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This century has seen science come to the stark realisation that a number
of things we have 'taken as read' since Newton, are in fact only relative,
or are merely deficient models. Our new realisations even challenged
the most basic building blocks of Newtonian scence such as 'cause and effect'.
Two hundred years after George Berkeley, and Quantum
field theory has even dismissed the myth of 'solid matter'.
| We have not yet embraced a paradigm to cope with the 'new' realities,
such as light being both wave and/or particle depending on who is 'watching',
and the bizarre implications of Quantum mechanics and of Heisenberg's Uncertainty
Principle (where everything we measure is subject to inherently random
and unpredictable fluctuations). |
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In 1941, shortly before his death, linguist Benjamin
Whorf, in Language Thought and Reality, wrote:
Science cannot yet understand the transcendental logic of such a
state of affairs, for it has not yet freed itself from the illusory necessities
of common logic which are only at bottom necessities of grammatical pattern
in Western Aryan grammar: necessities for substances which are only necessities
for substantives in certain sentence positions, necessities for forces,
attractions, etc. which are only necessities for verbs in certain other
positions and so on. Science if it survives the impending darkness,
will next take up the consideration of linguistic principles and divest
itself of these illusory linguistic necessities, too long held to be the
substance of reason itself.
The 'New Physics' is having a profound impact on our understanding of reality,
particularly as far as its integration with consciousness.
See: Erwin Schroedinger
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