Relativity of space/time: Ruickbie excerpt #27

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:  

Taking one example, journalist  Irene Corbally Kuhn's (1898–1995) consciousness could ‘see’ and ‘hear’ in a three-dimensional, full-color, realistic world, with time progression, in her future, even though her sense organs – her eye and ears – were still in the body holding onto the lamppost in her present.* Only a consciousness that is not the product of the brain could seemingly act independently of it, but then we must also concede that consciousness is no longer in space and time as we commonly experience them.

As the accusation stands against some of our colleagues, have we also violated “the basic laws of physics as they are currently understood?” Are Newton and Einstein turning in their graves? The orbit and rotation of Mercury violated Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation, but did we deny the existence of Mercury because of that? Luckily not, because Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity was able to account for the observed deviation. Just as Einstein at first rejected later interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, with its “spooky action at a distance” and dice-playing deities, so he finally had to accept them. As Einstein found out, even the ‘laws of physics’ violate the laws of physics. There is always an ongoing tension between some observables and the framework established by so-called laws, which are really just mathematical statements about physical relationships. So, have we violated any laws and what would that mean?

Science had once reached a point when everything seemed certain and only a small amount of tidying up remained. In 1878, the German physicist Philipp von Jolly advised one of his students not to go into physics because “in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes.”

Max Planck                  

That student was Max Planck, who along with Albert Einstein, revolutionized physics in the early twentieth century: Planck with his solution to black-body radiation in 1900, which introduced the concept of “quanta,” and, drawing upon that, Einstein’s solution to the photoelectric effect in 1905 (before his Theory of Special Relativity, and later General Theory of Relativity), and we were plunged down the rabbit hole of Quantum Mechanics.

“Physical objects are not in space,” said Einstein, “but these objects are spatially extended (as fields). In this way the concept ‘empty space’ loses its meaning [...] the field thus becomes an irreducible element of physical description, irreducible in the same sense as the concept of matter (particles) in the theory of Newton." But ‘the field’ changes our understanding of ‘matter.’

Giving a lecture in Florence, Planck told his audience “having studied the atom, I am telling you that there is no matter as such. All matter arises and persists only due to a force that causes the atomic particles to vibrate, holding them together in the tiniest of solar systems, the atom.” We have since revised this model: it is only the measurement of the electron’s position that creates a point-like particle, meaning that unmeasured electrons should be thought of more like waves (or fields), creating an electron ‘cloud’ around the atomic nucleus in which there is a probability of finding an electron.

The materiality of things – this page, the eyes reading it and so on – are mostly empty spaces defined by probabilities surrounding infinitesimal balls of quarks in gluon fields. That is certainly not how we experience reality in the everyday world. And the immateriality of ghosts and consciousness suddenly seems less problematic. 

 

* See Ruickbie excerpt #18.

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.