Ervin Laszlo - Reconnecting to the Source

ERVIN LASZLO was motivated to write this book out of an urgent need. He calls it the need to reconnect to our source, a proposition that leads us to the discussion of the domains of space, time, matter, and energy. This is where science locates the physical source of everything, including the universe and every object in it.

But the scientific model lacks a human dimension, which is what Laszlo wants to restore. It is an aim that has met with scientific resistanceusually very heated resistancefor a long time, creating a wall that separates the physical world out there from the subjective world in here.

To the vast majority of working scientists, theres no valid reason for breaking down the wall. They regard it as a matter of vital importance that science should deal in objective facts, data, measurement, and experiments. So, Einstein made history with the general theory of relativity, without regard for how he personally felt about his theory, just as Newtons theories about gravity and the mechanics of bodies in motion were of paramount importance, not his personal adherence to a fundamentalist strain of Christianity (the fact that Newton earnestly toiled to devise a timeline for Earth that began with the creation story in the book of Genesis would be a quirk of personality, not a scientific enterprise).

Science is the most successful model of reality in human history, and holding the latest iPhone in your hand or using the GPS in your car or reading about the Hubble telescope reinforces the claim that eventually the scientific model will explain everything. But models, no matter how successful, have a striking flaw. They are right about what they include and wrong about what they exclude. By shutting subjective experience out of the prevailing scientific model, we find ourselves in ignorance about what is actually happening in the human mind.

There have been calls, like this books message, to reconnect to The Source of the subjective world. In every case, it was the troubling ignorance about the human mind that motivated a few outstanding thinkers to try to bring down the Chinese wall dividing the physical from the mental. A radical attempt was voiced when the great quantum pioneer Max Planck, the German physicist who actually named the quantum, gave an interview to The Observer newspaper in London in 1931.

In that interview, Planck said, I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness. In other words, consciousness is somehow The Source of the physical universe. Planck was not alone in believing this; most of the great quantum pioneers (with the notable exclusion of Einstein, a stubborn resister of quantum theory) held the belief that without the participation of a human observer, physical reality would not exist in its present form. Or to simplify things further, we live in a participatory universe, a phrase coined by a great midcentury American physicist, John Archibald Wheeler.

If these insights come as a surprise, its no wonder, because physics, as practiced by everyday working physicists, ignored what Planck, Wheeler, and a host of other illustrious names were claiming. We wound up in the arms of a paradox. Every physicist accepts that quantum mechanics is the most successful scientific theory of all time, and quantum theory effectively demolished the commonsense notion that solid physical objects exist as tangible things. Their thingness vanishes once you enter the quantum domain, where all of reality can be reduced to ripples in the quantum fieldthese excitations in the gravity field, the electron field, and the quark field are more real than matter, which is just one mode of quantum excitations.

The paradox arises from the same physicists who refuse to believe that consciousness interacts with the quantum field, shaping and governing its excitations. Yet the very theorists who discovered the quantum field held that consciousness must be part of it, not only to account for a participatory universe but to correct a huge mistake. That huge mistake is the belief that subjectivity can be excluded from the work of science. Leaving out half of existencethe mental halfseems absurd at first glance. After all, the work of science begins in here, with mental activity being generated and perceived by a human being. What could be more subjective?

Ervin Laszlo plunges us into this paradox, with the aim of correcting the gaping mistake in the scientific model. He argues that reality must be viewed as a wholeand a growing number of physicists, particularly among the younger generation, agree. There are not two regions of existence, mental and physical, separated by nature. Instead, the division of mind in here and matter out there is a human construct. It can be shown, as this book does very convincingly, that wholeness dominates nature, including human nature. There is only one reality, and the task of science is to describe how it works.

Yet at another level, every scientific theory, including the one Laszlo proposes, must pass the So what? test. It must be relevant to everyday life. The part of quantum theory that led to the transistors So what? test passes, as does the general theory of relativity, because it is needed to accurately calibrate the satellites that send GPS signals back to Earth. But other aspects of quantum mechanics and general relativity do not pass the test, remaining in the obscure realm of mathematics that is the language of advanced physics. No less a figure than Stephen Hawking came to the conclusion near the end of his life that theories in physics may no longer match reality, having journeyed into a realm of abstraction that will never be validated by physical evidence.