Waves and Fields in Media
This new issue of SHAPE Journal tackles some of the most important problems in Physics from a Marxist perspective - revealing the science’s overlooked assumptions and disingenuous methods in comparison to new materialist Substrate Theory. This new kind of Physics assumes a hidden medium of Lepton particles permeates the known Universe, propogates light and explains some of Physics’ darkest corners - from pair production to quantised orbits to Dark Matter to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
As scientists dug ever deeper into Reality, even approaching the mythical “Fundamental Particles” of the Universe, which were supposed to be the original causal sources of absolutely everything, the proliferation of impasses became so abundent that “Explanation” itself was abandoned as a myth, and replaced by Mathematical Forms alone.
Unfortunately Mathematics is a Pluralist Discipline, requiring only fixed determinations of disembodied entities and forms, so it was always congenitally incapable of addressing what was required. Instead of seeking the engines of Qualitative Change, which might explain the evolution of matter and the rules which seemingly govern its behaviour, the discipline was still permanently orientated to seeking only eternal Natural Laws. Sub Atomic Physics, experimentally, was primarily restricted to seeking new discoveries in ever-higher- energy Colliders, or ever more powerful Telescopes - as if somehow technological progress would prove to be a magical salve to these shortocomings. All the while, Physical Theory was religated into the mere exotic manipulation of Mathematical Equations. Physics had been totally emasculted!
As a result, such an important scientific discipline has been effectively disabled from being analysed in the usual classical way, and, in spite of the sophistication of the Mathematics involved, on any completion, it has still been returned to its inadequate means of the past - explaining very little, yet delivering over long periods of time, a stream of seemingly constant states, each of which maybe “Wholly New”, to give the false impression of real descriptive Progress, but that old simplifying Phase has long passed.
What is clearly required today is a Revolution in Explanatory means, which can no longer avoid the crucial mechanisms of Real Qualitative Change - something the old single causes can never deliver.
Now, such a requirement cannot be solved by the usual kind of Causality: it is not a specific result requiring a single cause at all, but, on the contrary, more like a Complex, multi-factor System, that in exceptional circumstances changes into a very different one, or even a wholly new, never-before-experienced Emergent State.
It is a problem, which most certainly, involves many simultaneous factors, which have NOT led to Chaos, but, on the contrary, have arrived at an overall-interacting- mix of processes, that usually delivers a reliably stable- and-unchanging overall state (in fact appearing as a permanent natural and unchanging arrangement allowing that assumption of the eternal laws of physics which dominate the field), but which in particular and unusual sets of internal changes, can flip-as-a-whole into a new and different, but temporary stability, once again appearing to be another “permanent” result!
Clearly such Qualitative Changes are never the result of a particular single cause, with a known outcome, but, on the contrary, actually a temporarily-balanced outcome of a complex system, which will find a balance in one of its many possible outcomes, yet most-of-the- time stopped by the internal consequent changes that actually automatically oppose any externally imposed changes, in various corrective ways. But, exceptionally, can alternatively also wholly dissociate, and thereafter re- organise into something entirely NEW. And as the whole thing involves many different factors and levels, each and every one accompanied by one or more balancing opposites, so, the overall results are not easily diagnosed.
Now, unlike the usual Pluralist kind of Causality, the Dialectical form is never, so-directly, predictable: indeed, though the changes often take place within relatively-short Emergent Interludes, it initially involves the trajectory of a whole sequence of dissolutions, and a following, and often-entirely-new sequence of constructive associations, to finally deliver one-or-another from a whole range of possible final outcomes. Indeed, these Emergences are so quick-and-diverse, that the detailed trajectories seem impossible to theoretically reveal!
But, nevertheless, it was surprisingly discovered happening within Social Revolutions, and at much slower tempos, which could indeed be effectively interpreted, dialectically. Indeed, it was, in just such solvable situations, that Karl Marx finally got a general handle upon holistic processes of change, and enabled successful outcomes within a whole series of such Revolutions occurring in the 20th century.
Now, historically, the total absence of such a Dialectical means of analysis, meant the continuance of the prior Pluralistic Approach, which could never cope with such Changes, so the usual method was to, successively, greatly simplify the real situation, until it finally DID conform to Plurality, for each and every recognised Law, applied separately, within separated, tailor-made series of set-ups, would be necessary. And, to compound the felony, the other defining aspect of Plurality - that such acting laws were independant of one another, so their combined results would be given by mere additions, would also and quite incorrectly, be included in the analysis.
Naturally, in spite of such multiple, separately carried- out experiments, to model the Natural Combined Event, the results would NOT conform sufficiently, so further restrictions were included to remove any possibly- transmitting intermediaries, such as any Media, which could intervene, with the excuse, seemingly verified by the Michelson/Morley Experiments, that Space itself was totally empty of any Universal Substrate!
But, of course it was the role of such substrates, which enabled many phenomena to be adequately physically explained by Waves within them.
The Wave or Particle Nature of Light exemplified by the disagreements between Newton (for Particles) and Huyghens (for Waves) was resolved by the belief in Waves, but somehow without-a-Medium.
But this, in the 20th century, was removed from physical explanation alltogether, and via a construct known as Wave/Particle Duality, “unified” by a wholly illegitmate mixture of Wave Theory and Probabilities, gave useable results, purely pragmatically, via mathematical formulae alone.
But, there is the much more important aberration ofUnderstanding, now dominant across all the Intellectual Disciplines, which does not merely distort our view, but damagingly emasculate our ability to travel, even slowly, towards the objective of revealing the Truth of Reality. For Plurality, as is totally unavoidable in Mathematical Reasoning, has long been uncritically extended to both Formal Logic and literally all the Sciences. So that Qualitative Change, which is the only engine of all the varying qualities of Reality, and all development too, have been totally excluded from our view of the Universe.
Yet, there has been a tenuous, and often, all too frequently, an almost invisible link - to a solution, literally equally as old as has been the influence of the current consensus established by the Greek Intellectual Revolution, some 2,500 years ago.
It consisted of a totally opposite stance, which was developed by the mystics of India, simultaneously with the Greek Revolution, and greatly influenced by The Buddha, in which the determining essence of Reality was NOT Stability, as it was with the Greeks, but Qualitative Change - as evidenced by The Whole Living World, and the Consciousness of Man, both of which were available all the time and everywhere, though far more difficult to extract than the simplifications of Plurality.
It became known as Holism!
But these two alternatives appeared as mutually exclusive, so once one of them had been decided upon, consideration of its direct opposite appeared not only impossible, but actually incomprehensible! Though even within the Greek dominated arena, a dissenter called Zeno of Elea appeared immediately after the Intellectual Revolution, who in his Paradoxes, where he applied legitimate contradictory concepts to Movement, was able to expose many rationally untranscendable impasses, though he wasn’t aware of it, to the falsity of the Pluralistic stance imposed by the Greeks, upon General Reasoning from Mathematics.
And it wasn’t until some 2,300 years later, that the German Idealist philosopher Hegel, resurrected Zeno’s crucial exemplars, and considerably extended them to a much larger number of Dichotomous Pairs of Contradictory Concepts, that a possible reason for them appeared to be revealable.
And it boiled down to the impossibility of Plurality in situations where certain things could and indeed did change over time, in these particular cases, due to their being caused by two simultaneously-present opposites, in which the current relative proportions of each of them could change, and naturally cause a resultant switch in dominance between them.
It was a simplified explanation, but was then extended to a more complex System wherein everything varied, but arrived at complex Systems that settled into self- correcting, apparently permanent Stable States (such as those considered primary in Plurality and Physics).
The keys were still natural opposites, but “interpenetrating” in various ways to deliver an important System of corrections to Pluralist Formal Logic, which Hegel termed Dialectics.
NOTE:
An important contribution to this theory was recently developed by the writer of this paper in his researches into the pre-Life Chemical processes, which had to have preceded the first appearence of Life itself, in Systems of Natural Organic Chemical Reactions, and their overall trajectories of change, which were the prerequisites of Life, and which I called Truly Natural Selection.
Of course, Hegel’s version as an idealist philosopher was to his mind, and could only be about Human Thinking: but the transforming step was completed by the Young Hegelian follower of Hegel - namely Marx himself, who transferred over all of Hegel’s gains to a wholly Materialist stance, which only then could be correctly applied to both Reasoning and Science, initially by his own Key Intermediary of History. within the most profound Qualitative Changes ever - those occurring within Social Revolutions, as their necessary slow-tempo revelations, and his ever burgeoning Critique of Capitalist Economics, as the detailed coherent definitions of all such Qualitative Changes, in an on-going, constantly developing, yet constantly contradictory System.
Sadly, the final steps in this new Intellectual Revolution, which just had to be the detailed application of Dialectical Materialism to Science, took another 149 years to be addressed by this particular 21st century Marxist, and only completed in the latter part of 2019.
In this new issue, these dialectical studies are taken further, looking at the role waves and fields play in physical holistic systems, and how their study might change Physics forever.
