Copyright © 1980 by John Dobson
Origin: http://www.magicpubs.com/dobson/PhysicsOfIllusion.html
This essay was delivered by John Dobson as a lecture at the Vedanta
Society,
Berkeley, USA, on 12th October 1980 and has been reprinted from:
The Vedanta Kesari May, 1988 (pages 181-189)
Some of you may think from the title "Einstein's Physics of Illusion",
that I'm going to talk about the physics which underlies what we think of as
magic. That is not what I expect to talk about. Some of you may think that I
suspect that Einstein had some special physics of illusions. If he did, I
don't know anything of it. Instead, what I want to do, with Einstein's help,
is to trace our physics all the way back to square one, and to find out
whether, underlying it, there may possibly be something akin to magic.
George Valens has written a charming book called The Attractive Universe. It
is subtitled "Gravity and the Shape of Space", and on the very first page he
says that when a ball is thrown straight up, after a while it comes to a
stop, changes its direction and comes back. He says it looks like magic, and
probably it is. Now what he is taking for granted is that it should have
gone off on a straight path without any change in speed or direction. But
you see, that also would have been the result of magic. We do not understand
in physics why the ball comes back. But we also do not understand in our
physics why the ball should have continued without any change in the
direction of its speed.
Now in the title, and in the remarks that I have made so far, what I
mean by magic or illusion is something like what happens when, in the
twilight, you mistake a rope for a snake. And this sort of thing was
analyzed very carefully by some people in North India long, long ago, and
they said that when you make such a mistake there are three aspects to your
mistake. First, you must fail to see the rope rightly. Then, instead of
seeing it as a rope, you must see it as something else. And finally, you had
to see the rope in first place or you never would have mistaken it for" a
snake. You mistook it for a snake because the rope was three feet long, and
you're accustomed to three foot long snakes.
But before I speak further about illusion, I want to say a few words
about what we do understand in physics, and I also want to point out a few
gaps in that understanding. When we talk about the universe, or when we look
out and see it, what we see is that the universe is made out of what we call
matter. It's what we call a material universe. And what we want to do, first
of all, is to trace that material back, not quite to square one, but to
square two at least, We want to find out whether we can think of all these
things which we see as being made out of matter, as really being made out of
only a few ingredients. And the answer is that we can. Long ago the chemists
pointed out that all these things that we see are made out of not more than
92 ingredients. Those are the 92 chemical elements of the periodic table. It
was suggested in 1815 that all those different chemical elements are
probably made out of hydrogen. That was Prout's hypothesis, because in those
days no one knew how to do it. But now, in modern times,
1 we do know how to do it, and we do know that that's what happens.
All the other chemical elements are made out of hydrogen, and it happens in
the stars"
The universe, even as it is today, consists mostly of hydrogen. And
what it is doing is falling together in the gravitational field. It falls
together to galaxies and stars, and the stars are hot. Falling together by
gravity is what makes them hot. And they get hot enough inside so that the
hydrogen is converted to.helium. Now helium is a very strong atomic nucleus,
and so the main line in building up the atoms of the atomic table goes this
way: First, four hydrogens make one helium. Then three heliums make one
carbon. Two heliums won't stick. That would be beryllium-8. There is no
beryllium-8. It won't last. But three heliums will stick, and that's carbon.
Four is oxygen. Five is neon. That's the way it goes in the stars; the other
nuclei are built of helium nuclei. Six makes magnesium. Then silicon,
sulfur, argon, calcium, titanium, chromium and iron.
In big stars it goes like this. But in small stars like our sun it goes
only up to carbon or possibly carbon and oxygen. That's where our sun will
end, at about the size of the earth, but with a density of about four
concrete mixing trucks in a one pint jar. Larger stars get too hot by their
own gravitational squeeze, and the carbon cannot cool off like that. They go
right on to oxygen and so on, until they get, in the center, to iron. Now
iron is the dumbest stuff in the universe. There is no nuclear energy
available to iron -- nothing by which it can fight back against
gravitational collapse; so gravity collapses it, this time to the density of
a hundred thousand airplane carriers squeezed into a one pint yogurt box One
hundred thousand airplane carriers in a one pint box! And, when it collapses
like that, the gravitational energy that is released to other forms blows
the outer portions of the star all over the galaxy. That's the stuff out of
which our bodies are made. Our bodies are all made out of star dust from
such exploding stars. We do know that the main ingredient of the universe is
hydrogen and that the main usable energy in the universe is gravitational.
We know that the name of the game is falling together by gravity (hydrogen,
falling together by gravity), but what we don't know is why things fall
together by gravity. We do know that the stuff out of which this universe is
made is hydrogen, but we do not know from where we get the hydrogen. We know
that the hydrogen is made of electrical particles, protons and electrons,
and we know that the total electrical charge of the universe is zero, but we
do not know, you see, why it is made of electricity. We do not know why it
falls together. And we do not know why, when things are moving, they should
coast. There are these gaps in our understanding. We know how things coast.
We know how things fall. We know how the electrical particles behave, but we
don't know any of the why questions. We don't have any answers to the why
questions.
What I want to talk about next is a discovery made by Albert Einstein
when he was 26 years old and working in the patent office in Bern. Then I
want to talk about the" consequences of that discovery and, through that, I
want to trace our physics back, if possible, to answer those why questions.
Einstein noticed that we cannot have an objective universe in three
dimensions. We all talk about 3-D. Hardly anybody talks about 4-D. But the
universe is 4-D. It is not possible to have a universe of space without a
universe of time. It is not possible to have space without time, or time
without space, because space and time are opposites. I don't know that
Einstein ever used the language that space and time are opposites, but if
you look at his equations, it is very, very clear that that's exactly what
they are. If, between two events, the space separation between them is the
same as the time separation between them, then the total separation between
them is zero. That's what we mean by opposites in this case. In electricity
if we have the same amount of plus charges as we have of minus charges, say
in the same Einstein's Physics Of Illusion
2 atom or the same molecule, then that atom or that molecule is
neutral. There is no charge seen from outside. Likewise here. If the space
separation between, two events is just the same as the time separation
between those two events, then the total separation between those two events
is zero. I'll give you an example. Suppose we see an exploding star, say in
the Andromeda galaxy. There's one going on there right now. It's been
visible for about a month or so. Now the Andromeda galaxy is two and a
quarter million light years away, and when we see the explosion now, we see
it as it was two and a quarter million years ago. You see, the space
separation and the time separation are the same, which means that the total
separation between you and what you see is zero. The total separation, the
real separation, the objective separation, that is, the separation as seen
by anybody, between the event which you see and the event of your seeing it
-- the separation between those two events is always zero. What we mean when
we say that the space and time separations between two events are equal is
that light could get from one of those events to the other in vacuum.
We see things out there, and we think they're really out there. But,
you see, we cannot see them when they happen. We can't see anything when it
happens. We see everything in the past. We see everything a little while
ago, and always in such a way that the while ago just balances the distance
away, and the separation between the perceiver and the perceived remains
always at zero.
As soon as Einstein noticed that we cannot have a universe of space
without a universe of time and vice versa, and that they are connected in
this way, and that the only way to have an objective universe is in four
dimensions, and not in two or three or one -- as soon as he noticed that, he
had to redo our physics. Now relativity theory is a geometry theory. It's
not something else. It's a geometry theory. It's about the geometry of the
real world. I'm sure that most if not all of you have been exposed,
somewhere along your educational careers, to the geometry of Euclid. His
geometry is in two dimensions and in three, but he didn't have any idea
about introducing the fourth dimension. His geometry - is a theoretical
geometry about a theoretical space which does not, in fact, exist. Newton
based his understanding of physics also on that understanding of geometry,
and Newton's physics is a theoretical physics about a theoretical universe
which does not, in fact, exist. We know now, you see, that Euclid was wrong
in his understanding of geometry, and that Newton was likewise wrong in his
understanding of physics. And we had to correct our physics in terms of
Einstein's re-understanding of geometry. It was when Einstein went through
our physics with his new understanding of geometry that he saw that what we
had been calling matter or mass or inertia is really just energy. It is just
potential energy. It had been suggested a few years earlier by Swami
Vivekananda that what we call matter could be reduced to potential energy.
In about 1895 he writes in a letter that he is to go the following week to
see Mr. Nikola Tesla who thinks he can demonstrate it mathematically.
Without Einstein's understanding of geometry, however, Tesla apparently
failed.
It was from the geometry that Einstein saw that what we call rest mass,
that which is responsible for the heaviness of things and for their
resistance to being shaken, is really just energy. Einstein's famous
equation is E = mc2. Probably most of you have seen that equation. It says
that for a particle at rest, its mass is equal to its energy. Those of you
who read Einstein know that there is no "c" in that equation. The c2 is just
in case your units of space and time don't match. If you've chosen to
measure space in an arbitrary unit and time in another arbitrary unit, and
if you have not taken the trouble to connect the two units, then, for your
system you have to put in the c2. If you're going to measure space in
centimeters, then time must not be measured in seconds. It must be measured
in jiffies. A jiffy is the length of time it Einstein's Physics Of Illusion
minded people, and they have noticed that the universe is quite a bit too
big to be measured conveniently in centimeters, and quite a bit too old to
be measured conveniently in seconds; so they measure the time in years and
the distance in light-years, and the units correspond. That "c" in the
equation is the speed of light in your system of units, and if you've chosen
years and light-years then the speed of light in your system is one. And if
you square it, it's still one, and the equation doesn't change. The equation
simply says that energy and mass are the same thing. Our problem now is that
if we're going to trace this matter back, and find out what it is, we have
first of all to find out what kind of energy makes it massive. Now we have
only a few kinds of energy to choose from. Fortunately there are only a few:
gravitational energy, kinetic energy, radiation, electricity, magnetism and
nuclear energy. But I must allay your suspicion that nuclear energy might be
very important. It is not. The nuclear energy available in this universe is
very small. If all the matter in the universe began as hydrogen gas and
ended as iron, then the nuclear energy released in that change (and that is
the maximum nuclear energy available) is only one per cent of what you can
get by letting that hydrogen fall together by gravity. So nuclear energy is
not a big thing, and we have only five kinds of energy to choose from in
order to find out what kind of energy makes the primordial hydrogen hard to
shake. That, you remember, was our problem.
What we want is potential energy, because the hydrogen is hard to shake
even when it's not doing a thing. So what we're after is potential energy,
and that restricts it quite a bit more. Radiation has nothing to do with
that. Radiation never stands still. And kinetic energy never stands still.
And even magnetic energy never stands still. So we are left with electricity
and gravity. There are only two. We don't have any choice at all. There is
just the gravitational energy and the electrical energy of this universe
available to make this universe as heavy or as massive as we find it.
Now I should remind you that the amount of energy we're talking about
is very large. It's five hundred atom bombs per pound. One quart of yogurt,
on the open market, is worth one thousand atom bombs. It just happens that
we're not in the open market place. We live where we have no way to get the
energy of that yogurt to change form to kinetic energy or radiation so that
we can do anything with it. It's tied up in there in such a way that we
can't get it out. But right now we're going to talk about the possibility of
getting it out. We want to talk about how this tremendous energy is tied up
in there. We want to talk about how this matter is "wound up".
First let's talk about watches. We know how they're wound up. They're
wound up against a spring. Now when we wind up a watch, what I want to know
is whether it gets heavier or lighter. If we have a watch, and if we wind it
up, does it get harder to shake or easier? It gets harder to shake because
when we wind it up we put more potential energy into it, and energy is the
only thing in the universe that's hard to shake. So now we want to know in
what way the whole universe is wound up to make it heavy and hard to shake.
We know that it must be wound up against electricity and gravity. The
question is: How? We need to know some details on how to wind things up.
How, for instance, do you wind up against gravity? You wind against gravity
by pulling things apart in the gravitational field. They all want to go back
together again. And if the entire universe were to fall together to a single
blob, the gravitational energies that would be released to other forms would
be five hundred atom bombs per pound. The universe is wound up on
gravitational energy just by being spaced away from itself against the
gravitational pull inward. And it turns out to be just the right amount. It
really does account for the fact that it's five hundred atom bombs per
pound. Einstein's Physics Of Illusion
each other. If you push two electrons toward each other you have to do work,
and it gets heavier or more massive. If you push two protons toward each
other it gets more massive. And if you take a single electrical charge and
make it very small, since you're pushing like charge toward itself, it too
becomes more massive. Now it turns out that the work that's represented by a
smallness of all the teeny-weeny particles that make up the hydrogen atoms
and all the rest of this stuff is, once again, five hundred atom bombs per
pound. Some of you might think that it should come out to a total of ten
hundred atom bombs per pound -- five hundred gravitational and five hundred
electrical. No, it's only five hundred atom bombs per pound because winding
it up one way is exactly the same thing as winding it up the other way.
Coins have two sides, heads and tails. You cannot make coins with only one
side. For every heads there is a tails. Plus and minus charges are like
heads and tails. Space and time are like heads and tails. And electricity
and gravity are like heads and tails. You cannot space things away from each
other in the gravitational field without making them small in the electrical
field. I think that we're ready now to attack the consequences of this new
understanding of physics. We want to find out whether, through this
understanding, we can trace our physics all the way back to square one, to
see whether, underlying it, there may be something akin to magic. We want to
know why things fall. We want the answers to our why questions.
I'm going to draw you a quick map. This is a picture of the physics
before Einstein: Mass Space
Energy Time In the last century we thought that mass was one thing;
energy was another. Space was one thing; time was another. In our present
understanding of physics that won't work. Space and time are just two sides
of the same coin. Mass and energy are just two sides of the same coin. And
there is no line through there:
Mass
Energy
Space
Time
There is no line between mass and energy or between space and time. And
we just talked about the way in which the universe is wound up in order to
make the particles massive. They're wound up against space. They're spaced
in against the electrical field, and they're spaced out against the
gravitational field, which means that what we call matter and energy are
also nothing but geometry, and the line down the middle goes too. But when
the lines go, the picture goes. When the lines of demarcation between mass
and energy and space and time are obliterated, we do not have a model of a
physical universe. Every definition in our physics, every concept in our
physics. requires measurements of length. or of Einstein's Physics Of
Illusion
5 time, or of mass one or more of these measurements. And without the
discrimination between length, time and mass we have no way to measure
anything in physics, no way to define anything in physics. Our model of the
universe does not hold up when we examine it from the standpoint of
Einstein's equations. And what we are left with I shall indicate here by a
question mark: ?
What is it that exists behind our physics? Relativity theory does not
say exactly what it is, and our task is to find it out, if we can.
First let us understand a little bit about what we call causation in
physics. What do we mean in our physics when we say that one thing causes
another? We mean that there is a transformation of energy from one form to
another. For instance, if the hydrogen falls together to galaxies and stars,
the gravitational energy is first converted to kinetic energy in the
falling; and then the kinetic energy is converted to radiation when the
hydrogen falls together into stars. When radiation from stars like our sun
is picked up by all these green leafy things which we call plants and trees,
it's converted to electrical and magnetic forms. So all these things happen
by changes in energy, by changes in the form of the energy. The amount of
energy does not change. There is no such animal as the generation of energy.
The amount of energy, whatever it is, seems to be completely unchangeable.
It's one of our most basic observations in physics. And what we mean by
causation is changes in the form of this energy. Matter itself is energy,
and what we mean is that when something happens, whether it's hydrogen being
converted to helium, or whatever it is, there's some change in the form of
the energy. Now the universe cannot arise by this kind of causation simply
because in any such change the amount of energy at the end is never any
greater than the amount at the start. You cannot manufacture gold by
remolding gold. You never finish with more than you started with.
With this understanding of causation in mind, I want to go back to our
question mark. We want to see whether we can get some idea of the nature of
what the equations of relativity theory say must exist behind the universe
of our observations. And we want to see how, from that nature, we come to
the world of our perception.
When we look at this question mark, what we see is that it has to be
beyond space and time. Our physics is on our side of space and time, if you
like, but Einstein's equations say that behind our physics there is this
question, "What is it?". We know that it has to be beyond space and time.
And for that reason we can get a negative statement about what it is. If
it's beyond time, it must be changeless, because only in time could we have
change. If it's beyond space, it must be both undivided and infinite,
because only within space could we have things finite and divided. Without
space you couldn't break a. cookie in two. Without space you couldn't have
cookie crumbs. And without time you couldn't do anything, because you
couldn't have any kind of change. So whatever exists behind this universe
must be changeless, infinite and undivided:
Einstein's Physics Of Illusion
Changeless
Infinite
Undivided
The curious thing is this, that what we see is apparently not
changeless, not undivided and not infinite. It is obviously finite. The
teeny-weeny particles that make up the hydrogen atoms and all the rest of
these atoms and molecules are really minuscule. The number of hydrogen atoms
required to make a single drop of water is equal to the number of drops of
water in a million cubic miles of ocean. They are certainly finite. And this
matter is divided up into atoms. Why should it be so divided? And it's
continually changing. You can look anywhere. So what we see is changing,
finite and divided, and now comes the question: By what kind of causation
could we get from the changeless to the changing? From the infinite to the
finite? And from the undivided to the divided?
We haven't proved that we can get there by magic, but we have proved
that we can't get there any other way. We cannot get there by the causation
of our physics, because that would require that we change the changeless to
the changing, that we divide the undivided, and that we make the infinite
finite. As I say, we can prove that we cannot get there any other way, but
we have not yet proved that we can get there by magic. So now I want to ask:
What happens if we look at this problem from the standpoint of what I'll
call apparitional causation? My favorite word for this is not quite magic.
It's not quite illusion. It's apparitional causation. It's the kind of thing
you do when you mistake a rope for a snake. Could we have mistaken the
changeless for the changing? Could we have mistaken the infinite for the
finite? Could we have mistaken the undivided for the divided? That's the
question.
So let s go back to that old analysis of apparitional causation to see
if such a mistake could give rise to our physics. We want to know whether
apparitional causation can answer our why questions. When we mistake one
thing for another, you remember, there are three aspects to our mistakes --
three consequences, if you like. First, we must fail to see it rightly. In
this case, we must fail to see the changeless, the infinite and the
undivided. That's fine; we've failed. Then we must see something else in its
stead, and that else must be different. And so it is. What we see is
changing, finite and divided. Finally, you remember, we had to see the thing
to start with. If we had not seen a three foot rope we would not have
mistaken it for a three foot snake. When you mistake your friend for a
ghost, if your friend is tall and thin then the ghost will be tall and thin.
But if your friend is roly-poly you'll see a roly-poly ghost. Had you not
seen your roly-poly friend you would not have seen a roly-poly ghost. If,
then, our physics has arisen by apparition, the changeless, the infinite and
the undivided must show in that physics. But isn't that exactly what we see?
The changeless shows as inertia, the infinite as electricity, and the
undivided as gravity. Had we not seen the changeless, it would not have
shown up in our physics. It is the changeless which we see, and, as a
consequence, that changeless shows in what we see. That is why things coast.
That is what we see as inertia. That is what we call mass. Likewise in order
to see the undivided as the divided we had to see the undivided, and that is
what we see as gravity. It is a consequence of having seen the undivided.
You cannot see a universe of particles, all spaced out, without Einstein's
Physics Of Illusion
seeing it as divided without having the undividedness show. And, finally,
you cannot make the mistake of seeing the infinite broken up into
teeny-weeny particles without the consequence of seeing those particles as
electrical. Probably some of you don't know quite enough physics to
understand what I mean by that, but every electrical particle has energy
just because of its smallness, and if you let it get bigger, its electrical
energy would go down. If it could get infinitely big, its electrical energy
would go to zero. So you can think that electrical energy is just the
tendency to go back to the infinite, just as the gravitational energy is
just the tendency to go back to the undivided.
Now these two things are really the same thing. The wind up against
gravity by being spaced out is exactly the same thing as the wind up against
electricity by being spaced in. And these two things make up the rest mass.
They make up the thing called inertia. It's the electro-gravitational energy
of the particles which we see as their rest mass. It is that energy which is
hard to shake. It's impossible to see an apparition of this sort without
having it wound up. It is not possible to see this universe except wound up.
The infinite and the undivided must necessarily show as the electrical and
gravitational energy. There is no such thing as matter. There is only this
energy, and the energy is five hundred atom bombs per pound. The energy is
the consequence of the apparition. It is the yearning for liberation in the
apparently finite. It is the yearning for the undivided in the apparently
divided. And it is the yearning for the changeless in the apparently
changing.
With the help of this notion of apparitional causation suggested by
Einstein's equations, we are able, you see, to trace our physics all the way
back to square one to answer those why questions. With Einstein's help we
are able at last to understand why matter falls, why it coasts, and why it
is made of discrete electrical particles.
We have to look at it very carefully. We have completely to change our
understanding of geometry. Our native understanding of geometry, or rather
our native misunderstanding of geometry, is a genetic mistake. We make the
mistake because it was never necessary not to. It was never necessary, in
the long past history of our race, for us to see space and time correctly.
It never was. It was definitely necessary that we have at least a dog's
understanding of a three dimensional space, otherwise we wouldn't have had
offspring, and the species would all have died out. But it was never
necessary to understand that space and time are opposites. It was never
necessary to understand the origin of gravity, or the origin of inertia, or
even the -fact that the atoms are made of electricity, or the fact there are
92 chemical elements. It's not necessary to understand any of these things
in order to have offspring and have the perpetuation of the species go on.
It works all right through many, many mistakes.
You must not think that just because it's a native perception on your
part that it's true. That has nothing to do with it. Just look back and see
how you got the way you are. You have to think that it's all a mistake, and
you have to notice that our genetic misunderstanding of space and time is at
the root of it. That's where the root is. It is with. in our mistaken
notions of space and time that we see this universe the way we do. So what
we have to do is to straighten out our misunderstanding. Space is not really
that which separates the many. It's that which seems to separate the one.
There's only one. And in that space that oneness shines. Therefore falls
whatever falls. Space is not that in which we see the finite. There is no
finite. Space is that in which the infinite appears as small, and in that
space that vastness shines. Therefore bursts whatever bursts. Therefore
every electrical particles wants to become infinite. And therefore shines
whatever shines. And time is not that in which we see change, Einstein's
Physics Of Illusion
but that in which the changeless seems to change, and in that time that
changeless shines. Therefore rests whatever rests; therefore coasts whatever
coasts. Our problem is to discriminate between what's behind this notion of
space and time and what's within it. Our problem is to discriminate between
the real and the make believe. Einstein's Physics Of Illusion