What Science Teaches
How do we understand life and the Universe? In twenty-first-century science, the very disparate fields of biology and physics have come to a shared understanding: everything we observe is not a separate “thing” but a participant in a vast web of relationships. Living systems and the Universe are best understood as dense layers of networked relationships. Even a single cell is a complex network, far beyond the imaginings of scientists until a few years ago. Nothing living lives alone. This shift in understanding became clear as the blinders of mechanistic thinking were torn off by the paradoxes revealed in scientific evidence.
Life insisted on being understood differently and everything changed. The pursuit of basic building blocks gave way to subatomic particles understood as bundles of energy potential that become visible only in relationship. (This is why there are particle colliders—no particle is visible until it collides with another energy at extreme high speeds.) Molecular biology, in its search to identify discrete genes as causal, as specific on and off switches, had to yield to the realization that genes are but one actor among DNA’s many components—described by one scientist as an ensemble of actors.1 Individual species, all plants and animals, lost their identity as individuals fighting against one another in the struggle for survival; now they are understood as necessary participants in an ecosystem where all benefit if balanced relationships are maintained. Even treasured theories of change changed, from linear incremental steps to observing that new systems suddenly arise through emergence.
What’s interesting, as you’ll read here, is how these two major sciences are coming to terms with the mysteries that life has presented them, and the meaning they infer from their observations.
Interconnectedness in Biology
As the system’s view of life gained authority as the best explanatory lens for understanding how life works, it reframed the role of collaboration. Unlike our veneration of competition as the means to survive, collaboration is what is most essential to life’s flourishing. Symbiosis is no longer a curious phenomenon but the fundamental process that spawns life, beginning at the microbial level, the process by which all complex ecosystems form.2
This fundamental shift introduced a type of ethics to biology. “Ethics is how we behave when we decide we belong together.” With this ethic of collaboration, individual behavior takes on new meaning. As an organism interacts with its environment, individual actions impact the health of the ecosystem far beyond its nearest neighbors.3
Invasive species are destructive because they don’t work from this ethic: They take everything for themselves and wreak havoc with their insatiable appetite. Predatory invaders destroy the delicate harmony and balance that an ecosystem has created for itself.
Collaboration is the process that creates an ecosystem; greed destroys it.
A system’s view of life includes the qualities of harmony, balance, beauty—familiar experiences when we’re gazing at mountains, flowers, streams, and everything else natural.4 Darwin was astonished by beauty. In his journal in 1839 he wrote, “It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war of organic beings, going on in the quiet woods and smiling fields.” He would have done well to relish the beauty and let go of the competition lens, but he could only perceive his experience through his worldview (although he seems to have toyed with this possibility in that smiling field).
When life was viewed as an assemblage of discrete parts, it was possible to study the parts in minute detail and never understand what we were studying. Its construction was understood. Numeric assessments of size, weight, and functions were easily obtained. Limited to quantification and separation, the information we gathered was appallingly inadequate for understanding life and how to work well with it. And without noticing systems of relationships, we were blind to qualities of harmony and beauty.
Conventional reductionist methods for understanding life turned it into a dull, uninteresting machine that we then felt free to abuse in any way that suited us.
Today, our world confronts us with an ironic conflict. We go into nature and feel a sense of harmony and profound belonging beyond the tiny confines of self. Yet our technology and the lives we live continue to demand that we perfect the means of extraction and destruction to keep our lives going. We ignore the science, destroy the environment, and then go outside to feel more peaceful.
The physicists are more puzzled by their experimental observations but, with them also, the revelation of mystery doesn’t stop the production of more technologies that are facilitating ecological destruction.
Interconnectedness in Physics
What is often credited with being “the most astonishing discovery of twentieth-century physics”5 is now, in the twenty-first century, the incessant evidence confronting physicists to rethink their fundamental assumptions about the Universe. The astonishing discovery was that the perceived separation of electrons does not mean they are separate. If two electrons have been paired, they continue to operate as one entangled whole even if the distance between them is the vastness of space. If the spin of one electron is changed, its pair changes instantly, faster than the speed of light. Bell’s Theorem described this in 1964 and, since then, physical experiments continue to confirm that entanglement exists as an observable phenomenon. This raises the most profound questions about whether space exists.
Einstein was so disturbed by the possibility of entanglement that, just as Schrödinger had done for a different quantum observation, he created a thought experiment to show the absurdity of action-at-a-distance or nonlocality. He wanted to disprove the world that quantum theory pointed to: a reality that doesn’t exist if it isn’t being measured. Einstein wanted evidence of an objective reality. The EPR experiment6 would prove that entities (particles) separated in space would still maintain their individual qualities, that there was a reality made up of independent things.
But the EPR thought experiment proved just the opposite.7 There is no objective, independently existing reality that can be observed. If it can’t be observed, there is no way of knowing whether it exists or not. But what could be observed was totally bizarre. Einstein labeled entanglement “spooky action at a distance,” and he wasn’t the only scientist spooked by the recurring evidence that the Universe does not operate as separate physical entities influencing each other through the laws of energy and motion, or influenced by force fields of gravity and electromagnetism. In classical physics, space matters: how far you are from the source determines the influence of these forces. Entanglement refutes spatial separation. Even when particles appear to be separated by space, they behave as one. Does this mean there is no space?
The EPR thought experiment set off many decades of research. Even though results were consistent and replicative (the mark of good science), scientists basically ignored nonlocality until the mid-1990s, when it became an accepted description of how the world operates at the quantum level. George Musser, a science writer and editor, notes, “I’ve spent time with scientists from a wide range of communities—people who study everything from subatomic particles to black holes to the grand structure of the cosmos. Over and over, I heard some variant of: ‘Well, it’s weird, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself, but it looks like the world has just got to be nonlocal.’”8
The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.
Werner Heisenberg, physicist
More than twenty different theories are being proposed to explain entanglement, each of them more fanciful (and untestable) than the next.9 One scientist described the current state as “a chasm of mutual incomprehension.”10 This is not surprising at a time when the very foundations of physics are in question. When quantum mechanics first displayed itself in experiments, Werner Heisenberg, one of the giants in quantum physics, asked, “Can the universe possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?”11 One thing is certain: a reimagining of space is at the core of new physics.
In the midst of this profound upheaval, technology is keeping up with quantum reality, and we are its beneficiaries. Theoretical physicists can’t explain what they’re seeing, but applied physicists have been brilliant in using what they don’t understand to create new technologies. A brief list of everyday things we now rely on that use quantum mechanics would include transistors, computers, phones, electronics, lasers, MRIs, atomic clocks. Seventy percent of our economy runs on quantum technologies.
Quantum physics didn’t replace Newtonian physics. They both have provided the means for this era of discovery and invention. But all worldviews come to an end, just like everything else in life, and it appears that we are at the end of the materialistic worldview of science which was both magnificent and clunky. This view had built-in constraints of matter, space, and time. They didn’t appear as constraints when scientists were drunk with discovery. Yet it is only Western science that has these constraints—unwilling to acknowledge the presence of anything that cannot be located in matter. This pursuit currently is very obvious in neuroscientists who rejoice at the mapping of the brain in ever greater detail but cannot describe how immaterial thoughts or consciousness trigger reactions in the physical brain.
Western culture, now global, has paid a severe penalty for this materialistic obsession. Intuition, clairvoyance, precognition, mystical experiences, consciousness—these have each been discredited as “magic” and disparaged as the thinking of the poorly educated.12 No self-respecting scientist would go near these.
And the reverse has also happened, with people seizing on quantum theory as the explanator of these phenomena, taking bits and pieces of the science to validate their experiences, labeling anything as “quantum” if it’s the least bit puzzling or weird. Nobody has gained from these hijackings and misperceptions. Scientists continue to disparage the “New Agers” and they have a solid basis for their critiques, while those who want their work confirmed too often twist and misapply the science to suit their needs.
The world is not just a set of separately existing localized objects, externally related only by space and time. Something deeper, and more mysterious, knits together the fabric of the world.
Tim Maudlin, philosopher of physics
In recent years, this has improved. Some scientists have bravely explored the questions raised by entanglement even though, until recently, they often suffered rebuke and ostracism from others in their field. Dialogues between the Dalai Lama and preeminent scientists have explored the realms of consciousness, cognition, and the new physics.13 Buddhist teachers trained as scientists have probed deeply into the corollaries and differences between the new physics and the 2,500-year-old science of mind that is Buddhism’s unique contribution to human wisdom.14
This is a time of growing uncertainty. Physicists don’t fuss with the mystery because they can make it work to produce new technologies.15 These technologies, many of which breed destructive negative consequences while we grow more dependent on them, are the current Progress Trap.
In contrast, scientists working with living systems theory do know what’s going on: they have detailed and sufficient knowledge for how to keep ecosystems healthy. Their grief and anger only deepens as they see that science is not being applied with sufficient urgency or political will to prevent the destruction created by our insatiable predator species.
We have good reliable science on the workings of the biosphere, the ecospheres and our place within them. It is no surprise what is happening or who caused it—the Anthropocene Age is here. Science could have served us well. But it’s not being allowed to contribute. How tragic.
How stupid.
Now we have front row seats in the lessons of interconnectedness and the consequences of ignoring nature’s fundamental truths. As the ecologists have noted: nature bats last.