Heisenberg Saw God?
Heisenberg thought quantum theory is a connection with truth and, as such, a closeness to God. Was he right?
I like Werner Heisenberg’s take on Plato and mathematics, but I cannot follow him all the way. Is the world of God a departure from our senses?
Plato’s Solids
In his 1962 book, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, Heisenberg reviews the roots of quantum theory reaching back to ancient Greece (Chapter IV). More than any other, he is enthusiastic about Plato’s Timaeus. Usually in this context of all-things-atoms, we hear about Democritus, who coined the term. But Plato was not an atomist after Democritus. He rejected that eternal and indivisible particles account for nature’s changing phenomena and apparently even wanted to burn all Democritus’s writings (Laërtius, IX, 393). Plato also did not agree with Pythagoras that mathematics was directly connected to religion (i.e., worship of Dionysus). Plato synthesized his own teaching from those of his predecessors. To Democritus’s idea of atoms and Pythagoras’s mathematics, Plato expanded the idea of elements from Empedocles. Where Thales thought everything originated from water, Anaximenes from air, and Heraclitus from fire, Plato added earth as a fourth element and connected these elements to geometric solids, which later became known as Plato’s solids, which Johannes Kepler would later adapt as an explanation for the Solar System.
To fire and water, Plato designated the tetrahedron and icosahedron, which are respectively the smallest and largest volumes corresponding to dryness and wetness. To earth, he designated the cubic form because it is the most stable body. To air, he designated the octahedron because it rotates around opposing vertices and, therefore, is more mobile (Plato, 54d-56c). To the dodecahedron, he ascribed the whole universe. One theory says Plato did this because 12 faces match the 12 zodiac signs (Plato, 55c, footnote).
Plato envisioned these geometric solids as corpuscles. He said:
Now one must conceive all these to be so small that none of them, when taken singly each in its several kind, is seen by us, but when many are collected together their masses are seen (Plato, 56b-56c).
Much in the way we now understand atoms in quantum theory, Plato saw these solids as exact, ordered, harmonious, and, contrary to what Democritus thought, transformable. As Heisenberg puts it in his book, “…one atom of fire and two atoms of air can be combined to give one atom of water” (Heisenberg, 69). This is very close to how chemists work with the periodic table. Although we do not really think atoms are hard little solid corpuscles, we do treat them as building blocks when it comes to understanding nature or formulating new materials. Plato’s theory was without experiment, but it was close to what scientists today have discovered in the once inaccessible world of atoms.
Heisenberg’s Prediction
Today, of course, we know atoms are not the smallest particles, nor are they indestructible units of matter. They are understood in terms of energy. Even as far back as 1962, Heisenberg points out that if two subatomic particles moving with high kinetic energy collide, new elementary particles appear from the available energy. Heisenberg says this as the “best proof that all particles are made from the same substance: energy” (Heisenberg, 71). Later in the book he identifies energy with form in Aristotelian hylomorphism, which has problems of its own, but in this essay, I want to focus on what Heisenberg said about Plato and quantum theory.
Heisenberg sees energy as strongest connection between Plato and quantum theory because of the esoteric mathematics associated with these ideas. For Heisenberg, energy takes us out of the material realm into the non-material. Plato’s particles were mathematical forms in the same way; they were abstractions. Hence, Heisenberg predicted that elementary particles would someday also be understood purely as mathematical forms, but of a more complicated kind than Plato’s geometric solids. The wave equations, what he calls in the book the “Eigensolutions,” will come to represent the elementary particles just as the regular solids represented Plato’s elements (Heisenberg, 72).
Over sixty years later, quantum theory has indeed taken on a Platonic flavor.
Right in Front of Us
In my reading of contemporary Thomistic philosophers, this is the point of derailment. No to Plato! But I think we would better serve the truth to pause and examine what this means about how we understand the quantum realm. These ancient and modern compatible views provide a platform to think more deeply about “nature” and what it means philosophically but in the context of modern science. I don’t meet a lot of philosophers who want to understand quantum mechanics, and I don’t meet a lot of scientists who want to understand philosophy. It seems questions like this go unaddressed.
Obviously, Thomists do not want to go totally Platonic because that would mean we lose touch with the natural world and fly away into the world of Plato’s Forms, but it is also not clear how to view the complexities of quantum theory in Aristotelian or Thomistic terms. (If you are not familiar with Plato’s Theory of Forms, see here.) There is much to learn in Heisenberg’s book, as well as some things to avoid. He was, after all, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932 “for the creation of quantum mechanics.” For now, I just want to zoom in on what he said about a more complicated kind of mathematics.
The difference in mathematics then, for Plato, and now, for Heisenberg, is the difference in statics and dynamics. That is the difference in kind. Statics deals with forces but without considering changes in motion. Even though they were thought to rearrange, Platonic solids were static forms in the sense (mathematically) that they snap together into structures like building blocks in the eternally cycling cosmos. Quantum theory, on the other hand, is dynamic in that it relies on integral calculus, the measure of relationships of change upon change, to arrive at Eigenvalues. Dynamics deals with the change in motion caused by forces. Statics is like the frame. Dynamics is the messy, lived-in home. Complicated mathematics are required because motion and time never cease.
Nature, i.e., the universe, is a system. As good as we ever get with mathematical modeling, it can never capture the full rush of reality. Right now, as your heart beats, your stomach processes breakfast, your brain struggles with painful memories, and you breathe in the mixture of gases we call air, it is utterly impossible to mathematically capture the exact motion of all the interacting particles. And anyway…that moment is now gone and we’re on to the next one. The world flies by faster than we ever have a prayer of fully analyzing.
Plato saw Forms as the exactness of God (Plato, 56c). Heisenberg posited that quantum theory is a connection with truth, and as such, a closeness to God as the world of mathematics departs from the world of the senses. As Heisenberg puts it:
This immediate connection with truth or, we may in the Christian sense say, with God is the new reality of the world as perceived by our senses (Heisenberg, 77).
For Heisenberg, quantum theory is like the light for Plato’s prisoners who escape from the cave (in his Theory of Forms). Perhaps it is the work of scientists, philosophers, and theologians now — both atheists and theists — to figure out how the light of dynamism in the subatomic realm actually does invite us into a deeper understanding of the systematically whole natural world. There is unity, wholeness, and mystery here. Quantum theory describes the particles that make up our bodies and our world. Look at your hand right now. You can’t see it, but there are all kinds of things going on at the atomic level that we can but cast a mathematical net toward understanding. But it’s right there! The Christian theist just goes one step further than calling this all nature. We add…this is God’s creation. Either way, it’s the same truth.
Sources
Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 67-77.
Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, trans. C. D. Yonge Laërtius (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1915), Book IX, Chapter VIII, 393.
Plato, Timaeus in Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925), 54d-56c.
I wonder what Heisenberg would think about information realism...information all the way down?
To the untutored layman, a beautiful and brisk ride down the white slopes of reality. Thanks for providing the sled.