The Tao of Physics

#The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra

Preface

• “Our culture has consistently favoured yang, or masculine, values and attitudes, and has neglected their complementary yin, or feminine, counterparts. We have favoured self-assertion over integration, analysis over synthesis, rational knowledge over intuitive wisdom, science over religion, competition over cooperation, expansion over conservation, and so on. This one-sided development has now reached a highly alarming stage; a crisis of social, ecological, moral, and spiritual dimensions.”
  • 50 years ago.

Part 1: The Way of Physics

• “Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question…Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t it is of no use.” - Carlos Castaneda
• “The term ‘physics’ is derived from [physis] and meant therefore, originally, the endeavour of seeing the essential nature of all things.”
• “The Milesians [of Ionia, 6th century BCE] were called ‘hozoists’, or ‘those who think matter is alive’, by the later Greeks, because they saw no distinction between animate and inanimate, spirit and matter.”
• “Heraclitus taught that all changes in the world arise from the dynamic and cyclic interplay of opposites and he saw any pair of opposites as a unity. This unity, which contains and transcends all opposing forces, he called the Logos.”
• “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they are not reality.” - Einstein
• “Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.” - Ananda Coomaraswany
• Hindus with deep insight know all their gods are creations of the mind representing the many faces of reality. But they also know they are not merely created to make stories more attractive, “but are essential vehicles to convey the doctrines of a philosophy rooted in mystical experience.”

Part 2: The way of eastern mysticism

• The basis of all Hinduism is that the multitude of things are but different manifestations of the same ultimate reality: Brahman. Brahman is the “unifying concept which gives Hinduism its essentially monistic character in spot of the worship of numerous gods and goddesses.”
• “This that people say, ‘Worship this god! Worship that god!—one after another—this is [Brahman’s] creation indeed! And he himself is all the gods.”
• “The original meaning of the words yin and yang was that of the shady and sunny sides of a mountain, a meaning which gives a good idea of the relativity of the two concepts: ‘That which lets now the dark, now the light appear is the Tao’”
• “From the very early times, the two archetypal poles of nature were represented not only by bright and dark, but also by male and female, firm and yielding, above and below. Yang, the strong, male, creative power, was associated with Heaven, whereas yin, the dark, receptive, female and maternal element, was represented by the Earth. Heaven is above and full of movement, the Earth—in the old geocentric view—is below and resting, and thus yang came to symbolize movement and yin rest. In the realm of thought, yin is the complex, female, intuitive mind, yang the clear and rational male intellect. Yin is the quiet, contemplative stillness of the sage, yang the strong, creative action of the king.”
• “A dog is not reckoned good because he barks well, and a man is not reckoned wise because he speaks skillfully.” — Chuang Tzu
• An essence of Taoism is the interplay of opposites. “Be bent, and you will remain straight. Be vacant, and you will remain full. Be worn, and you will remain new.”
  • Challenge yourself ethically, and you will remain ethical. Empty yourself of material goods, and you will be replenished with meaning. Challenge yourself physically and mentally, and you will be sharper in both respects.
• “When the zen master app-Chang was asked about seeking the Buddha nature he answered, ‘it’s much like riding an ox in search of the ox.’”

Part 3: The parallels

• “When all in the world understand beauty to be beautiful, then ugliness exists; when all understand goodness to be good, then evil exists.” - Lao Tzu
  • Enhancing beauty creates more that is ugly relative to it, and so it is with goodness and evil.
• Space and time interpenetrate one another.
• “It is believed by most that time passes; in actual fact, it stays where it is. This idea of passing may be called time, but it is an incorrect idea, for since one sees it only as passing, one cannot understand that it stays just where it is.” - Zen master Dogen
• “Time, space, and causation are like the glass through which the Absolute is seen … In the Absolute there is neither time, space, nor causation.” - Swami Vivekananda
• “In the collision processes of high-energy physics, mass is no longer conserved. The colliding particle can be destroyed and their masses may be transformed partly into the masses, and partly into the kinetic energies of the newly created particles. Only the total energy involved in such a process, that is, the total kinetic energy plus the energy contained in all the masses [potential energy], is conserved.”
• “We may therefore regard matter as being constituted by the regions of space in which the field is extremely intense … There is no place in this new kind of physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality.” - Einstein
• Speaks of Shiva’s cosmic dance. In one of his four arms he holds a drum, symbolizing the primal sound of creation, in another the tongue of a flame, which symbolizes destruction. Between his hands his face shows detached serenity, showing that he transcends the polarity of creation and destruction. His other right hand bears the sign of ‘do not fear’, symbolizing maintenance and peace, while the remaining left hand points down to his uplifted foot, symbolizing the release from the spell of maya. He dances on a demon, the symbol of human ignorance that must be conquered before liberation can be attained.
  • Based.
• Order underlying quantum physics: symmetry (conservation of momentum/angular momentum and energy), unitarity (although everything is probabilistic, i.e., uncertain, the sum of probabilities is equal to 1), and causal (in particle interactions, the former must precede the latter, and the interaction occurs at a singularity—a confluence of interaction)
• “Physicists have come to see that all their theories of natural phenomena, including the ‘laws’ they describe, are creations of the human mind; properties of our conceptual map of reality, rather than reality itself. […] All scientific theories and models are approximations to the true nature of things, but the error involved in the approximation is often small enough to make such an approach meaningful.”
• “The incomplete character of a theory is usually reflected in its arbitrary parameters or ‘fundamental constants’, that is, in quantities whose numerical values are not explained by the theory, but have to be inserted into it after they have been determined empirically.”
• “To see a world in a grain of sand // And a heaven in a wild flower, // Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, // And eternity in an hour.” - William Blake
• “Each portion of matter may be conceived of as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fishes. But each branch of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its humours, is also such a garden or such a pond.” - Leibniz
• “He who knows does not speak, // He who speaks does not know.” — Lao Tzu