results of quantum theory also become managable if the concept of both a subjective reality is used for the physical world of appearances and also one of objective reality for the immaterial world of origins and “potential forms”.  This objective world could then be thought of as sustaining the physical world of appearances in our absence, without having to worry about what role our consciousness has to play in the creative process. Within such an expanded frame of reference, physics could perform its functions of dealing with the world in a practical manner without constantly bumping up against contradictory absurdities.

Galileo did not merely overthrow one way of looking at the solar system (the geocentric, Ptolemaic one) with a better one (the heliocentric Copernican model).  Other people had suggested that the sun was really at the center of the solar system, not the earth.  What made Galileo a truly revolutionary figure was his way of looking at the world.  He truly felt that there was no connection between the observer and the object observed.  The object observed was an independent entity, with its own history and existence.

This separation of man from the nature surrounding him was entirely new.  The man of the Middle Ages, a scant few centuries before Galileo, still felt intimately connected to many things in nature.  There were all sorts of influences and subtle correspondences that determined the medieval man’s character, his health and his moods.  All medicine of that time was based on such connections, for instance, certain planets had affinities with certain metals (iron with Mars, copper with Venus, silver with the Moon), certain plants with corresponding organs in the body and so on.  Natural disasters, like earthquakes, were seen as connected to human failings and sins.  The medieval man was totally immersed in an interacting cocoon of nature around him and in a universe around nature, consisting of a rather cozy solar system surrounded by the zodiac stars.  Man was placed right at the center of this whole structure, with everything orbiting around him on an unmoving Earth.

There were two realms of existence for the medieval man.  One was the world of nature around him, which he perceived through his senses.  The other was the divine world of the Creator.  He did not just believe in this divine world, because the Church told him to; for him, this was also a real world, which was accessible to mystics and saints directly, but which also sent down many messages and omens, especially in times of trouble, which were taken very seriously.  This divine world was taken to be located somewhere above man in the heavens.  There was also the obverse of this divine world, which was equally a direct experience to people like witches and black magicians, namely the world of the devil, located below man, at the Earth’s center.  The reality of the experience of nature was subjective, as it depended on man’s senses and presence, while the reality of the immaterial divine and infernal worlds was objective, in that it did not depend on man at all.

This entire fabric of experience and awareness of the medieval man was torn up by Galileo, though the full extent of his revolutionary thinking became evident only after his lifetime.  In fact, when he was forced to recant his beliefs in the truth of the Copernican system of planetary revolutions, it was thought by his contemporaries that all the fuss raised by him had now subsided and things were back in their accustomed order, as mandated by the Church.  But Galileo was the first to articulate a new consciousness of the world in a new age that was dawning, so that later thinkers did not treat him as a unique oddity but rather as a pioneer, who had suffered for his prescient knowledge and convictions.  It took only a little more than half a century after Galileo’s death for Newton to formalize Galileo’s vision of the world in his monumental synthethis of natural laws, the Principia Mathematica.  Newton ruled physics for over three hundred years and the secular Age of Reason, based on the new science, did away with the last vestiges of medievalism.

This is the background of Galileo’s achievement.  What exactly did he do that was so extraordinary?  We have said that he no longer recognized any connection between the observer and the object observed.  That meant two things:  he ripped man out of his entire, cozy medieval cocoon of connections, relationships and correspondences with the natural world.  Man, the observer, was now completely independent of the observed world, as this world was of him.  But is also meant that Galileo eliminated with one chop of the axe the reality of the entire immaterial worlds of God and of the devil: both these worlds were now relegated to realms of belief only and (for many) to mere superstition.

As an educated man of his time, Galileo was well aware of the Greek philosophical traditions that had not been challenged for over two thousand years and to which the Church in his own time still adhered.  For Plato and Aristotle, the only world containing permanent values and true knowledge was the upper world of the divine.  This world, by definition beyond the ordinary human senses, was a real world, not one of belief only.  “Contemplation” of it was the only way to real knowledge.  In contrast, the knowledge to be gained on earth was of a very inferior kind, transitory, evanescent and unsatisfactory, because of the unreliability of the human senses, which depended on many purely personal factors.  There was an intermediate stage of knowledge, which Plato said could be acquired by a study of ‘geometry’, or what we would call mathematics today.  He called it a ‘bastard’ science, because it was still only a product of the human mind and thus represented no true knowledge.  It could always be overturned by a better argument, based on (human) logic.  Nevertheless, Plato encouraged his students to study mathematics, because it did raise thoughts beyond the gross material level.

In this Greek system, the transitory reality of the natural world was subjective, because it depended on the human senses and the human presence.  The reality of the divine world, however, was objective, because it was quite indenendent of man and his senses, or of any other created beings.

Galileo was convinced that his new way of looking at the world was capable of unlocking the secrets of nature through a process of careful observation and rational analysis.  His work on motion convinced him, as he put it, that “the language of nature was mathematical” and that without mathematics we could not understand a single word of it.  It followed, therefore, that any hypothesis about natural processes that was repeatedly confirmed by observation and experiment, would cease being a mere hypothesis and become a truth about the laws of nature, something established permanently by science.

Galileo agreed with the Greeks that most of what we perceived through our senses was purely subjective, therefore unreliable and totally unsuited for any scientific treatment.  He stated very clearly that anything perceived by the organs of touch, smell, taste and hearing fell into this category, which he called the “secondary qualities”.  He also felt, however, that the absence of these sense organs would leave a small area which did not depend on them or our presence.  He called these the “primary qualities”.  They were very few in number and Rene Descartes later reduced them to just two, matter and motion.  These two “qualities” did not depend on our senses and were thus fit to be the subject of scientific study.  Because of their independent status, Galileo postulated that they, and they alone, possessed objective reality.  

As time went on, this objective reality was extended to all perceived phenomena of nature, not just matter and motion, so that by the end of the nineteenth century the only reality recognized by science was the independent existence of the natural world.  For things to be ‘real’ they had to be material and this reality did not depend on man, his senses or his presence.

These comforting certainties were rudely shaken up in the early twentieth century when physics breached the atomic barrier and gave birth to relativity and quantum mechanics.  The limitations of Newton’s physics were exposed.  It no longer represented the undisputedd truth of nature’s laws, but only a good, first approximation of the facts.  Therefore hypotheses now remained hypotheses only, no matter how many times experiments showed their correctness.  In this, modern physics agreed with the Greek traditions of Plato and not with Galileo.  Also, mathematics was now recognized as proceeding only from the human brain: its arguments could be overturned by better logic at any time and thus did not correspond to any independently existing outside facts.  The seminal work done by Kurt Goedel in mathematical logic was pivotal in this area.  Again, this merely stated in modern language what Plato had said about ‘geometry’.

Finally, the latest string theories in physics call for a one-dimensional particle which, as such, cannot exist in out world.  It is however defined as the ultimate, irreducible matter particle, so it must be “real” in some way, if matter is also “real” in some way.  The reality of matter is recognized by modern physics to be subjective, because its perception depends on our senses and thus our presence.  As the one-dimensional string particle cannot be perceived by our senses in this manner, what kind of ‘reality’ can it possess?  The only other kind of reality that we can conceive of is the objective kind, which does not depend on our senses.  It seems, therefore, that modern physics is going to need to reintroduce objective reality into its thinking.  Galileo tried to keep objective reality in his new scientific method, by making matter and motion objectively real, but this failed when it was realized that everything in nature that we perceive can only be subjective.  Therefore anything objectively real, like the string particle for instance, can exist only in an immaterial world, beyond our senses.

The above line of argument shows that modern physics agrees very closely with all the Greek traditions that Galileo strove so hard to overthrow in the seventeenth century.  This is especially important when it comes to Galileo’s treatment of objective reality.  This has no place in our world of subjectively perceived nature, where Galileo tried to make use of it.  It does, however, have a place in an expanded realm of physics, where both the subjective world of material nature and an objectively real but immaterial world are included in its conceptual structure.

 Many people, who vaguely remember their school physics classes, would have some trouble differentiating between “mass” and “matter”.   Modern physics, however, is beginning to show that these two words really refer to two different physical manifestations.  All matter that we can perceive on earth, and all the billions of stars and galaxies that we can observe in the sky, altogether make up less than 5% of the contents of the universe.  More than 95% consists of what is called “dark matter” and “dark energy”, that is to say matter and energy that is invisible. 

This dark matter can be detected only by its gravitational pull on visible matter.  “Visible” matter includes not only what we see in nature around us, but also the gases that we do not see directly.  All this matter is atomic in structure, with almost all its mass in the atomic nucleus, that is in its protons and neutrons.  These two particles, plus some short-lived particles, are called baryons as a group.  Each of them consists of three quarks. 

What the invisible dark matter consists of is unknown.  Physicists, however, are reasonably certain that by far the greater proportion of it must consist of non-baryonic particles, that is of matter which does not have an atomic structure.  Speculation centers aound the concept of a gas of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPS.  These particles are purely hypothetical at the moment.  If they are ever discovered, the presently used Standard Model of particle physics would have to be extended to include them. 

So it seems that “dark matter” has mass, because it exerts gravitational pull, but not what we commonly call matter, which has an atomic structure.  This atomic matter, which not too long ago was thought to represent the entire structure of the universe, is now found to be a somewhat rare (less than 5% of the total) combination of mass and forces which work together to form an atom, that is the basic building block of all matter.  The forces involved here are primarily the strong nuclear force, which holds the quarks together in the protons and neutrons, and also holds the protons and neutrons together in the nucleus of the atom.  The other force involved in this unique combination of mass and force that constitutes the atom is the electromagnetic force, which interacts with electrically charged particles, like the electron and the proton.  The electromagnetic attraction between negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons in the nucleus causes the electrons to orbit the nucleus of the atom.

As all solids, liquids and gases of our world are made up of an atomic structure, it might be easier to call all these “matter”.  Everything below the atomic horizon, particles such as protons, neutrons and quarks, could then be thought of as consisting of “mass”  There are also force particles which carry mass, like the W and Z bosons.  When it comes to “dark matter”, of course, something is involved which is different again.  Not only in this dark matter thought to have no atomic structure, but it is also thought to consist largely of WIMPS, that is non-baryonic particles, or particles which do not include the ordinary subatomic protons and neutrons.  It is tempting, however, to use the term “matter” only for atomic matter and the term”mass” for everything else on which gravity exerts an influence.  When we know what “dark matter” actually consists of, it might be necessary at some stage to divide the concept of mass yet further.

This conceptual difference between matter and mass is confirmed to some extent by the latest work in quantum mechanics, which otherwise has been rattling our conceptual cages in a most disquieting manner for years.  It should be emphasized that quantum theory is unbelievably successful.  Every prediction it has ever made has been proved by experiment and observation.  Its mathematics has refined and corrected Newtonian laws.  It is the bedrock of modern physics.  Yet it also states (and has shown experimentally) that a body can exist simultaneously in two or more places; it also avers that observation not only marks an object but actually brings it into being: before the observation, there was no object.  Furthermore, under certain conditions, the result of an action can be transmitted instantaneously to another place, no matter how far away. 

These weirdnesses in quantum mechanics will be dealt with separately in another article.  They serve as a reminder that matter is much more mysterious than anyone imagined during the era of classical Newtonian physics, when the atom was thought to be the ultimate, indivisible little bit of ordinary matter.  What is of interest here is that quantum mechanics realizes that, for all practical purposes, large bodies can be dealt with according to the laws of classical physics.  As these bodies get smaller and smaller, down to molecules and then atoms, the weird effects increase, because such particles can easily be put into a wave form, which is the necessary preliminary to being in a “superposition state”, where such a particle can exist in two places at the same time.

Down to and including the atom, however, matter particles are still well defined in space.  With a modern scanning tunneling microscope (STM), we can not only see individual atoms, but we can pick them up and move them around.  The situation gets much more difficult with subatomic particles, which Heisenberg called “potentialities” or “probabilities”, rather than well-defined realities.  At the beginning of the modern age of physics, in the 1920s, when it became obvious that subatomic particles were not simply very small bits of matter, Bertrand Russell grumped in his Outline of Philosophy that, ”For ought we know an atom may consist entirely of the radiations that come out of it.  It is useless to argue that radiations cannot come out of nothing …. The idea that there is a little hard lump there which is the electron or the proton, is an illegitimate intrusion of commonsense notions derived from touch.”  It was a hard time for scientific thinkers to make the jump from classical Newtonian physics to the modern age.

Today, the results of quantum experiments leave no doubt that what we call matter exists simultaneously in two states, one in wave form (where it can be in two places at once) and the other in particle form, where it can exist in only one place at a time.  It is entirely our decision in which state we want to investigate a body.

What this article suggests is that both mass and force are “dark” or invisible manifestations by themselves.  Hence, what we call “dark matter” and “dark energy”.  The primal energy (to give it a name) which was exploded in the Big Bang and from which the universe originated, is thought by modern physics to have passed through something called the Higgs Field, from which it emerged at different levels of energy.  First to emerge, at very high energy levels, were the force of gravity and the strong nuclear force.  Below that came the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force and still further down the energy scale came the mass particles.  A small portion of these mass and force particles then combined to form the atomic structure of matter, which we can perceive through our senses.  Apart from that, only light (as it emerged from the Higgs Field) could have been perceived by our senses, as part of the radio wave spectrum.

Such is the general framework around the origins of mass, matter and force which modern physics is looking at today.  How it all fits together, and whether these ideas will stand the test of time, is something only the future can decide.

We are all pretty sure we know what force is.  Gravity, for instance, is a force and gravity needs no further explanation.   Newton was the first scientist to state the law of gravity in mathematical terms and for many years we thought that this was the final answer to what the force of gravity really is.  Then came Einstein, who found that Newton’s law was only a good first approximation.  Einstein’s relativity concepts gave us a more accurate computation, which has been proved many times to give the correct answers for orbital and space trajectories.

By this time, we should feel reasonably certain that at least we know the answer to how gravity affects massive bodies, so that we can predict any result.  It seems, however, that nature still has a trick or two up its sleeve.  Back in the early 1970s, two Pioneer spacecraft were sent to take a close look at Jupiter and Saturn.  After that mission was completed, they then went on into the outer solar system.  Soon afterwards, it was noticed that their velocities deviated from those predicted by Einstein.  They were slower than they should have been, by some 5000 kms. per year.  It seemed as though an unknown force, emanating from the sun, slowed them down.

To add to the mystery, another anomaly was discovered with several spacecraft when they were sent around the earth in what is called a slingshot maneuver, to pick up speed before going on to various space missions.  This time, they picked up more speed than they should have, only four millimeters per second but easily measured.  Of course, in both cases, all sorts of precautions were taken to eliminate errors due to faulty instruments, inaccurate measurements or any other extraneous factors that would have allowed existing theories to remain intact.  It seems that we might need another bored young patent clerk doodling on a piece of paper, another Einstein to astound us by finally explaining a very enduring mystery.

And this would just be the mathematics that predicts motions of bodies under the influence of gravity.  It would not explain what a force such as gravity actually is, or how it is transmitted.  When we see a body fall to the ground under the influence of gravity, what we see is the body, not the force.  What exactly is this thing, this something, that has all matter in its grip in the entire universe?   What did Newton have to say about this?  After all, he studied this force all his life, surely he must have known what it was!  We can turn for enlightenment to his first law, as given in his Principia Mathematica:

“Every body continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by a force impressed on it”

In order to find out what Newton meant by “impressed force”, his Definitions must be consulted.  Definition IV states:

“An impressed force is an action exerted upon a body, in order to change its state, either of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line.”

Here, the definition is saying exactly the same thing (only the other way round) as the law itself.   But the law should have been the result of repeated observations, confirmed and proved by experiments, as laid down by Galileo, not a restatement of the definition.  It is clear that the difficulty lies with the definition, not the law.  It tries to define what a force is by describing its effect on a body.

Before Newton, many thinkers had tried to define what gravity actually was, from magnetism and circular inertia to Kepler’s idea of sweeping, broom-like arms from the sun and Descartes’ vortices in a universal ether.  Newton avoided this entire quicksand of speculation by concentrating on finding a mathematically expressed law that would fit the observed facts.  But this did not enable him to answer two crucial questions:  what was gravity (or any other force) and how (or in what medium) was this force transmitted?

Newton was especially puzzled by the latter question.  If the earth and the other planets are made to go round the sun by the force of gravity, what trasmits this force? There is no physical transmitter between the bodies of the sun and the earth.  During his life, Newton could find no satisfactory solution to this problem.  Einstein, in his treatment of gravity in the general theory of relativity, included a fourth dimension in his explanation of how the force of gravity functions.  Put very briefly, he suggested that the earth’s motion in this four-dimensional continuum was actually in a straight line.  In our world of three dimensions, this motion appears to be curved.

When quantum mechanics was developed, quanta, or discrete particles, became involved in everything, even in forces.  Quantum theory is very careful not to say that the force of gravity (for instance) consists of its particles, the graviton: it merely suggests that this force is transmitted by the particles.  These are weightless and must be imagined as a constant stream between two bodies under gravitational attraction, going at no more than the speed of light.

The concept of force particles is more complex than the comments made here have suggested.  For example, force particles are considered to be “virtual” particles, because they cannot be detected directly by a particle detector, as against “real” particles.  However, theory indicates that gravitons, for example, can also exist in the “real” form - in which case they must be thought of as waves.  Gravitational waves are so weak, however, that they have never yet been detected.

All this will show that even today, we have very little idea of what a force actually is and even its transmission is subject to lively debate.

  Further discussion of this subject may be found in Galileo’s Shadow, including the way the Higgs field concept can be brought to bear on the controversy of what a force actually is.

For hundreds of years now, a wide gulf has been perceived between what we know of in science and what we believe in in faith.  For many, the two concepts are fundamentally incompatible and any attempts to bridge the gulf between them are doomed to failure.  The issue is of great importance to many people because it affects the way their children are taught in school.  If you as parents are scientifically inclined, you will want your child to learn the facts about evolution (for instance) according to the theories first proposed by Charles Darwin.  If, however, you believe that the Book of Genesis, is the absolute word of God and therefore the truth, you will not want your child to be taught something completely different at school.

The controversy between science and faith is usually couched in terms of a conflict between Darwin’s evolutionary theory and creation, as mentioned in the Bible.  This in itself is unfortunate, as the biblical account of creation is about origins - the origin or creation of the world and the origin or creation of man on the sixth day.  However, what most people associate with Darwin is the evolution of a species by adaptation to an environment through various means, such as natural selection or the survival of the fittest.  He is not primarily about origins or beginnings.  There are also conceptual rigidities on both sides of the argument, which make the debate somewhat sterile.  On the side of faith, the accounts in Genesis must be taken as the truth:  in any argument, that is non-negotiable.  On the side of science, Darwin’s theories of evolution are often considered to be so well established by proof that they may be regarded as laws of nature which no amount of argument can alter. 

For these reasons, this article will attempt a different approach to resolving this controversy and to bridge the gulf between science and faith.   For a start, we will look at the last time when there was no conflict between science and faith and no rift between them.  This would have been any time before 1543, the date when Copernicus published his book on the solar system and the motions of all the bodies it contained.  He proposed that the sun was really at the center of the system, with all the planets, including the earth, orbiting around it.  In a sense, this was the first sign of the coming rift, because the official, accepted picture of the solar system, favored by the Church, was one worked out many years before by an Egyptian astronomer called Ptolemy.  He put the earth at the center of the solar system.  The earth did not move and everything, including the sun, moved around the earth. 

Copernicus himself did not challenge the orthodoxy of his time and, in any case, he died the year his book was published.  That challenge was left to Galileo. 

Galileo was a passionate Copernican and, as is well known, got into trouble with the Church because of this.  However, from our point of view, the important fact is that the Ptolemaic system represented the last instance of full harmony between science and faith.  This harmony is easily explained.  The observed facts of science had to be adapted to various conditions imposed by philosophy or faith, a process called “saving the appearances”.  In the case of the Ptolemaic model, this meant that it had to show that the motions of the planets in their orbits were constant at all times and that the orbits themselves were perfect circles.  Anything else would not have reflected the perfection of creation in the heavenly spheres.  As the observed motions of the planets did not coincide with these pre-conditions, all sorts of tricks had to be employed in the model, such as a whole series of epicycles, eccentric deferants, equant points and the like,  to “save the appearances”. 

It was Galileo who would have none of this. As an educated man of his time, he was well versed in Greek philosophy and especially in the theories of knowledge which were still accepted by the Church in his day.  He knew that to Plato (and to Aristotle also), the knowledge to be gained from our low world of physical phenomena was transitory, unreliable and unsatisfactory.  This was because the reality of this low world could be transmitted only through our senses, which made all human perceptions merely subjective, without inherent truth or permanent value.   The  real, final and true knowledge could be gained only from contemplation of the divine in the upper world, whose reality was objective, that is it was totally independent of all creation (including man).  This upper world was the origin of the lower, it contained the “potential forms”, which were the origins of the “actual forms” perceived on earth.

Galileo changed all this.  No more upper world, that could not be perceived directly (the supposed perception of oracles and mystics was a matter of faith, not science).  He concentrated on our natural world and even most of that was subject to sense perceptions which, to him, were quite unsuitable for science.  Only what he called the “primary qualities” , chiefly matter and motion, were suitable for investigation by his new science of physics.   Everything else which we perceived in nature, through our senses of hearing, smell, taste and touch, was banished from science.  In Galileo’s opinion, which he stated very clearly, all such “secondary qualities” required the presence of a person with his sense organs and were thus hopelessly subjective.

However, he thought that matter and motion were there even if man was not there.  He therefore appropriated the Greek idea of an objective reality for these primary qualities only.  Subsequent thinkers agreed with Galileo and all of Newtons monumental synthesis of physical laws, for instance, deals only with matter and motion.  

 Galileo set out the scientific method to be followed by the scientific age which he helped to usher in.  His ideas survived until the 1920s, when the modern physics of relativity and quantum theory was born.

It will be seen, therefore, that it was Galileo himself who opened the gulf between science and faith.  He removed everything that was faith-based in science.  Some of his actions were philosophical, but he remained within the framework of physics.  His new science would deal exclusively with our world of real phenomena, that did not need our presence.  The upper, divine world was one of belief only, of morals and precepts, not of facts.  As time went on some changes in the strict Galilean limits were inevitable and by the nineteenth century all physical phenomena, as perceived by any of our senses, became the province of science.  Galileo’s philosophical difference between objective and subjective reality, when applied to nature, was diregarded.  All physical phenomena were now supposed to have an independent reality of their own, what Galileo would have called an objective reality, as well as a history of their own which did not depend on a human presence. 

Then came relativity and quantum theory.  These new branches of physics were forced on it by failues of the predictions of classical, Newtonian and Clerk Maxwellian physics.  We still feel in ordinary life that nature exists quite independently of our human presence, but our science no longer supports this feeling, especially quantum mechanics.  If forced to make a philosophical statement, modern physics will admit that all physical phenomena, as perceived through any of our sense, are of subjective reality only.  No part of these phenomena is thought of today as having an objective reality which does not depend on our presence.  This of course implies that nothing supports our world in our absence, which is causing a great deal of concern, especially in quantum theory.  Quantum theory actually leads straight to the conclusion that our consciousness is directly involved not only in choosing the phenomena we wish to investigate but that this choice makes them appear.  This is a very hard nut to crack, because quantum theory is in all mathematical senses the foundation of all modern physics and its scientific conclusions have been validated and found to be accurate for many years now.  It surely cannot be wrong!

It is possible that one of the difficulties here is that the only reality left for physics today is the subjective kind.  If everything depends on our presence, then our absence (and this would include the absence of our conscious attention) might lead to the kind of conundrum faced by quantum theory today.  It is also possible that the reintroduction of the concept of an objective reality might help here.  Of course, an objective reality cannot form part of physical phenomena.  Galileo made a serious philosophical error in assuming that it could.  Objective reality, namely a reality that does not depend on our presence, can belong only to an immaterial world, which is where the Greeks had it.  For them, this upper, divine world was not a world of belief only, it was a real world which was the origin of our world of nature.  It therefore sustained our world when we were not there, or not paying conscious attention to some part of it.  The fact that our world is sustained not only during our absence of attention but also before we appeared on it at all seems the most elementary common sense to most of us.

  Another example of the need for an objective reality in modern physics may be taken from the latest string theory.  The string particle is defined as having only one dimension, length.  There are excellent mathematical reasons for this.  It is also defined as the ultimate, irreducible matter particle. But nothing of only one dimension can exist in our world and be perceived by our senses.  Therefore, if the string particle is to be thought of as real, in the way matter is real, it can exist only in a world apart from ourselves and our senses, that is a world of immaterial reality.

Such a world of immaterial reality had been thought of as necessary by scientific thinkers, such as Arthur Eddington and James Jeans, as early as the 1930s.  They thought that the stream of knowledge within the physical sciences was heading towards this concept. Now, the most modern physics is pointing towards it again as the origin of matter (and perhaps of life as well).   

If the line of reasoning suggested here is followed up and taken seriously, it follows that the rift between science and faith, started by Galileo, has been closed again and by the very science which he founded.  Furthermore, this conclusion would be reached without appealing to any arguments from the side of either creationism or evolutionary theory. History has given us many examples of irony, perhaps none greater than this.

Most people remember Galileo, if they remember their schooldays at all, as the champion of the Copernican model of the solar system, with the sun at the center.  Perhaps they might even remember the story that he dropped a heavy and a light weight together, from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa, to show that they would reach the ground at the same time.  All Galileo’s valuable experimental work in the movement of objects on earth was recognized by Newton and incorporated into his monumental synthesis of laws of motion.  It is now merely a part of the history of physics, with little relation to the present state of the science. 

However, there is another side to Galileo’s work  which was not only of immense importance in his own time but also to our present age.  It was Galileo alone who was responsible for setting down the scientific methods to be followed by the new science of physics.  He published three foundation concepts which underpinned  and guided all thinking in physics until the modern age of relativity and quantum mechanics.  In sciences other than physics, these concepts still form the axiomatic basis of all later developments.

Galileo’s three foundation concepts can be expressed as follows:

The first of these stated that if a theory is proved to be correct by repeated and careful observation or experiment, it ceases to be merely a theory and becomes an established fact, an expression of a law of nature, a truth that has been definitely established.  He further stated that the philosopher had the duty to test all statements made about phenomena, especially those phenomena that were quantifiable and measurable, and not rely on unsupported traditions.

His second axiom was stated very simply:  mathematics is the language of nature.  Without it, we cannot understand a single word of it, in his opinion.  Here, he implies that mathematics is not simply a construct of the human mind, something internal and subjective (no matter how abstract), but a reflection of natural law that exists outside the brain and is part of the fabric of the world. 

Galileo really becomes audacious and radical in the last of his three axioms.  He divides the world into two categories, the “primary qualities” and the “secondary qualities”.  In his opinion, only the former are suitable for scientific consideration because they exist without the need of a human presence.  They are therefore imbued with objective reality.  They were very few in number and Rene Descartes later reduced them to just two, matter and motion.  All the secondary qualities, that is everything we perceive through the senses of touch, taste, smell and hearing, needed the presence of a person and his sense organs and was thus hopelessly subjective and unsuited to science.

This reduction in the focus of physics to just two allowable “qualities” was accepted by later thinkers.  Newton’s great synthesis of laws, for instance, is all about matter and motion only.  It was thought that these alone could unlock all the mysteries of nature.  The philosophical expression of Newton’s laws was given in the completely deterministic cause-and-effect formulation of scientific determinism, championed by Laplace and many others.  It lasted until the 1920s, when physics had breached the atomic barrier and it was realized that subatomic particles could not be explained without including a degree of uncertainty.

However, as far as our awareness of the world is concerned, we still live in th age of Newton and Galileo.  We still feel that the world of nature that surrounds us leads a completely separate existence from us and has a completely separate history.  This means that we still feel that the reality of nature is objective, that is it does not depend on us and our presence. 

This is no longer the position taken by modern physics, which argues that everything we know and can know about the world, on an experimental basis, comes through our sense structure and is therefore subjective, not objective.  If we now take a second look at Galileo and his primary qualities, it will become clear that the human sense of sight has to be involved in investigating matter and motion, so that a person is still needed.  Therefore, these qualities cannot be granted objective reality, that is a reality which does not include man.

Galileo’s other axioms similarly contained serious flaws.  For instance, no serious modern physicist would ever claim that experimental proof, no matter how often repeated successfully, could ever turn a theory into a fact, or a truth about nature.  To be properly scientific, a theory always has to remain open-ended, because you never know when some new facts might be found to upset it.  Newtonian laws are a prime example of this.  For hundereds of years, every experiment verified them, yet their absolute truth was overturned by relativity and quantum concepts, and they were found to be nothing but good, rough approximations.

Galileo is responsible in large part for the fact that today out consciousness of the world of nature is out of step with our latest science.  We have to make a conscious effort to realize that nature is not objectively real, and this affects the way we ought to think about the ages of the world before the appearance of man.