I am also grateful to my family and friends for their critical reading of various parts of the manuscript; especially to my mother, Ingeborg Teuffenbach, for valuable editorial suggestions. Finally, I would like to thank my editors at Simon and Schuster, Alice Mayhew, John Cox, and Debra Makay for their excellent and sensitive editing of the text. It is the story of my encounters with many remarkable men and women who inspired, helped and supported my quest - Werner Heisenberg, who most vividly described to me his personal experience of the change of concepts and ideas in physics; Geoffrey Chew, who taught me not to accept anything as fundamental; J.
PREFACE 13
The magic of the sixties faded; the initial excitement gave way to a period of concentration, digestion, integration. The era of the sixties, which had the most decisive influence on my view of the world, was dominated by an expansion of consciousness in two directions. The two dominant trends of the sixties—the expansion of consciousness toward the transpersonal and that toward the social—had a strong influence on my life and work.
PREFACE 15
WERNER HEISENBERG
The story of his struggle and triumph is also the story of the meeting and symbiosis of two exceptional personalities, Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. The subject of the lectures was Bohr's new atomic theory, which had been hailed as an enormous achievement and was studied by physicists all over Europe. Niels Bohr, sixteen years Heisenberg's senior, was a man of superior intuition and a deep appreciation for the mysteries of the world; a man influenced by the religious phi.
The uncertainty principle measures the extent to which the scientist influences the properties of the observed objects through the measurement process. To distinguish themselves from the round cuts and polyester suits of clean-cut business executives, they wore long hair, colorful and individualistic clothes that flowed. Rock music and psychedelic drugs were strong bonds that greatly influenced the art and lifestyle of the hippie culture.
We could easily understand why the counterculture's protest against the American way of life had arisen here, and we were naturally drawn to this movement. They were called "dirty hippies" by straight society, but referred to themselves as "the beautiful people". Dissatisfied with an education system designed to prepare young people for a society they rejected, many hippies dropped out of education. Bendit, extended their critique to society as a whole and sought the solidarity of the labor movement to change the entire social organization.
Bernt gave me an anthology of the Beat poets and writers, which introduced me to the works of Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Alan Watts. Through Alan Watts I learned about Zen Buddhism, and soon after Bernt suggested that I read the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most beautiful and profound spiritual texts of India. After moving to California, I soon learned that Alan Watts was one of the heroes of the counterculture, whose books were on the shelves of most hippie communes, along with those of Carlos Castaneda, J.
We have remained very close since childhood, and Bernt shares my interest in philosophy and spirituality.
KRISHNAMURTI
I'm not going to tell you anything; I have no authority; we are going to investigate this question together." He will then show the futility of all conventional ways of eliminating (for example) fear, true. He will not simply confront you with the results of his analysis, but urge and persuade you to engage to become myself in the process of analysis. 34; How can I be a scientist," I asked, "and still follow your advice to stop thinking and gain freedom from the known?" Krishnamurti did not hesitate for a moment.
His appearance was still very striking, although he had lost some of his intensity. Therefore, freeing oneself from desire cannot be achieved by suppressing or avoiding sense experience (the way of the ascetic). This is the reason, I believe, that so many of my colleagues feel threatened by my comparisons between physics and mine.
When I first learned about the Eastern traditions I discovered parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism al-
I felt it with my whole being, but it appeared early in my career and I was very lucky that the person who made me realize the threat also helped me perspire. I remember reading a French book on Zen Buddhism in Paris, from which I first learned about the important role of paradoxes in mystical traditions. They are precisely designed to stop the thought process and thus prepare the student for the nun.
The discovery of a parallel between the Zen koans and the paradoxes of quantum physics, which I would later call kar. Matthews, a particle physicist I met in California who was then head of the theory department at Imperial College, the first thing I saw was a giant poster of Bob Dylan. He would never have thought of the parallels between particle physics and Hinduism himself, he said, but when he saw my photomontage, they became immediately apparent to him.
WALKING WITH THE WOLVES 37 The Taoist sage flows in the stream of the Tao, the Yaqui man. I applied for an invitation to the conference as part of the team representing Imperial Col. For the first time I felt that I was sitting with one of the great sages of my culture.
Bohr was serving him a bowl of soup, while Niels Bohr sat on his bed insisting: 'But Schrodinger, you have to accept it. He said that in the early 1920s Niels Bohr suggested to him during one of their long philosophical conversations that they might have reached the limits of human understanding in the realm of the very small. As Heisenberg was telling me these stories, I noticed that he had Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity on his desk, and as I had just read this book myself with great intelligence.
As soon as I returned to London, I abandoned the textbook project and decided to incorporate the material I had already written into the text of The Tao of Physics. My parents were happy to have me in the house while I wrote, although they were quite concerned about the benefits. He was not only the first publisher of The Tao of Physics - the best of his many impressions, as he has often proudly told me - but is also the British publisher of some of the most influential works mentioned in these pages.
When I first discovered the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism the similarities between statements made
A direct consequence of this unification of space and time is the equivalence of mass and energy and furthermore the fact that subatomic particles must be understood as dy. Heisenberg agreed with me about physics and he also told me that he was well aware of the emphasis on interconnectedness in Eastern thought. At the end of my rather lengthy presentation of the manuscript, Heisenberg simply said, "Basically, I completely agree.
GEOFFREY CHEW
It is based on the concept of the S-matrix, or "scattering matrix", originally proposed by Heisenberg in the 1940s and developed into a complex mathematics over the past two decades. None of the properties of any part of this web are fundamental; they all follow from the properties of the other parts, and the overall consistency of their interrelationships determines the structure of the entire web. The fact that the bootstrap philosophy assumes no fundamental entities makes it, in my opinion, one of the most profound systems of Western thought.
When I first became aware of Chew's approach to understand
Two years later, however, after writing my letter, I was confident that my thinking had evolved to a point where I could have a real exchange of ideas with Chew, and I sent him a copy of the letter and asked for his comments. . During my visit to California in 1973, Chew invited me to give a lecture on the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism at UC Berkeley, where he received me very kindly and spent most of the day with me. However, at the end of the day I asked Chew if he saw any opportunity for me to come here and work with him.
The essence of Veneziano's discovery was the recognition that topology—a formalism well known to mathematicians but never before used in particle physics—could be used to define categories of order in the interconnectedness of subatomic particles. In other words, the mathematical complexity of the boot scheme can be resolved by incorporating the topology into the S-matrix framework. When this is done, only a few special categories of ordered relations turn out to be compatible with the well-known properties of the S matrix.
When I arrived in Berkeley in April 1975, Veneziano was visiting LBL (the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory) and Chew
My feeling is that the principles of quantum mechanics as stated are not satisfactory and that the hunt for bootstrap pro. Chew has added a further refinement to this view that is typical of the bootstrap approach. He believes that the science of the future may well consist of a mosaic of inter.
GREGORY BATESON
I knew he was an authority in the field, but I had no idea the extent of his research. In the meantime, I read his Kingdom of the Human Unconscious with great enthusiasm, and the Count's lecture at the conference gave me an additional one. For example, there is often an experience of tremendous tension that characterizes the struggle in the birth canal.
I spent most of the following day thinking about my problem, and by evening I was ready to see Laing again. SWIMMING IN THE SAME OCEAN 137 meaningful framework for reconciling the traditional approaches to the age-old questions of the nature of life, mind, and con.
MARGARET LOCK
34;The concern was not so much with anatomical accuracy, but rather with the interrelationship of all the parts." She explained that the Chinese concept of a physic. It is usually translated as the 'five elements; but Porkert has translated as the 'five evolutionary stages; which conveys the Chinese idea of dynamic relationships much better." Lock explained that a complicated correspondence system was derived from the five phases, which extended to the entire universe. The flow and fluctuation of ch'i keeps a person alive, and there are definite paths of ch'i, the known meridians, along which the acupuncture points lie." Lock told me that, from the Western scientific point of view, there are now a lot of documenta.
You know, I've noticed in Japan how they teach young children to pay close attention to changes in the weather and seasons, and to observe the body's reactions to these changes.” But it's not quantitative; it seems to be a qualitative description of a dynamic pattern, a pattern of processes.' .
For me, quality refers to movement, to processes, to functions or to change, and especially to the vital changes that matter in medicine." 34;But when you describe such a dynamic pattern, it is not enough to specify the directions; you also have to describe the interrelationships to get the whole pattern.". 34;And you know, you'll especially find that not all traditional cultures take a holistic approach to health care."
You see, most contemporary practitioners have not read the classic texts; these are studied mainly by researchers who never practice medicine."
In short, I believe that the major diseases of the people have become accessible biological puzzles, ultimately solvable.” If there is a reduction in disease and at the same time it is offset by a rising crime rate, we have done nothing. to improve the health of society." I would also like to see people understand that a cancer cell is not a strong cell, but a weak cell."
34;The idea that people who get cancer die, that cancer is absolutely deadly, that it's only a matter of time.". I would definitely agree with that, and we could probably do the same thing with a pulse.". 34; In the diagnosis of the pulse, the pulse is connected with different patterns of energy flow, which reflect the state of the entire organism".
34;So if you are powerful in one direction, you can create psychological problems in the other." 34;It seems to be your approach, to work with the conscious part of the psyche in the healing process.". It's really addressing the unconscious, and that's very important in alleviating a lot of anxiety."
34;This seems to have been the function of churches and the extended family in the past."
