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Natural Justice
| Article
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18849 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1991 |
2,355 Words |
| Author
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Robert P. Lanza
Robert P. Lanza is research associate of surgery at Harvard
Medical School and senior scientist at BioHybrid Technologies. |
It was a soothing experience, on one of those warm nights in the summer, when the breeze was fully appreciated, to sit there in the moonlight, overlooking the pond, and to communicate by a flaxen line with fishes, which had their dwelling twenty or thirty rods from the shore. Now and then I could feel a slight vibration along the line, indicative of some life prowling about the bottom. At length I pulled some horned pouts and a pickerel, squeaking and gasping into the upper air.
It was remarkable with what innocence I sat there--and from my distant perch my mind wandered to cosmological themes in other spheres. It seemed as if I had made one cast out over the pickerelweed, and another upward into the firmament. To experience this was something of an epistemological puzzle. To feel this faint jerk, and to be conscious in that precise moment of the presence of something kindred to me, something that was not accounted for very clearly in my dissections as a scientist--a part of me, which, as it were, was not a part of me, but scale and fin, circling the hook, slow to strike.
This was not an illusion. It is when one sees reality in this manner, or a sense of doubleness by which one can stand as remote from one's self as from one's fellow, that one knows we are not wholly involved in nature. It is in this way alone that one comes to grips with the implications of the quantum theory, that one knows the events of particle interactions, on a submolecular scale have applications to the larger events of everyday life. Surely this is what Spinoza meant when he contended that consciousness cannot exist simply in space and time, and at the same time be aware, as it is, of the interrelations of all parts of space and time? In order to enjoy knowledge of a pout or a pickerel, prowling there about the bottom, I must have somehow been identical with them.
How can this be, you ask? How is it managed, for real experiments with electrons, that a single particle can be at two places at once--that when electrons are fired at a barrier with two small holes or slits, they appear as particles or as waves depending on what sort of measurement is being performed? When you look at them they are articles, like little bullets, obeying the laws of classical physics; yet as soon as you are not looking they behave like waves, and can actually pass through both holes simultaneously. What shall we learn from these experiments? To the scientist they yield the quantum theory. But it is the fault of our philosophy that we cannot relate them to our immediate experience. We hold such perspectives very cheap. Hear the mice in the woodpile, the owls and
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