Douglas Reinhardt

Douglas Reinhardt, Ph.D. anthropology

I am retired from a teaching career in biological and cultural anthropology. Having enjoyed a lifelong interest in physics, I began reading in that field in my post-retirement years. In my studies of the exotic theories in physics over the years, I had accepted these theories on faith in the authority of renowned physicists. However, as I began to study the evidence for these theories myself, I became more and more skeptical about the methodology of Modern Physics and the assumptions that physicists make about the nature of reality. As a philosopher of science, I have come to question whether theoretical physicists follow the classical scientific method that has yielded such great successes in other fields. Accordingly, I have written a book entitled THE LANGUAGE AND LOGIC OF PHYSICS, METAPHYSICS AND MYSTICISM in which I question the assumptions, premises, inferences, language and logic of Modern Physics.

This book is about thinking. More specifically, it is about “thinking about thinking” or what has been called “critical thinking”. While classical physics seemed like the other sciences I had studied with rational theories supported by observation and experiment, modern physics, including relativity and quantum mechanics, seemed like a return to mystical, pre-scientific thinking similar to the primal thinking I had studied in anthropology. Intrigued, I sent out a survey to physics professors asking if “neophysics” requires a different kind of logic or thought mode than other sciences – perhaps a kind of paralogic or even higher logic that I did not understand. Three physicists answered my survey, and two seemed offended by the term I had coined – “neophysics.” All of them told me that “modern physics” is the proper term, and that the answer to my question was an emphatic “no.” No, modern physics does not require a different kind of logic – it uses the same logic as all the other sciences.

Then, I discovered Fritjof Capra. Capra confirmed what I had been thinking about the “logic” or paralogic of modern physics. In his fascinating book, The Tao of Physics, Capra said that modern physics partakes of the same kind of thought processes as Eastern mysticism. In college, I had taken two semesters of Indian history with a heavy dose of Hinduism, and I found that Capra’s stimulating book resonated with my own perceptions of physics. I, too, had observed the parallels between “neophysics” (Capra called it the new physics) and Eastern mysticism. The strange tricks that time plays with our perceptions in relativity seemed eerily similar to Hindu (and primal) concepts of time. And, apparent contradictions coexisting in the same quantum theory seemed strangely familiar to Hindu, non-categorical thought where contradictions are transcended. To wit, the claim of some quantum physicists that a cat can be dead and alive at the same time, if its life depends on a quantum probability, closely resembles the Hindu saying: “I exist and non-exist at the same time”. Both concepts seem to partake of the same kind of mysticism even though quantum predictions may have been derived from sophisticated mathematics.

Furthermore, I was intrigued by how physicists use language. My studies in anthropological linguistics had taught me that the way a people perceive the world largely depends on their language, deeply embedded in their culture. For example, the Navaho language does not distinguish between blue and green. That lack of distinction does not mean that Navahos are color blind, but it does mean that they are less sensitive to these color categories and thus will make more errors than English speakers in tests requiring them to separate blue and green objects. In anthropology, the way a culture divides the continuum of reality into categories is called ethnoscience. While Fritjof Capra and David Bohm contend, true to Eastern mysticism, that the unity of reality cannot be divided into categories without distorting it, it is difficult to speak about any topic without the distinctions made possible by our categories of speech. The digit span of our brains is limited to 5-7 bits of information that can be held at once in our RAM – short term memory. In applying ethnoscience to physics, this book will examine the way physicists use the categories of space and time in theory building and how lack of careful definition of these terms has led to some of the more other-worldly theories in physics. If space is void or vacuum, then how can physicists speak of space as being curved or folded up like a sheet of paper through which a wormhole can be burrowed to provide a shortcut to distant parts of the galaxy or universe?

I have been encouraged to find that some people inside the physics world have come to similar conclusions that I have as an outsider. While practical physics and engineering has produced some wonderful technology, I have found that these technologies do not depend on highly abstract theories. Technology involves “how” something works and theory attempts to explain “why” it works, and there are usually competing theories on how even simple technology such as centrifuges work.