Issue 43: Developing a Holist Approach in Science

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I am a professional scientist and mathematician, and also a life-long Marxist philosopher. In the last decade I have finally begun to make substantial progress wherein this diverse background has been brought together into what I call a Holist approach to Science.

It isn’t merely a statement of position. Indeed, it has included a wholly new interpretation of the ill-famed Double Slit Experiments in Physics, as well as related contributions on the Red Shift in Cosmology, and a crucial Theory of Emergences in Philosophy. There was no fitting-up of these areas to an a priori stance by any means. The researches in these areas were crucial in delivering a comprehensive extension of Marxism by a professional in these areas of study.

Needless to say, current work is concentrated upon demolishing the consensus position in Physics - the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Thoery - particularly in the more way-out areas such as Quantum Entanglement, and even Quantization of Electron Orbits in Atoms.

An important part of the remit for this series of papers was established by the tackling of a complete redesign of Stanley Miller’s brilliant holistic experiment concerning establishing processes prior to the Origin of Life on Earth. The great gains of this acheivement are based upon an important set of profound contributions in Philosophy, surprisingly not only on Science, but more generally.

This publication is meant as a basis for those who may consider investigating this amazing and effective alternative approach to the scientific method.

The Fight Back!

What is to be Done: XII

The essential tasks for the Marxists of today

Now, such a reactionary step had to be defeated. Scientists had been aware of a tendency to do this across the board in Science, but these “brilliant” Nuclear Physicists now had come up with a reason.

My first effort was to suggest a classical explanation “in the old style”. Various steps were taken to construct a viable explanation from a definition of the nature of the electron stream, as being solely determined by its Source, via a Diffraction of the electrons at both slits, giving a fan-out of velocities, with the fastest going straight through, and the slowest being inversely proportionately deflected.

So far so good, but if nothing else was involved these fan-out could NOT produce an interference pattern at the detection screen.

What was Missing?

There had to be something BETWEEN the slits and the screen which could deflect electrons, and this “field” would have to be very similar to an interference pattern. What could it be? Nothing had been detected!

But, something MUST be present in that space. It can only be caused by either the “slits” or the moving electron streams” or BOTH, but it does not have to be extensive. If it were initially strong but dropping off very quickly, that would still be sufficient to do the job. Two interfering components (one form each slit) would be involved, and as the effect is known to vanish as the slits are moved apart, it is clear that the mutual effects must at least be the distance apart of the slits in extent. Obviously, the problem that caused such a solution to be immediately discounted was the fact that interference can ONLY be caused by contributing elements that include both positive and negative (i.e. oscillating) parts, so that they can either re-inforce or cancel-out.

Now that sounds like wave motions, but such DO NOT terminate over very short ranges. They impart a momentary disturbance and then move on. But such have certainly NOT been detected over many years of trying and by innumerable researchers.

Do the Phenomena Demand a Substrate?

So we are talking about something NEW!

Let us put asode exactly what it might be for the moment, and instead work out what our required “field” would have to do.

Imagine that TWO components, one from each slit, come together very close the the pair and interfere in a fan out from the slits. The shape would be radial, and would be composed of alternatate reinforced effects and cancelled effects.

The electrons, as we have already established classically, would also produce fan outs due to diffraction by the slits.

Imagine the superimposition of these.

The reinforced fringe regions would deflect the –ve charged electrons, while the cancelled regions would allow the electrons to go straight through. When you work it out, you arrive at “gaps” where the electrons were not deflected, and “field” areas where they were. All electrons would end up in the target regions determined by NO FIELD at the slits., while those determined by ACTUAL FIELDS would deliver NONE.

The result at the detection screen would be the observed fringes.

But, What is it?

Now, of course, there is still a question mark about our postulated post-slit field. But the electrons ARE –ve charged, and are known to produce magnetic fields when in motion, while the proximity of charges are also known to produce induced charges in appropriate materials nearby. We are not exactly whistling in the breeze with these surmises are we?

And, of course, this does produce an Explanation. In this effort the electrons are NOT obeying a disembodied “Probability Wave”, but are generated the fringe effects by physical causative factors.

Remember, scientists throughout the centuries were willing to state such evidence as physically caused, long before they had full and accurate explanations as to the causes. THEY could have taken the route of the New Physicists, but they never did. Were they right? I would have thought that this particular version could be confirmed or denied by appropriate experiments.

New Ideas and Methods

BUT, my second alternative approach is NOT irrevocably based on this attempted explanation. I have also attempted a very different route, via my criticisms of the usual scientific methodology. Indeed, if anything, the following attempt is much more sound, and also delivers the necessary rebuttal to our reactionary scientists and it is not as alarming as it sounds.

It does not throw away the gains of that well established method of Experiment & Explanation (or even the truncated version stopping at the derivation of an equation). What this alternative explanation does is to explain the observed phenomenon via an Emergence-like transition.

The FLAW in their attempted version is the suppression of both the containing Context on the one hand, and the treatment of the negligible factors on the other. These are unavoidable in the usual scientific methodology, and delivers results, while-ever the situation remains, within a stable Context (or Level) and whether by Nature or arranged by us. In addition, having removed, or totally constrained, all systematic minor contributions, we treat both the bundle of negligible minor perturbations and any unknown (because invisible) remaining contributions as mutually contending, and this allows us to remove their effects by merely averaging our results. We can do this because these tend to cancel each other out. But, such averaging is “over time”, and moment by moment, these are evident as seemingly tiny, random perturbations. So we have these Random perturbations which as well as being very small, cancel each other out over time, and our averaging delivers a good sound result (accompanied by a small random error).

Now, elsewhere I have demonstrated that at an emergent boundary of any sort (whether minor as in Changes of State, or major as in a full blown Emergence), what were dominant factors and subject to normal scientific study begin to SUBSIDE, and the minor perturbations GROW in significance until they usurp the situation entirely.

What were tiny zigzags of perturbation, become MAJOR ZIGZAGS which totally swamp the situation.

BUT, they can STILL be predicted by averages, as they were selected as such by our methods. Thus situations can occur where by seemingly inexplicable individual events can be summed to produce predictable results.

That is what happens in the famed Double Slit Experiment. Because we NEVER did know anything about the mutually contending perturbations, they when magnified they are totally inexplicable.

Now, this is only an interlude in a paper with an extensive and wide-ranging remit, so I cannot present the full case here, but it is available in the personal Theoretical Journal The Double Slit by the author.

The crucial point here is how criticism of method traced through from Zeno to Modern Physics reveals the reasons for their failures in this and other crucial areas.

Postscript

This now complete, 12 part series was meant as an introduction to the current Marxist Work delivered by the SHAPE organisation.

Current research and findings are at the forefront of such work, and the very latest is available on-line in the SHAPE Journal, Blog and Youtube Channel. It had become clear that a more basic outline of Marxism was necessary, and the above series was taken from our work 10 years ago as a suitable introduction. So, whether it has triggered an abiding interest, or an avalanche of criticisms, we can offer a substantial range of the very latest developments. This body of work is now available as a Special Issue. Read it all here!

Current Theoretical Work

What is to be Done: XI

The essential tasks for the Marxists of today

The Crisis in Physics

Since my intellectual birth in my late teens at Leeds University, I have struggled unsuccessfully with the idiocy of the reactionary ”revolution” in Sub Atomic Physics. A Reaction that was exactly simultaneous with the rise of Fascism in the World.

I have, in the past, laboured long and unsuccessfully in attempting to correct this massive retrenchment, but have for most of the time been totally unaware of the cause of that retreat, and have largely and unconsciously limited myself to their pluralistic methods to combat these “errors”. Needless to say, I did not succeed. Indeed, it was ONLY when I “tracked back” to philosophical fundamentals, that I began to get anywhere. And the touchstone for me was Zeno’s Paradoxes and the realisation of how significant were our assumptions and premises in erecting explanatory systems.

NOTE: In case my readers think that this was a fairly obvious step, let me vigorously dissuade them. Having read many contributions to the assessment of Zeno’s efforts, I have to say that what he did is almost never understood. The commonest content in articles about these Paradoxes are of the type “Where Zeno went wrong!”. The usual conception of what Zeno was doing was that he was a “spoiler” cleverly undermining the sound basis of Mankind’s achievements with his cleverly constructed contradictions. But, of course, Zeno’s purpose was no such thing. He wanted to draw attention to our unquestioned assumptions, and to show where they led “in extremis”. In missing the point in this way, NONE of them came anywhere near an understanding of the limitations of their own implicit methods. Zeno was, and still is, totally ignored to this day.

My researches kept being driven “ever backwards” to such fundamental elements, and my research into The Processes and Productions of Abstraction began to reveal the nature of man-made Explanation, and the incredible erection of the World of Pure Form alone – Ideality, which has turned out to be for many the actual objective of scientific research.

Double Slit Experiment

At a certain point I began to feel that tackling the Old Enemy might well be within my grasp, and a return to Zeno led me to realise the vital role of plurality in Mankind’s attempts to understand Reality.

In the last period, I have focussed my efforts on the crucial Experiment of Modern Sub Atomic Physics called the Double Slit Experiment.. I commenced to bring all I had learned to bear on this “foundation stone” of the “New Physics”.

I decided on TWO separate and unconnected assaults on this troublesome peak!

Herman Von Helmholtz

Back to Explanation

The first would attempt to explain this phenomenon by purely classical methods. I have always found the pinnacle of Science to be that version pursued in the Victorian Era (My personal Hero being Herman Helmholtz). And, have long been against throwing out the baby with the dirty bathwater. It should NOT have been Victorian Science’s explanatory tradition that was dumped, by Modern Physics, but merely the errors of the past. In other words we should have treated the situation we encountered in the sub Atomic area of study in the same “explanatory” way as previously. So this exercise would be an interesting one.

The second approach would vigorously expose the theoretical assumptions, and all subsequent stages in the erection of the final wholly unprecedented Theory. This would be based on my extensive researches as referred to above, but would be more particular, and address the various steps one at a time to reveal the basis for every one.

Both these lines of research have been successful!

I have not dotted all the “i”s, and crossed all the “t”s as yet, but full solutions are clearly possible.

As far as I can tell by studying the academic literature, mine is the ONLY Marxist attack on the problem. Nobel Laureate Laughlin, Emmeche of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Holland – the leading researcher into this area at the Sante Fe Institute all take an Emergentist standpoint, but none of them are Dialectical Materialists, neither have they understood the bases of this modern reaction, or that these same things are still unchanged in their OWN methodology.

Their chances of success must be as minimal as those who have attempted to explain Life in terms of non-living processes. In spite of their commendable attempts, they seem to me to be doomed to failure.

Let me briefly outline my dual undertakings in this area.

The Key Experiment for the New Physics

The Double Slit Experiment (originally called Young’s Slits) has two versions.

The first uses Light shone through a pair of closely positioned slits in an opaque plate.The separation of these slits is close enough to to produce an interference pattern of fringes on a receiving screen beyond the slits. This is easily classically explained by treating the Light as a Wave Motion.

The second version of this experiment uses not light, but a stream of electrons, and surprisingly the receiving screen again displayed the same sort of interference pattern as with Light.

All hell broke loose!

The Copenhagen Explanation

With Light simply replaced by electrons, the immediate, and simplistic reaction, was to say that electrons must be wave-like in nature. If the stream of electrons was like a wave, then the experimental set up would indeed do exactly the same things. But, of course, this is a very unscientific conclusion. The same results CAN be produced by very different phenomena. That is the basic fact behind mathematics. We don’t assume that all phenomena utilising the same mathematics MUST be produced by the same physical reasons. And such a slight conclusion was also not appropriate here too.

So how can particulate electrons interfere? They can’t of course!

They could, if they were waves, but they are not. The arrivals at the detection screen were definitely of individual and decidedly “local” particles. These arrivals occurred one at a time, but built up to finally deliver the same sort of pattern as would be produced by waves..

Our physicists were perplexed! How could they explain this confusing Experiment?

They did it by abandoning all classical explanation. They were impatient with ”theory”! Many of their number had already found the mathematics to deliver exactly what occurred. Why bother with Theory at all? They therefore proposed a non existent “wave” associated with the electrons as a whole. No such wave was detectable, but that didn’t matter. These revolutionaries were departing from “old Science” into a wholly new approach. The “waves” were not physically present at all, BUT delivered the probabilities as to where the individual electrons would end up.

It was the epitome of a purely maths-driven Science.

WAVEFUNCTIONS?

A Fulfilled Objective

They had found a Pure Form in mathematics that could be easily shoe-horned to deliver the “right numbers” to account for the final cumulative pattern.

And, “If it works, it is right!”, took over. NO explanation was proferred for this, just the fact that it fitted perfectly. Indeed, these physicists stressed that no explanations should ever be attempted. For scientists were condemned for ever even trying to explain.

The New Physics had been born.

Now, after centuries of explanation most scientists world-wide were quite unwilling to abandon what had been achieved over the most significant period in the History of Mankind. But the new physicists were adamant. Explanation must go!

Mathematics was the Truth of all things, and the “old fashioned scientific process” HAD to be truncated as soon as a mathematical form could be fitted to the experimental data. The usually following “explanation phase” had to be dumped...

This post is the eleventh in a blog series entitled "What is to be done?" on the crises in both Marxism and Science, and how a revolution is necessary in both. This body of work is now available as a Special Issue. Read it all here!