“What would it be like, he wondered, to really know the Tao? The Tao is that which first lets the light, then the dark. Occasions the interplay of the two primal forces so that there is always renewal. It is that which keeps it all from wearing down. The universe will never be extinguished because just when the darkness seems to have smothered all, to be truly transcendent, the new seeds of light are reborn in the very depths. That is the Way. When the seed falls, it falls into the earth, into the soil. And beneath, out of sight, it comes to life.”
Philip K. Dick – The Man In The High Castle
It’s a warm summer night on Salt Spring Island in the Pacific Northwest. The wine flows freely as wasps fly reconnaissance missions over the dessert dishes. The host holds up a glass, glimmering in the twilight, and toasts her guests. “The hollowness of the vessel is as important as the glass itself,” she adds, explaining how Taoists appreciated the value of things absent.
Sounded like a subtle cue for everyone to leave. If so, no one got it.
When I got home I pulled a dog-eared copy of the Tao Te Ching from a bookshelf, to sharpen my recollection of the original words by Lao-tzu, a sixth-century Taoist Chinese sage.
“The utility of the cart depends on the hollow centre in which the axle turns. Clay is moulded into a vessel; the utility of the vessel depends on its hollow interior. Doors and windows are cut out in order to make a house; the utility of the house depends on the empty spaces. Thus, while the existence of things may be good, it is the non-existent in them which makes them serviceable.”
In 1928, our astronomer friend Arthur Eddington told us that our world - that is, the physical objects in the world including ourselves - is 99.9999999 percent empty space. He did this through his legendary “parable of the two writing desks.”
The first desk was the dependable, solid piece of furniture his typewriter sat upon. The common sense writing desk of touch and sight.
The second desk was the one envisioned by scientists, consisting almost entirely of empty space. The atoms that make up the desk contain inconceivably small atomic nuclei orbited by electrons at distances a hundred thousand times larger in scale than the electrons themselves, noted Eddington:
In the world of physics, we watch a shadowgraph performance of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow-table as the shadow-ink flows over the shadow-paper… The frank realization that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.
The astronomer would have appreciated the mid-century discovery of a subatomic particle called the neutrino – a will-o’-the-wisp that is about as close to nothing as anyone can imagine - other than it’s subatomic cousin, the photon. A single neutrino can pass through 1,000 light-years of lead without interacting. The spectral subatomic particle inspired the writer John Updike to pen his 1960 poem, Cosmic Gall:
Neutrinos, they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
In other words, damnably difficult to detect, but there are various methods to catch these will o’ the whisps. In the mid-sixties, scientists commenced a big-budget effort to detect neutrinos created by nuclear reactions at the sun’s core. Engineers buried a huge tank of perchloroethylene thousands of feet underground in a gold mine in South Dakota, far from the muddying effect of cosmic rays and other subatomic interlopers. The only thing that could penetrate to that depth would be neutrinos. The detectors installed with the tank didn’t catch the particles themselves, but rather the argon isotope created after the extremely improbable collisions with the nuclei of chlorine atoms.
It was like waiting for a passing ghost to topple a candlestick in an abandoned mansion, but the researchers’ patience won out. They knew their chances were good, since the first detection of a spooky neutrino trail dated back to 1970.
Mass as process
CERN’s seven-story Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland is the particle-smashing plaything of thousands of scientists from across the world. They accelerate protons to speeds close to the speed of light, and smash them together in a giant ring magnet cooled to near absolute zero. Because energy is equivalent to mass, the high energies of the collisions conjure up bizarre, heavy particles that quickly decay into more mundane things like photons and electrons. It’s a bit like throwing two clocks against each other to discover weird components that were never there to begin with.
In 2014, Scientists analyzing the results of the LHC impacts announced the discovery of the Higgs particle, a massive subatomic entity with an extremely short life span. The particle is an expression of the Higgs field, which is believed to confer mass on electrons, neutrons, protons and other subatomic particles. So even what we take to be the most convincing aspect of lived reality - the solidity of mass - is something mediated by a process in time: a field effect.
With a universe this bizarre, talk of ghosts and poltergeists is hardly any more challenging than ‘squarks’ or ‘gluinos,’ just two of the many theoretical entities pressed into accounting for the “dark matter” that apparently pervades the universe.
Shakespeare’s line from Midsummer Night’s Dream - “Everything that is solid melts into the air” - could be poetic shorthand for the evaporation of the classical physicists’ world at the outset of the 20th century. Newton’s conception of atoms as “solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles” was replaced with a more dynamical paradigm: atoms are made up of subatomic particles that are patterns of activity within fields.
The vacuum ain’t so empty
You’re no doubt familiar with the Yin-Yang symbol of light and dark forms, which graphically sums up the concept of change in Taoist philosophy. The symbol represents how opposing forces may actually be complementary and interconnected in the natural world, with each force giving rise to the other. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr put the Yin-Yang symbol on his family coat of arms to capture the eastern-inflected philosophical principle he called “complementarity,” of which the most primary phenomenon is wave-particle duality.
At a certain level of fine-grained analysis, all things are subject to complementarity, Bohr believed. “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real,” he wrote.
What did he mean by that? The followup to the Bohr-Heisenberg conception of the quantum world - the Feynmann-Wheeler model of ‘quantum electrodynamics’ - introduced a modern vision of emptiness, in which nature is built upon a bedrock of “virtual photons.”
Empty space is not quite the vacuum we normally think of. In the words of physicist Paul Davies, “a vacuum is not inert and featureless, but alive with throbbing energy and vitality…a seething ferment of quantum field activity…with waves surging randomly this way and that.” In this vacuum virtual photons emerge and disappear back into the void in a supremely short space of time.
In his book Science Set Free, author and biologist Rupert Sheldrake describes the physicists’ new vision of the world. It’s essentially an update of Arthur Eddington’s legendary 1928 vision of his mostly empty writing desk:
“According to quantum electrodynamics, all electrical and magnetic forces are mediated by virtual photons that appear from the quantum vacuum field and then disappear into it again. When you look at a compass to find out where north is, the compass needle interacts with the earth’s magnetic field through virtual photons. When you switch on a fan, its electric motor makes it go round because it is suddenly filled with virtual photons that exert forces. When you sit down, the chair supports your bottom because the chair and your bottom repel each other through a dense creation and destruction of virtual photons between them. When you get up, much of this activity in the vacuum field stops, and now great clouds of virtual photons appear between your feet and the floor, wherever you put your feet. All the molecules within your body, all your cell membranes, all your nerve impulses depend on virtual photons appearing and disappearing within the all-pervading vacuum field of nature.”
These virtual photons can emerge from a perfect vacuum – the so-called “zero-point field” – as long as they return to the vacuum within a precise amount of time set by a time/energy variant of The Uncertainty Principle. These are ‘no-things’ that prop up our world of ‘some-things.’ And not surprisingly, we find an eastern inflection of Davies’ vacuum, “alive with throbbing energy and vitality,” in Taoism. In the words of Lao-tzu:
The Tao is like a bellows: / It is empty yet infinitely capable. / The more you use it, the more it produces; / The more you talk of it, the less you understand. / Hold on to the center.
It turns out you can get a sort of something from this sort of nothing, if you have the debits and credits in the physics ledger add up to zero. Did some quantum hiccup create our universe 13 billion years ago? More about nothing next time.
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