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Hello!

I would have edited the Whitewhead entry myself, if I only knew how to do it. Your section about Whitehead and Science can be greatly enriched, I believe, by adding to it the perspective of the late physicist David Ritz Finkelstein (1929-2014. Whitehead's philosophy has become central to Finkelstein's bold understanding of modern physics. Some of his thoughts about this topic are presented in the book Physics and Whitehead: Quantum, Process, and Experience (SUNY series in Constructive Postmodern Thought) Hardcover – December 11, 2003 by Timothy E. Eastman (Editor), Hank Keeton (Editor).

Here is a brief talk that he gave when participating in a panel in a conference that took place in Columbia University in the early 2000; for whetting your appetite:

David Finkelstein Physical Law as Physical Process

I would like to thank Tim Eastman and Hank Keeton for giving me this chance to acknowledge my indebtedness to Whitehead.quite a few years. When I was in high school I was, for an important brief time, a devotee of science fiction and the novels of L. Sprague deCamp, a graduate of Stevens Tech where I also worked. Equations of symbolic logic appear and the idea of an arithmetic of thought so fascinated me that I ended up reading the three volumes of Principia Mathematica, which has stunted my growth forever. As a high school student you can get into the stacks of the New York Public Library and fortunately the Harlem branch of the library had volumes 1 and 2 of the Principia and I spent many happy hours there scanning them. Later on I learned the importance of projective geometry in physics and…I came across the aphorism ‘geometry is cross-classification,’ which helped me to understand quantum logic when I came across that. This is because quantum logic is really projective geometry interpreted as cross-classification. Clearly Whitehead did not make a sharp distinction between mathematics and logic. That would have been totally against the aims of his Principia efforts. And of course this led me on to read books like Process and Reality which made it that much easier for me to understand modern physics when I began to despair of ever doing so. If desired, one could discuss the question of the relation between modern physics and Whitehead completely in Whiteheadian language - that’s the whole point. What Whitehead had set out to do was founded not on the intuitions of Newton but on the latest state of our information about the world, which means the basic ideas of relativity and quantum theory, and I have no problem finding them all the way through his work. One of the problems, however, is that while relativity has a fairly uniform mode of expression in physics, it really swept the field within a few years after its pronunciation, somehow quantum theory has split up into a great many dialects. A great many people are saying the same thing about their experiences in remarkably different languages. This is very confusing to physicists in the first place. How can you tell when you disagree with someone? Even when they agree they sound different, and it is certainly confusing to the general public. I must say that I account for the difference by the fact that when Einstein made his discovery he went out and announced it to the world boldly, and when Heisenberg made his he went to work for Hitler. If he had really said what it was he was thinking he would have ended up on a meat-hook. I think of quantum theory as a holocaust survivor. Even as it was in Germany he was accused of doing Jewish physics. And as a result various dialects of quantum theory sprang up. In France the thought of Count Louis de Broglie had very great influence and he never really accepted Heisenberg’s view in the first place. In this country Wigner found a totally different way for expressing the ideas of quantum theory in which the emphasis is shifted from the wholeness and non-objectivity that Heisenberg emphasized to the idea of a wave function as the fundamental variable of the system. Now Bohr and Heisenberg made it perfectly clear that the wave function is not the system. That the wave function describes the whole process of observer and system. This is a very new thing in physics. In classical physics one forgets the observer. One talks about things ‘as they are.’ I heard someone earlier say that physics is about things ‘as they are.’ And of course the first thing you learn in relativity is that there is no ‘are’ and the second thing you learn from quantum theory is that there are no ‘things.’ Aside from that, the idea is true. [Note: This modern perspective was well expressed in Whitehead’s earlier works in natural philosophy, including Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), Concepts of Nature (1920), and The Principle of Relativity (1922).] Remember that Heisenberg formulated the quantum theory in the city of Munich in the decade in which Kandinsky was operating. It was Kandinsky who coined the phrase ‘non-objective art’ and Heisenberg seized it and called quantum theory non-objective physics. Perhaps it would have been better to have called it object-free physics. The whole idea of quantum theory is to talk about what you do - you talk about the whole process. Heisenberg set up a so-called algebra in which the fundamental elements, operators, could just as well be called processes, they are the things you do. Later on, as a result of Schrodinger’s point of view, it became convenient to factor these general processes of Heisenberg into two parts, one is creative, one is anti-creative, one begins the experiment when you inject something, one ends the experiment when you read out what you have. There is a temptation to call these input and output. That’s not a good idea because the system doesn’t ‘put’ anything out. You have to take it out, you extract, so it’s better to call it input and outtake. And these are special cases, I believe, of Whitehead’s general concept of process. And it was to cover the operational foundations of field theory and modern physics, which is so powerful in relativity theory and quantum theory, that Whitehead was led to take the idea of process as fundamental. It’s in modern physics that we learned to do this. The event is a very, very tiny process and the measurements of quantum theory are larger processes. So the idea of a wave function of the universe has to be regarded as an anachronism in which you give up the idea of describing the observer and imagine that you can talk about things as they are. There must be some way to do a cosmology that takes into account the facts of quantum life, but the idea that you can do it just by imagining the application of ordinary quantum concepts means implicitly that you’re putting an observer, an all powerful, all-knowing observer, outside of the universe looking at it. Now this is totally alien of course to Whitehead’s philosophy and totally alien to Heisenberg’s physics, and Bohr’s. So I really think that there are important problems involved in understanding the whole universe that Whitehead has faced more seriously than most physicists. I have tried to draw up with Bill Kallfelz a table relating the vocabulary of present day physics to that created by Whitehead in the late ‘20s and it works pretty well - there are a few blank spaces of not-so good correlations [D. Finkelstein and W. M. Kallfelz, “Organism and Physics,” Process Studies, 26 (1997): 279-292]. I think it’s expressing the extent to which theology influences physics - it’s not gotten across in our courses. But if you look back on the development of physics, you begin with Newton’s brand of theism and for Newton the idea of a closed physical theory is absurd. He takes for granted that God steps in now and then to keep things working in a reasonable way and the idea of one single dynamical law is totally alien to Newton. This is so important I want to read it. Since Space is divisible ad infinitum and matter is not necessarily in all places, it may also be allowed that God is able to create particles of matter of several sizes and figures and in several proportions to Space and perhaps of different densities and forces and thereby to vary the laws of nature and make worlds of several sorts in several parts of the universe. At least I see nothing of contradiction with all this. (Newton, 1730, Query 32). What I want to talk about most in the time I have left is the controversial, hard question of the non-creativity that we see in nature. If the fundamental elements are creative how come so much of nature goes by rote, like the ball that falls? In Leibniz’s time, this was expressed by saying that things move in such a way that this is the best of all possible worlds and over the years we have managed to quantify what makes some worlds better than others. There is this thing called ‘action’ - things move in order to make the action a maximum or minimum. It’s a matter of signs, stationarity is the important thing. And so gradually the search of the physicist began to be a search for ‘the’ action - ‘the’ fundamental law. Newton doesn’t speak of ‘the’ law of nature. When I learned physics, I thought physics was the search for the laws of nature and then I read Einstein. That’s where you find the idea that there is ‘a’ law and immediately I was converted. Physics is the search for ‘the’ law of nature. I thought this was a great insight. Now as I get older I must admit that I’m either atheist (there is no law) or pantheist (there is nothing but law). There’s not too much difference between these two positions from my point of view. But the older ones no longer make sense to me so I want to dredge up this remark of Newton which starts it all off. I will read a fairly extended quote to avoid slanting. Since Space is divisible ad infinitum and matter is not necessarily in all places, it may also be allowed that God is able to create particles of matter of several sizes and figures and in several proportions to Space and perhaps of different densities and forces and thereby to vary the laws of nature and make worlds of several sorts in several parts of the universe. At least I see nothing of contradiction with all this. And then there’s a hiatus of a hundred years or two during which we’re led to believe that there is one fixed law. Now if you look down the list of the fundamental concepts of classical physics, they have been relativized since then. One of the few survivors of the mechanical doctrine in today’s physics is the idea that there is ‘a’ law - ‘the’ law. The grand unified theory is one expression of it. The ‘theory of everything’ is another expression of it and so forth. In quantum theory one has to be a little suspicious of this idea because surely the law for a system depends on what the system is and the system cannot be the whole universe in quantum theory. There are therefore many systems and so, at the beginning, there are many laws. What can it possibly mean to say there is only one? It must mean somehow that you have a way of figuring out what the law is that goes with each system. That’s not impossible by any means, but it’s quite different from what people are searching for at present. Where does the concept come into mechanics in the first place? The point I want to make is that the idea of a separate dynamical law, separate from every other element of physical theory, is actually a byproduct, an artifact, of the separation of space-time into space and time. A truly relativistic theory, relativistic in all its formulations, could see no difference between kinematics and dynamics. By kinematics I mean a theory of the description of motion; kinematics is the linguistics of physics. It sets up a formal language, a syntax, usually disgustingly mathematical, with a dictionary relating it to the experiences that go on and don’t go on with all the measurement you could make, the experiences you could have in principle, and then there’s the question - what determines the experience you do have? What is it that distinguishes the actual from the possible? And Whitehead is perfectly clear about this - it’s the aim of the organism. Well organisms change their aims. So this sounds a little as if Whitehead is giving up the idea of an immutable natural law. Certainly Peirce, an intentionally evolutionary thinker, ridiculed the idea of an absolute law. He insisted that the law had to evolve and he described the process by which it happened. He spoke of the first flash whereas today we speak of the big bang. I was really gratified at this meeting to discover that I’m not crazy to think that Whitehead imagined the law itself as mutable, something that probably everyone here knows. And here it is on page 27 in the Whitehead exam from 1927 Harvard, the last question, #10: Potency refers to the continuum of nature. Act to the community of atomic creatures. Potency is a character of the creativity due to the creatures. [and now begins the question] Explain this doctrine pointing out its bearing (a) on this (b) on the doctrine of an evolution of laws of nature. So Whitehead too had the feeling that there is no definite law of nature. That law also is part of the creative process. I suppose in modern physics Wheeler is among the first to insist that the laws of nature are mutable; as he put it, “there is no law except the law of averages.” To which I would add the comment ‘that is not a law of course.’ It doesn’t tell you what is going to happen on each occasion. Let me get back to my remark about the separation between dynamics and kinematics - dynamics is kinematics plus law. I have claimed that this separation is a remnant of the old distinction between space and time. The fundamental variables that we take in classical mechanics are positions, then we ask how the positions change in the course of time and the rate of change of position is frozen at a certain moment in the concept of momentum or velocity. We ask how positions and momentum change in the course of time. In quantum theory, correspondingly, our fundamental variables, position and momentum, change only the position variables but have no affect on time. Earlier, the idea of a Hilbert space was mentioned as a framework for physics. But Hilbert space does not contain time. The original formulation of quantum theory is timeless in its kinematics, it deals with states at one moment. It is fundamentally non-relativistic therefore as has been pointed out by all the founding fathers of relativity from Bohr to Wigner and on through modern times. So how do we correct for this? After we have worked out the matrix elements, the transitions, between different positions, we add in information about how to get from here now to here later. We set changes of position which are handled by kinematics and changes in time which are handled by dynamics. If you set up a true network theory in a ways Geoffrey has described this morning, you will describe processes in a completely spacetime way. I don’t mean spacetime in the ordinary sense, but you certainly will not introduce a distinction between space and time. You’ll talk about processes or events or transitions which do not necessarily connect things at the same time, but like the actual processes that go on in nature, it takes time to cover space. You’ll not assume propagation faster than the speed of light, you’ll not assume rest, you talk about what actually goes on, which means that you will link space and time in the kinematics. Once you describe a physical process by giving, let’s say, the operators that couple different space and time together, there’s nothing else to do. Each such description assigns an amplitude to every other description. There is simply no place in such a theory for a separate law of nature. The description of the process also contains the information about what the probability of a happening is and assigns probabilities to every other process, relative probabilities. Given that your preparation is so and such, if you look for this what is your chance of finding it? Quantum theory is set up to answer such questions. That’s my main point. That Whitehead was a little bit ahead of us. The search for ‘the’ law which has evoked considerable criticism within physics already, really is an absurdity, it’s a relic of the last century. Whitehead simply saw that a little earlier than the rest of us. [Note: The formal paper associated with this oral presentation is published as “Physical Process and Physical Law” in Physics and Whitehead: Quantum, Process and Experience, ed. by T. Eastman and H. Keeton (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). Please refer as well to the following works by Professor Finkelstein: “A Process Conception of Nature,” in The Physicist’s Conception of Nature, ed. by J. Mehra ( Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1973): 709-713; “All in Flux,” in Quantum Implications: Essays in Honour of David Bohm, ed. by B. J. Hiley and F. D. Peat (London: Routledge, 1987): 289-294; Quantum Relativity: A Synthesis of the Ideas of Einstein and Heisenberg (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1996). Finally, see Finkelstein’s article written with William Kallfelz, “Organism and Physics,” Process Studies 26 (1997): 279-292.]

Thank you, Shlomit Ritz Finkelstein finkelstein@emory.edu