Parapsychological research. Riding Apollo 14 between earth and moon, astronaut Edgar Mitchell shuffled a pack of oddly marked cards and concentrated on flashing mental images of them to four people on the home planet. Sometimes shattering consequences can flow from insignificant looking scientific events. To know what others are thinking is one of the basic dreams, and episodic nightmares of the individual, and thought is the lat privacy…
—George Bellows (American; Ashcan School (The Eight), 1882-1925): The Big Dory, 1913. Oil on wood panel, 18 x 22 x 1/4 inches. New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut, USA. © New Britain Museum of American Art. Photo: Al
ex Morganti
…But the clockwork was inadequate. Quantum theory and the theory of relativity, as developed by Einstein, Niels Bohr, and their successors, were to render its centralized rigidity obsolete. Since 1900 the finite frame of Newtonian science has split, under pressure from the two extreme ends of the cosmos, the smallest particles and the farthest stars. There, “natural and established law” is constantly flouted. As Koestler put it:
For the deeper the physicist intruded into the realms of the sub-atomic and super-galactic dimensions, the more intensely he was made aware of their paradoxical and commonsense-defying structure, and the more open-minded he became towards the possibility of the seemingly impossible. His own world, based on relativity and quantum theory, is in fact a world of impossibles.
—William J. Glackens (American; Ashcan School co-founder, The Eight, 1870-1938): Descending from the Bus, c. 1910. Oil on canvas, 25 x 30 inches (63.5 x 76.2 cm). Private Collection. (Location depicted: Washington Square, New York, NY.)—
Neither our logical systems nor our senses are tuned to that world. In it, Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” simply dissolves, since it is a habit of quanta both to be and not be. The common picture of an atom, with electrons orbiting like buckshot around a hard little marble of a nucleus, is now essentially unrecognizable in quantum physics. There is barely any ambiguity about the speed and position of real buckshot- its exact path can be mathematically described and tested, its speed is certain. Not so the electron, which may be a particle and may be a wave but in any case is not to be pinned down,. Oppenheimer remarked of it:
If we ask … whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say “No”; if we ask whether the electron’s position changes with time, we must say “No”; if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say “No”, if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say “No”. ( to be continued)…
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