Ebook physics and whitehead quantum, process, and experience part 1

Physics and Whitehead SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought David Ray Griffin, editor Physics and Whitehead Quantum, Process, and Experience Edited by Timothy E Eastman and Hank Keeton State[.]

Physics and Whitehead

SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought

David Ray Griffin, editor

Physics and Whitehead

Quantum, Process, and Experience

Edited by Timothy E Eastman

and Hank Keeton

State University of New York Press

Cover image: This ghostly apparition is actually an interstellar cloud caught in the process

of destruction by strong radiation from the nearby star, Merope This haunting picture of Bernard’s Nebula, located in the Pleiades, suggests the interconnectedness, openness, order, and creativity of the universe Modern physics now understands the multi-scale coupling, interdependence, and pervasiveness of such stellar radiation and space plasmas Image Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Acknowledgment: George Herbig and Theodore Simon (Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii)

Published by

State University of New York Press, Albany

2003 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever

without written permission No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise

without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, address State University of New York Press,

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Production by Judith Block

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Physics and Whitehead : quantum, process, and experience / edited by Timothy E Eastman and Hank Keeton.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7914-5913-6 (alk paper) — ISBN 0-7914-5914-4 (pbk : alk paper)

B1674.W354P48 2003

192—dc22

2003059022

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To John B Cobb Jr.

whose encouragement and support of the dialogue between process thought and natural science made this work possible And in memory of scholars whose work substantially advanced the dialogue between process thought and natural science.

David Bohm (1917–1992) Miliˇc ˇCapek (1909–1997) Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) Ivor Leclerc (1915–1999) Victor Lowe (1907–1988) Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003)

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Contents

Part I Physics and Whitehead 1

Philip Clayton

Timothy E Eastman

Hank Keeton

John A Jungerman

Part II Order and Emergence 61

6 Constraints on the Origin of Coherence in Far-from-Equilibrium

Joseph E Earley Sr

7 Whitehead’s Philosophy and the Collapse of Quantum States 74 Shimon Malin

8 A Historical Reality That Includes Big Bang, Free Will, and

Geoffrey F Chew

viii Contents

Henry P Stapp

Part III Fundamental Processes 127

11 The Primacy of Asymmetry over Symmetry in Physics 129

Joe Rosen

12 Spacetime and Becoming: Overcoming the Contradiction

Between Special Relativity and the Passage of Time 136 Niels Viggo Hansen

13 The Individuality of a Quantum Event: Whitehead’s Epochal

Theory of Time and Bohr’s Framework of Complementarity 164 Yutaka Tanaka

David Ritz Finkelstein

Part IV Metaphysics 197

16 Whitehead’s Process Philosophy as Scientific Metaphysics 199

Franz G Riffert

Jorge Luis Nobo

SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought 321

Preface

The Center for Process Studies in Claremont, California held a conference on

Physics and Time in August 1984 with David Bohm, Ilya Prigogine, Henry

Stapp, and other leading scientists and philosophers During that conference, a spontaneous conjunction of energies emerged from a conversation between two participants who also appear in these pages (Stapp and Keeton) Stapp pre-sented a paper on Einstein and Alfred North Whitehead, after which Keeton asked Stapp if they might collaborate on reinterpreting Whitehead’s gravita-tional theory of 1922 Stapp suggested they write a paper together and discuss the project over lunch that day As they left the auditorium, other conference participants joined the conversation, swelling the original pair to more than 25

It was a loud and energetic session, and two more of those joining the effort that day also appear in this volume (Eastman and Tanaka) Our enthusiasm for the project of reinterpretation grew into a broad collaboration lasting nearly 10 years, including research, annual gatherings, and publications The present vol-ume is an extension of that collaboration In the decades preceding 1984, efforts

to explore and enhance process concepts within modern scientific research had gradually accelerated (see Bibliography, especially Internet resources)

In the 1940s one major work was published (Lillie), and in the 1950s three volumes appeared (Agar, Smith, Synge) The 1960s included a major investigation of Whitehead’s philosophy of science (Palter) and a study empha-sizing Whitehead’s relativity theory (Schmidt) In the next three decades the pace quickened The 1970s saw three significant works on Whitehead and sci-ence (Fitzgerald, Fowler, Plamondon), and the 1980s had 11 major volumes, including one on mathematics (Code), one on logic (Martin), one a collection of papers from the 1984 conference mentioned above (Griffin), and a collection of papers on postmodern science (Griffin) The 1990s experienced increasing pro-ductivity and diversity in 13 major works on process thought and natural sci-ence: in the fields of biology (Birch), computer science (Henry), philosophy of science (Athern), and physics (Fagg, Jungerman, Lobl, Ranke, Shimony, Stapp,

x Preface

Stolz) Then a major effort was mounted by the Center for Process Studies

during 1997–98 with two special focus issues in Process Studies, “Process

Thought and Natural Science” (Eastman, ed.) In the past century, there have been more than 200 significant publications focusing on Whitehead or a pro-cess-relational perspective and the physical sciences Of these, more than 90% have appeared since 1950, and 25% in the past decade alone This rapid in-crease of interest in Whitehead’s philosophy and its associated variations re-flects a growing recognition of the creative possibilities a process perspective brings to contemporary science and human experience The 1998 conference papers included in this volume are a continuation of that momentum, with a focus on Whitehead’s contributions to mathematical physics, and the implica-tions of his philosophy for contemporary physics

Whitehead’s academic career spanned more than five decades, from 1880 well into the twentieth century, covering a variety of fields from mathematics and symbolic logic to philosophy of nature and philosophy of science, to epis-temology, cosmology, and metaphysics Chronologically, his publications have been popularly grouped into three general categories parallel to this demarca-tion of interests, no category being completely exhaustive or mutually exclu-sive A careful reading of materials published throughout his career reveals an uncanny and persistent hallmark of continuity between specific focus and broad generalization within and between each work During his early work in mathe-matics and logic (1880–1912—generally the years at Trinity College, Cam-bridge) he clearly enlarged his specific concentration on mathematics to include applications for other more physical sciences As he gradually generalized those early investigations into the foundations of broader science, he naturally began expressing his evolving insights using more philosophical language and catego-ries (1912–1924—generally the years in London at University College and the Imperial College of Science and Technology) This more philosophical dis-course led to even broader categorical investigations that resulted in the chal-lenging cosmology of his mature thinking (1924–1947—generally the years at Harvard University’s philosophy department, and retirement) The threads link-ing this complex scheme of progressively more comprehensive ideas can be found within each work, and exhibit themselves throughout his career His abil-ity to maintain and expand those threads within the wide range of his interests

is a hallmark Other thinkers (e.g., Alexander, Bergson, James, Peirce) track parallel paths through similar issues, and together help constitute an emerging

field within philosophy focusing on relationality and the process nature of the universe This philosophical field was described as process philosophy in the

1960s and found institutional support at Harvard and the University of Chicago Most interpreters of Whitehead’s thought focus on the more philosophical works of his Harvard years, but the authors in the present volume seek an expansion of those ideas into the contemporary worlds of quantum and rela-tivity physics In both of these worlds, Whitehead has inspired contemporary

onstrates just how parallel his thinking was to that of Bohr, de Brolie, Heisen-berg, and Schr¨odinger on matters of continuity and atomicity In fact it is the subtly profound nature of Whitehead’s quantum thinking, woven into the fabric

of his emerging philosophy of nature, that stimulates several authors in this present volume

However, from very early in his career, in numerous publications and lectures, Whitehead wrestled openly with the concepts surrounding space-time and motion, finally resulting in his own version of gravitational theory in 1922 What inspired Whitehead to formulate his own theory? As a mathematical physicist, he was aware of the success Einstein’s first theory of relativity en-joyed in the scientific community But what intrigued Whitehead most was the philosophical basis of Einstein’s theory For Whitehead’s own theory, he begins with different philosophical assumptions After 1905 his work, both mathe-matically and philosophically, revealed his growing dissatisfaction with the classical concepts of mass, time, and space He had a strong intuition that Ein-stein, and with him the mainstream scientific community, was traveling a path that might look entirely different if the journey began with different assump-tions For Whitehead, the profound coupling of mass and energy that Einstein proposed in his special theory was a brilliant development But something else was revealed in this mass-energy relationship A sense of limits appeared in the concepts Whitehead saw something beyond or behind the focus on mass-en-ergy and realized he was looking at the coupling relations themselves, not just mass or energy If these new relativistic theories about the interaction of

mass-energy resulted in refinement of the basic concepts, what might happen if the concepts themselves were radically reconceived? How might gravity be

con-ceived differently?

Whitehead began at a place quite foreign to most scientists during the

early part of the century Rather than focus on the things that were being

mea-sured and tested (whether massive objects or massless objects), Whitehead

choose to focus on the events that constituted or included those things instead What does it mean to focus on events rather than on things as objects? The

papers in this volume approach this question from a variety of angles They seek to explore the conceptual adjustments required if event-like structures re-place object-like structures in physical theories, both quantum and relativistic The authors of the chapters in this volume have collaborated from the standpoint of a felt need That need emerges from inquiries into the limits of mass-spacetime concepts, in the face of experimental data suggesting that foun-dational concepts of mass-spacetime have reached particular limits of

appli-xii Preface

cability This book emerged from three seminars offered at the Third Interna-tional Whitehead Conference held in August 1998 in Claremont, California, under the sponsorship of the Center for Process Studies These workshops were one stage in the process of uniting the variety of voices into a cohesive whole The sequence of the workshops largely parallels the structure of the present volume, to which the editors have added introductory and concluding sections, with bibliography

Part I consists of an introduction to process thought (Clayton), a summary

of contrasts between classical, modern, and postmodern scientific-theoretic cat-egories (Eastman), and an overview of Whitehead’s work as a mathematical physicist (Keeton), culminating in suggestions for a process physics (Junger-man) Following each set of chapters is a selection of the workshop dialogue pertinent to that section

Part II focuses on order and the phenomenon of emergence by exploring

coherence in chemical systems (Earley), comparing Whitehead’s actual entities

and the collapse of quantum states (Malin), developing a foundation of physics

based on the contrast between the classical material reality and a Whiteheadian

historical reality (Chew), and interpreting experimental choice in quantum

the-ory (Stapp), followed by pertinent workshop dialogue

Part III focuses on fundamental processes by exploring the relationship between symmetry and asymmetry in physics (Rosen), interpreting special

rela-tivity to account for temporality (Hansen), revising quantum individuality using quantum logic to define commensurability (Tanaka), and reimaging the concept

of physical law in terms of the its relationship with dynamics and kinematics resulting in the notion that process replaces law in very stimulating and

chal-lenging ways (Finkelstein), followed by further dialogue

Part IV expands the focus from physics to metaphysics by comparing process metaphysics with the scientific metaphysics of Bunge (Riffert) and speculatively revisioning the role of human experience as quanta of information with extensional relations and causality (Nobo), plus dialogue This section en-larges major themes emerging from the workshops and presents significant op-portunities for further development at the interface of process and physics

We hope this work, together with the bibliography and related Web site, will stimulate further research and constructive thinking employing the expand-ing resources of process thought

We are especially grateful to the following: John B Cobb Jr and the codirectors of the Center for Process Studies for their unflagging support of academic advancement; Philip Clayton for special organizing; Jorge Nobo for general editing; our patient spouses, Carolyn Brown and Norma Jean Standlea, for their advice and encouragement throughout this project; Lyman Ellis for professional video recordings of the workshops; and key workshop participants beyond those directly contributing to this book, Ian Barbour, Murray Code, Lawrence Fagg, Stanley Klein, and Robert Valenza Our thanks as well to the

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Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive

The rapid spread of the term postmodern in recent years witnesses to a growing

dissatisfaction with modernity and to an increasing sense that the modern age not only had a beginning but can have an end as well Whereas the word

modern was almost always used until quite recently as a word of praise and as a

synonym for contemporary, a growing sense is now evidenced that we can and should leave modernity behind—in fact, that we must if we are to avoid

de-stroying ourselves and most of the life on our planet

Modernity, rather than being regarded as the norm for human society

toward which all history has been aiming and into which all societies should be ushered—forcibly if necessary—is instead increasingly seen as an aberration

A new respect for the wisdom of traditional societies is growing as we realize that they have endured for thousands of years and that, by contrast, the exis-tence of modern civilization for even another century seems doubtful Likewise,

modernism as a worldview is less and less seen as The Final Truth, in

compari-son with which all divergent worldviews are automatically regarded as “super-stitious.” The modern worldview is increasingly relativized to the status of one among many, useful for some purposes, inadequate for others

Although there have been antimodern movements before, beginning per-haps near the outset of the nineteenth century with the Romanticists and the

Luddites, the rapidity with which the term postmodern has become widespread

in our time suggests that the antimodern sentiment is more extensive and in-tense than before, and also that it includes the sense that modernity can be successfully overcome only by going beyond it, not by attempting to return to a premodern form of existence Insofar as a common element is found in the

various ways in which the term is used, postmodernism refers to a diffuse

1 The present version of this introduction is slightly different from the first version, which was contained in the volumes that appeared prior to 1999.