The Reach of Physics in our Lives
Many years ago I was sitting next to James Moir at an AES Convention in New York City. James Moir was a member of the British Scientific establishment that brought the Magnetron to the U.S. at the start of WWII and who had introduced impulse testing to British Motion Picture theaters in the 1930s. We were good friends having been guests in each other’s homes.
The AES session had a panel that consisted of European Tone Masters and American studio mixers. The Europeans had described at length how they had to study history, music, mathematics, as well as a full electronics technical course. The Americans stated they couldn’t imagine why anyone would do that in audio. James Moir leaned over to me and whispered, “I’ve found knowing how to grow cabbages useful in audio.”
So, in that spirit, I offer the following philosophical musings for what they might contribute to broadening your audio outlook, from the famous Bishop Berkeley “Destroy me and you destroy the world” To John Wheeler’s “it from Bit.” The dates range from 1710 to 2008. Let me share with you the influences these men perpetrated and shared with every thinking man via their publications.
Bishop Berkeley
Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753) wrote “The Theory of Vision,” and “The Analyst,” an acute and influential critique of the foundations of Newton’s calculus. Berkeley attacked the doctrine that material things exist. His collective works are available in nine volumes – Rejecting Rene Descartes, and Duality of Mind and Body. He did adopt Descartes “I think, therefore, I am” as his starting point (Descartes lived 1596-1650).
Today one can only speculate what he might have done with “it from Bit” (see bottom of this article).
Berkeley did not defer to authority and as he proclaimed “One thing, I know, I am not guilty of. I act not out of prejudice and prepossession. I do not adhere to any opinion because it is an old one; a received one, a fashionable one, or one that I have spent much time in the study and calculation of.” Berkeley’s suggestion that a tree doesn’t exist minus an observer led one wag to write:
Their was a young man who said God must think it exceedingly odd When he finds that the tree continues to be when no one’s about in the Quad.This then led to the answer
Dear Sir, Your astonishment odd, I’m always about in the Quad and that’s why the tree continues to be. since observed by yours faithfully, God.All the above led to “If our ideas exist in God, then they presumably exist continuously. Indeed they must exist continuously, since standard Christian doctrine dictates that God is unchanging.”
John Wheeler
Turning to John Wheeler (1911 – 2008) we find that he sought the ultimate truth, by his own testimony first in his “Everything is particles” period from 1930 to the 1950s. After WWII Wheeler came to his “Everything is waves” period, roughly the 1950s to the 1970s. Finally came the “Everything is information” period. Wheeler was Richard Feynman’s PhD professor in 1942 and both of them worked at Los Alamos during the War. Feynman discussed his work at Los Alamos in his Nobel Prize lecture. “During the War I didn’t have time to work on things very extensively, but wandered about on buses and so forth with little pieces of paper.”
Richard Heyser
Richard Heyser (1931 – 1987) worked out of the California Institute of Technology for NASA (Jet Propulsion Laboratories – JPL) and knew Feynman. Richard Heyser when asked if there a Supreme Being instantly answered, “There is an Is.”
Physics is often the attempt to build up from the ground toward an ultimate truth whereas religion tends toward the attempt to accept an ultimate truth and look down from it to solutions to human problems. (Editor’s note: The implication is that these are the only two possibilities, but in the interest of completeness there is a third. The distinction between religion and Christianity is that in religion man reaches toward God, but in Christianity God reaches out to man).
Sometimes the stunning power of a fresh thought sweeps away months or years of less inspired effort. In his Nobel Prize lecture, Feynman describes such a moment, “One day a dispute arose at a Physical Society meeting as to the correctness of a calculation by Slotnick of the interaction of an electron with a neutron…so, I went home and during the evening I worked out the solution. The next day at the meeting I saw Slotnick and said, “Slotnick, I worked it out last night. I wanted to see if I got the same answer.” Slotnick replied, “What do you mean you worked it out last night; it took me six months.”
The audacity of men such as Wheeler and Feynman is illustrated in “So it did not bother me any more than it bothered Professor Wheeler to use advance waves for the back reaction – a solution of Maxwell’s equations, which previously had not been physically used.”
What delineates the thinking man’s “mind set” is their receptivity to seemingly paradoxical ideas, and their persistence in their proofs which occasionally turn on them and rend them, but which they then discard, keeping only the skills developed in the process.
Tolstoy wrote, “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
Frank Wilczek
I recently gained a new insight reading Frank Wilczek’s definition of “Field” in his new book, “The Lightness of Being.” This is a physics book par excellence. He writes: “Sometimes physicists or engineers will make the statement, “We reduced the electric and magnetic fields to zero inside my specially shielded laboratory.” Don’t be fooled! What this means is that the average value of those fields has been zeroed; nevertheless, the electromagnetic field will still respond to charge currents inside the shielding, and it still boils with Quantum fluctuations – that is, virtual photons. Similarly, the average values of electric and magnetic fields in deep outer space are zero or nearly so, but the fields themselves extend throughout, and support the propagation of light rays over arbitrarily large distances.”
In the Journal, Physics Today, April 2009, Page 15, is a report on advanced MRI techniques. Higher resolution has been attained by “When the RF frequency of the pulses matches the resonance, or Larmor frequency, the spins (nuclear) tip and precesses about the static field. Thanks to Faraday induction, the precessing magnetic moment then gives rise to an electromagnetic force that can be detected in a nearby coil of wire.”
Further in the article we read: “Fortunately, standing waves are not the only solutions to Maxwell’s equations. A variation of field amplitude can be compensated before by a spatial variation in phase, for example.” And still further, “It took the presence of an additional dielectric like the human body – a bag of salt water, essentially……”
The title of Einstein’s original paper was Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on its Energy Content? Wilczek answers, “If the body is a human body, who’s mass overwhelmingly arises from the protons and neutrons it contains, the answer is now clear and decisive. The inertia of that body, with 95% accuracy, is its energy content.”
It was recently pointed out to me that “light” in outer space is invisible and only detected when a reflecting object is present. Religionist have pointed out that Spirit is undetectable until someone expresses (manifests) it.
The “comb filter” of all the interacting forms in the universe should cause us caution in making dogmatic statements.
The one interesting commonality I sense from Berkeley to Wheeler and Wilczek is that matter is not what it seems; that light is the fundamental upon which to seek reality and that thinkers will seek out all the alternative ways to view the same thing. I would encourage anyone seeking an understanding of what scientific thinking really is to read Berkeley, Wheeler, Wilczek’s papers and especially Feynman’s Nobel Prize lecture as outstanding examples of metaphysical thinking that leads to the jumps that propel Physics from one era to another. dbd
“I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy.”
Max Born
