Quantum Revelation by Paul Levy

Author:Paul Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590794807
Publisher: SelectBooks, Inc.
Published: 2018-04-08T16:00:00+00:00

THE POLITICS OF PHYSICS

How amazing that physics, in discovering the miraculous world of the quantum, simultaneously constructs a don’t-go-there zone regarding what we are and are not allowed to talk about. This fact alone, a collectively shared defense mechanism, points to an underlying psychological issue within the physics community. From the psychological point of view, the question naturally arises: why is mainstream physics so threatened? It should be pointed out that issues regarding consciousness have not been refuted but merely rejected by those in positions of power and influence, which seems less a scientific process than a (reactionary) political and psychological one. The fact of there being an unspoken elephant in the physics living room, of there being a mysterious secret that cannot be spoken about, are all signs, seen from the family systems theory point of view (which sees the world as a whole, interrelated, and inseparable system of relationships), of a “dysfunction in the family system” of the physics community.

It is not that physicists are merely disinterested in the appearance of consciousness in their experiments; on the contrary, they have become “aggressively/belligerently disinterested” in the metaphysical implications of their own theory. It is as if they have developed a willful ignorance, impervious to the implications of their own data. If we view the physics community as if it were an individual, it has an emotional “charge” (analogous to that of a subatomic particle) and is “reacting” (energetically speaking, in an almost violent way) against something in its own discoveries that is being triggered within itself. Often the greatest discoveries in physics are found by following with unbiased and open-minded curiosity the one anomalous thread in the prevailing theory (in this case, what to do about consciousness) that doesn’t seem to fit. Interestingly, the current reaction of the physics community is the polar opposite to this approach: It is actively choosing to look away from what is in its closet, from the thread that is protruding through the cracks in its theory. And yet, if this thread is pulled, it could potentially unravel not only the field of physics’ ideas about the world, but physicists’ ideas about themselves as well. Jung comments, “New points of view are not as a rule discovered in territory that is already known, but in out-of-the-way places that may even be shunned because of their ill repute.”573

The lineage holders of corporate/academic physics are like “gate-keepers” who quarantine the radical philosophical implications of quantum theory from the rest of us. To quote Einstein, “Restricting the body of knowledge to a small group deadens the philosophical spirit of a people and leads to spiritual poverty.”574 It is not something solely within the individual psyches of physicists that is resisting the liberating perspectives of quantum theory; it is important to view the physics community within the wider context of the institutional structures in which it operates. From the point of view of the prevailing power structure which funds the overwhelming majority of physics research in the United

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