Physics and anarchy

Physics and Anarchy

Some anarchists have found inspiration in findings in modern physics that suggest the universe may be much more dynamic, spontaneous, and interconnected than classical, Newtonian physics suggested. The theory of general relativity can be seen as a blow to the Newtonian worldview of a static, mechanistic universe that, as Carolyn Merchant has pointed out, helped rationalize capitalist exploitation of people and nature alike. Aspects of quantum theory, such as the uncertainty principle, path integral formulation, and entanglement, suggest to some a holistic, interconnected universe. Theories of a multiverse, derived from quantum mechanics and string theory, offer explanations for why our solar system and universe so conveniently suited for life, without there being a creator dominating the cosmos. Finally, chaos theory has caught the attention of anarchists interested in the universe's spontaneity and unpredictability. Such findings in modern physics point to compelling metaphors for those interested in mutual aid, sustainability, and horizontal societies.

Before proceeding, it is important to note that there is a danger in extrapolating social ideals from physics, a risk of anthropomorphizing atoms and oversimplifying human societies, of finding false affinities between very different phenomena. Rudolf Rocker implores in Nationalism and Culture that society has no set of basic scientific laws akin to those followed by basic particles of matter. “The assertion that the destiny of social structures is determinable according to the laws of a so-called 'social physics' is of no greater significance than the claim of those wise women who pretend to be able to read the destinies of man in tea cups or in the lines of the hands,” Rocker writes. Worse, there is a tendency among some non-scientists to misrepresent physics in order to derive mystical-sounding conclusions. The website Rational Wiki warns that there is an entire industry of “quantum woo,” defined as “the justification of irrational beliefs by an obfuscatory reference to quantum physics”.

Nonetheless, there are reasons why it may still be worthwhile to search modern physics for possible anarchistic metaphors. Social philosophies in every age draw from the physics of their time. The physicist Nick Herbert explains:

In the Middle Ages, when virtually everyone believed the world to be the personal creation of a divine being, society mirrored the hierarchy that supposedly existed in the heavens. Dante's picture of the world...gave everything and everyone his proper place in the medieval scheme of things... Coincident with the rise of the Newtonian physics was the ascent of the modern democracy which stresses a 'rule of laws rather than men'...The Declaration of Independence, for example, 'we hold these truths to be self-evident' reads more like a mathematical theorem than a political document.

While the Newtonian worldview had a certain democratic potential, it also had a deeply atomistic and mechanistic side. Newton saw a dead universe, where all matter could be reduced to lifeless atoms disconnected from each other and set it motion only passively by forces such as gravity. Newton's work “epitomized the dead world resulting from mechanism,” writes Carolyn Merchant. Newtonian atomism inspired the political economy of Adam Smith, involving an entire society of self-intererested actors. In David Graeber's words:

Newton had represented God as a cosmic watchmaker who had created the physical machinery of the universe in such a way that it would operate for the ultimate benefit of humans, and then let it run on its own. Smith was trying to make a similar, Newtonian argument. God—or Divine Providence—as he put it—had arranged matters in such a way that our pursuit of self-interest would nonetheless, given an unfettered market, be guided 'as if by an invisible hand' to promote the general welfare.

In addition, elites used the mechanistic worldview to rationalize “biopower,” a regime of control over people's bodies including their reproductive processes. Arguing that people were just complicated machines, elites subjugated working-class bodies to the interests of capitalist accumulation. Sylvia Federici writes:

In Mechanical Philosophy, the body is described by analogy with the machine, often with emphasis on its inertia. The body is conceived as brute matter, wholly divorced from any rational qualities; it does not know, does not want, does not feel..Mechanical Philosophy contributed to increasing the ruling-class control over the natural world, control over human nature being the first, most indispensable step.

In the twentieth century, general relativity would overturn the Newtonian worldview that had been long associated with capitalist industrialization. Quantum mechanics would provide grounds for interpreting the universe as having certain similarities, perhaps superficial, with an anti-authoritarian society.

Anarchist themes

Drawing on the science of ecology, the anarchist Murray Bookchin defines “libertarian” with reference to principles he saw in nature: “unity in diversity, spontaneity, and complementary relationships, free from all hierarchy and domination”. Working backwards from this definition, this article asks whether the universe as understood by contemporary physics displays tendencies that might be considered libertarian.

A multiverse without Gods or Masters

Although there are a number of religious anti-authoritarian movements and societies, anarchists influenced by Bakunin often extend their rejection of authoritarianism to a rejection of God, who, they say, should be opposed like any other ruler. “[I]f God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him,” argued Bakunin. “No gods no masters” is a widespread Anarchist slogan and the title to a popular Anarchist anthology. As explained by Graeber above, Newton invoked a creator to explain the formation of the universe. Contemporary physics, however, offers explanations that remove God from physics much like natural selection removed God from biology. Therefore, contemporary physics, moreso than Newtonian physics, portrays nonhuman nature as lacking hierarchy and domination.

String theory, M theory, and the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics lead scientists to believe that this universe is just one of many that exist in a multiverse. M theory says there are as many as 10^500 different universes. One of the implications of there being many universes is that it is understandable how our solar system has the very unlikely conditions for supporting life. As Darwin's theory of natural selection provided biologists with a non-theological explanation for the unlikely existence of complex life, the anthropic principle can provide physicists with an explanation for the unlikely existence of life's physical preconditions.

The earth’s nearly circular orbit is crucial for life. if it were much more elliptical, then winter would get too cold, and summer too hot. If the sun were just 20% more massive or 20% less massive, the earth would be hotter than Mars or colder than Venus. The earth is in a very small zone of habitable distance from the sun. These can be explained with the “weak anthropic principle” which says there are many, many solar systems so it is not so surprising that at least one of them has these conditions.

Going further, the universe itself has certain conditions that seem “tailor-made to support us,” according to Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. If the universe’s strong nuclear force were changed by 0.5% or the electrical force changed by 4%, this would destroy either nearly all carbon or all oxygen in every star. If the weak nuclear force were weaker, all the hydrogen in early universe would have turned to helium and there’d be no normal stars. If it were much stronger, exploding stars wouldn’t eject carbon through space. The “strong anthropic principle” says that since there are many different universes, it makes sense that at least one of them can support life. In response to developments in M theory, Hawking has written, “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”

An interconnected whole

Recall that the Newtonian worldview of a universe full of unconnected atoms inspired individualist strains of political economy. Rejecting such atomized social philosophies, anarchists are quick to emphasize that individuals' relations to their community, environment and universe shape them who they are. This understanding of the self embedded in community leads anarchists to emphasize mutual aid and deepen their connections with the people and environments around them.

Aspects of the new physics suggest that objects are connected to each other in a number of ways. Particles on opposite sides of the universe are sometimes “entangled” with each other, meaning that the direction one spins affects the direction the other spins. According to theories involving a multiverse, the measurement of a quantum event anywhere can instantly split the entire universe into two. Path integral formation says that each quantum-scale particle travels everywhere in space-time all the time. Scientists' rejection of the idea of absolute time and the probabilistic tendencies of matter at the quantum-level lead some scientists to understand the universe as a indivisible whole, not merely an assortment of parts.

Some anarchists, especially those involved in deep ecology movements, have found in contemporary physics a groundwork for a deep, sometimes mystical identification with the entire universe. This identification of the individual self with a broader cosmological whole can have either authoritarian or authoritarian implications. It is authoritarian if it entirely merges the individual into the universe, sacrificing individuality for the good of the whole. It can be libertarian, however, if it is based in unity in diversity and thus strengthens both the individual and the whole at the same time. Contemporary physics, it could be argued, represents the latter possibility. The interconnections of the universe do not imply conformity of objects. To the contrary, theories of the multiverse imply a continuous formation of new entirely new, diverse worlds.

An understanding of the universe as containing deep interconnections also can be used to preclude the Mechanical Worldview, described above by Carolyn Merchant and Sylvia Federici, which has been used to subjugate humans and nature to the aim of capital accumulation.

Relativity

Relativity theory marked a shift from the Newtonian worldview of a static, dead universe to a new view of a dynamic, expanding universe in which space and time are interrelated with all the universe's bodies and forces. As Stephen Hawking explains:

Space and time are now dynamic quantities: when a body moves or a force acts, it affects the curvature of space and time—and in turn the structure of space-time affects the way in which bodies move and forces act. Space and time not only affect but also are affected by everything that happens in the universe.

Einstein's concept of relativity came in two parts, a “special theory of relativity” in 1905 and a “general theory of relativity” in 1915. The special theory of relativity responded to James Clerk Maxwell, who had found light travels at the same speed for all observers. The problem with Maxwell's finding was that it could not explain how different people can observe a single beam of light travelling at different speeds. Suppose someone turns on a flashlight on a moving train. A person on the train will see the beam of light move merely from one end of the car to another, but someone standing outside the train will see the beam of light, along with the train, moving many times the length of the car. How can the speed of light be constant when the two observers saw the same beam of light moving two different differences?

One explanation was that empty space was full of a substance called ether and that the speed of light should be measured in relation to it. When the scientists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley tried to test the ether theory, however, they found no evidence of any such substance existing.

Then in 1905, Albert Einstein, a “hitherto unknown clerk in the Swiss patent office” published his special theory of relativity, which asserted that the laws of science for all freely moving observers are the same, no matter their speed. One consequence of his theory was that there is no such thing as absolute time. Recall the flashlight on the train. “[I]f the observer on the train shone a flashlight, the two observers would disagree on the distance the light traveled. Since speed is distance divided by time, if they disagree on the distance the light has travelled, the only way for them to agree on the speed is for them to also disagree about the time the trip has taken,. In other words, the theory of relativity requires us to put an end to the idea of absolute time! Instead, each observer must have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and identical clocks carried by different observers need not agree.”

In 1915, Einstein published his general theory of relativity, which unlike the special theory, applied to gravity. The main postulate of Einstein's general theory of relativity was that in small enough regions of space, it is impossible to tell whether you are at rest in a gravitational field or uniformly accelerating in empty space. The far-reaching impacts of this theory can be seen in the “twin paradox”. Suppose one twin boards a spaceship that accelerates to nearly the speed of light and the other twin stays on earth. When the first twin returns from space, she will be much younger than the twin who stayed on earth, since she experienced less time than the person who stayed on earth. “Our biological clocks are equally affected by these changes in the flow of time,” explains Hawking.

Einstein's equations imply that the universe contained zero matter at some point in the distant past, about 13.7 billion years ago. In contrast to Newtonian physics, relativity theory implies that the universe is expanding. For all its explanatory power, general relativity could not explain the big bang, when the universe was reduced to a single point. Scientists developed a new branch of physics, quantum mechanics, to explain phenomenon occurring on the very smallest scale.

Holistic implications of relativity?

In a 1950 letter to a grieving father, Einstein himself indicated that he saw the universe as holistic, although he did not specify whether or how specifically this view is related to his scientific research:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.

The philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell thought relativity theory should lead scientists to adopt a form of methodological holism reminiscent of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus.

From all this it seems to follow that events, not particles, must be the 'stuff' of physics. What has been thought of as a particle will have to be thought of as a series of events....Thus 'matter' is not part of the ultimate material of the world, but merely a convenient way of collecting events into bundles.

Quantum Mechanics

In 1900, the scientist Max Planc argued that light and other electromagnetic waves consisted of packets called quanta. A branch of physics called “quantum mechanics” emerged, which describes what occurs at the smallest scale of the universe. One of the most startling aspects of quantum mechanics is Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which says that the position and velocity of a quantum-scale particle prior to its measurement can never be determined. Heisenberg noted that in order to measure the speed and velocity of any particle, you need to shine a light on it. If you shine a light with a high wavelength, you can measure the particle's velocity but you can't measure its precise location. To find the precise position, you need to use a light with a short wavelength. The problem is that when you shoot light at the particle, the light affects the particle's velocity. The shorter the wavelength, the more the light affects the particle's velocity. So, the more accurately you measure the particle's position, the less accurately you can measure what its velocity was. The uncertainty principle shows that scientists cannot predict with certainty the movement of particles. “One of the revolutionary properties of quantum mechanics is that it does not predict a single definite result for an observation. Instead, it predicts a number of possible outcomes and tells us how likely each of these is.”

It may be tempting to think that the particle actually has a definite position and velocity all along and that the measurement merely disturbs a particle which had a definite state prior to measurement. Nick Herbert calls this view the “disturbance model”. However, phenomena like quantum entanglement contradict the disturbance model. The probabilistic nature of quantum objects is not merely a consequence of philosophy of science (such as the fact that the position can't be proven or falsified). The quantum objects are actually probabilistic in a way that has required scientists to explore new conceptions of reality.

Path integral formulation

One of the consequences of the uncertainty principle is the concept of particle-wave duality. The tiniest bits of matter behave both like particles and like waves. Fire an electron—normally thought of as a particle—at a wall with two slits, and the electron will interfere with itself as if it were a wave of light. The screen on the other side of the wall will show a pattern that looks like a wave was sent through the two slits.

Richard Feynman's “path integral formulation” theory provides a framework for understanding how quantum objects can make up larger bodies like basketballs and boomerangs that conform to to classical laws of motion. According to Feynman, each particle takes every possible path in the universe, including through both slits. Hawking and Mlodinow summarize:

“In the double-slit experiment Feynman's ideas mean that particles take paths that go through only one slit or the other; paths that thread through the first slit, back out through the second slit, and then through the first again; paths that visit the restaurant that serves that great curried shrimp, and then circle Jupiter a few times before heading home; even paths that go across the universe and back.

With larger objects, it turns out, paths tend to cancel each other out except for the one predicted by Newtonian physics. Hence large objects move just as Newton's theory predicts they will. Feynman's theory implies that at every moment, you travel everywhere in the universe. In the words of physicist Michio Kaku:

[A]s odd as it may seem, every time you walk across the room, somehow your body 'sniffs out' all possible paths ahead of time, even those extending to the distant quasars and the big bang, and then adds them up... When I first learned of Feynman's point of view as a graduate student, it changed my entire mental picture of the universe...it was the idea that I am in some sense sniffing out paths that take me to Mars or to the distant stars as I walk across the room that altered my worldview. Suddenly, I had a strange new mental picture of myself living in a quantum world.

==Quantum Entanglement==

Two quantum objects can become entangled, in such a way that when one spins in one direction, the other instantly spins in the opposite direction. In 1935, Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen made an argument against quantum mechanics, saying that if two particles were entangled and then shot in opposite directions at a distance, one would have to be able to somehow send information to the other faster than the speed of light. Einstein ridiculed this communication as impossible “spooky action at a distance.”

With “Bell's theorem,” physicist John Stewart Bell calculated that if quantum mechanics was correct the two particles would be correlated one way, while if Einstein and other skeptics were correct the particles would be correlated another way. Experimentation with entangled particles proved the quantum mechanicists correct and Einstein wrong.

The entanglement of particles across the universe implies a much stronger interconnectedness than Newtonian physics envisioned. As Kaku writes,

There is a cosmic “entanglement” between every atom of our body and atoms that are light-years distant. Since all matter came from a single explosion, the big bang, in some sense the atoms of our body are linked with some atoms on the other side of the universe in some kind of cosmic quantum web. Entangled particles are somewhat like twins still joined by an umbilical cord (their wave function) which can be light-years across. What happens to one member automatically affects the other, and hence knowledge concerning one particle can instantly reveal knowledge about its pair. Entangled pairs act as if they were a single object, although they may be separated by a large distance. (More precisely, since the wave functions of the particles in the big bang were once connected and coherent, their wave functions might still be partially connected billions of years after the big bang, so that disturbances in one part of the wave function can influence another distant part of the wave function.)

According to Nick Herbert, “Bell's theorem shows that the holistic grammar of the quantum formalism reflects the inseparable nature of reality itself. Beneath phenomena, the world is a seamless whole.”

Herbert later concludes:

“Religion assures us that we are all brothers and sisters, children of the same deity; biologists say that we are intertwined with all life-forms on this planet: our fortunes rise or fall with theirs. Now physicists have discovered that the very atoms of our bodies are woven out of a superliminal fabric.”

More cautiously, Richard Healey in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, writes, “Superficially, such entanglement of systems already demonstrates nonseparability. At a deeper level, it has been maintained that the puzzling statistics that arise from measurements on entangled quantum systems either demonstrate, or are explicable in terms of, holism or nonseparability rather than any problematic action at a distance”.

Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

The “Schrödinger's cat” thought experiment helps illustrate a number of ways that quantum physicists understand reality. Suppose that inside of a box, there is a cat, an atom of uranium, a Geiger counter, a hammer, and a bottle of poison gas. If the atom decays, it sets off a Geiger counter which launches the hammer, which breaks the bottle of poison gas, killing the cat. There’s no way to predict ahead of time whether the uranium will decay or not, since the decaying is a quantum event. According to some interpretations, prior to measurement the cat exists in a quantum state, or wavefunction, where it is both alive and dead at the same time.

Rational Wiki warns, “It's best not to take the experiment literally and at face value as that can lead to some extreme misconceptions about quantum mechanics. At best, the superposition can represent our uncertainty and our lack of knowledge about the state of the cat. So the 'dead and alive' interpretation is true only on a metaphysical and probabilistic level—to mistake it as a physical reality for the cat is a different matter entirely.” The article goes on to point out the the cat itself, or even the Geiger counter, can be interpreted as an “observer” that collapses the quantum state well before a scientist opens the box.

Many Worlds Interpretation

The Many Worlds Interpretation, proposed in 1957 by Hugh Everett III, says “the cat is both dead and alive because the universe has split into two. In one universe, the cat is dead; in another universe, the cat is alive. In fact, at each quan- tum juncture, the universe splits in half, in a never-ending sequence of splitting universes.”

The advantage of the Many Worlds Interpretation is that it does not require the wavefunction to collapse, making it simpler than competing theories like the Copenhagen Interpretation.

Although Bell's theorem does not apply to the Many Worlds Interpretation, Everett's worldview still implies an interconnectedness of things across the universe. Nick Herbert comments:

Although Bell's theorem does not apply to an Everett-style universe, there's plenty of non-locality without it. Any model of reality in which a tiny event in the Andromeda galaxy can instantly split my reality into thousands of Xerox copies cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called 'local.'

The Everett worldview has some poetic affinities with the Zapatistas' concept of a “world where many worlds fit” and the slogan “another world is possible”. It also allows for the anthropic principle to explain plausibly how the universe developed the specific conditions for life without divine intervention. See further discussion on the multiverse in the section on “A multiverse without Gods or masters” and in the section on M theory.

Copenhagen Interpretation

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics says that “there is no deep reality” prior to measurement and that it is the act of measurement “collapses” the wavefunction of an object into a definite state. It is measurement, then, that makes the cat either dead or alive. N. David Mermin explained the implication, “we now know that the moon is not there when nobody looks.”

In his controversial 1975 book The Tao of Physics, physicist Fritjof Capra uses the Copenhagen interpretation to argue that everything in the universe is connected. The core of his argument rests on the uncertainty principle. Since no one object can exist in a non-quantum state without being observed, Capra argues, no object can be understood in isolation from other the observer.

Quantum theory thus reveals an essential interconnectedness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smaller units. As we penetrate into matter, we find that it is made of particles, but these are not the 'basic building blocks' in the sense of Democritus and Newton. They are merely idealizations which are useful from a practical point of view, but have no fundamental significance. In the words of Neils Bohr, 'Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interactions with other systems.

Capra's book is controversial among scientists. Rational Wiki gives a literature review:

Many who acknowledged Capra had described quantum physics fairly though his correlations between it and Buddhist mysticism were superficial and silly, and Peter Woit noted the book used quite a bit of out-of-date physics. Physicist John Gribbin described The Tao of Physics as the only purveyor of quantum-based mysticism that had any genuine grasp of quantum physics at all, although the book's physics has been severely criticized by Victor Stenger.

However, many quantum physicists appear to share Capra's commitment to a methodology that recognizes the impossibility of reducing the universe into separate, definite objects. Writing for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Richard Healey reports, “It is surprisingly difficult to find methodological reductionists among physicists.” Hawking and Mlodinow seem to agree with Capra that it is impossible to understand any object without understanding that it is affected by the objects with which it interacts. They explain, “According to quantum physics, you cannot 'just' observe something. That is, quantum physics recognizes that to make an observation, you must interact with the object you are observing.”

David Bohm's interpretation

Offering an alternative to both the Many Worlds Interpretation and the Copenhagen interpretation, David Bohm believes the universe is an undivided whole. He wrote, “One is led to a new notion of unbroken wholeness which denies the classical analyzability of the world into separately and independently existing parts..The inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality.”

String theory and M theory

While relativity theory describes phenomenon at a large scale and quantum mechanics describes them on a small scale, neither theory can completely explain the universe. Specifically, gravity does not conform to quantum mechanics. Scientists have searched for a quantum theory of gravity that combines the insights of relativity and quantum mechanics.

String theory, invented in the 1960s, attempts to provide a unified theory of physics. It suggests that particles are actually vibrations on strings that are curled up into up to twenty-six dimensions. We never notice the extra dimensions (beyond the four we inhabit: length, width, depth and time), since they are curled up into a million million million million millionth of an inch.

In the 1990s, some physicists decided that string theories all belong to a more fundamental theory called M theory. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow write that M theory is “the only candidate for a complete theory of the universe”. M theory says that there are 11 dimensions and as many as 10^500 parallel universes.

A consequence of there being many universes is that it becomes much more explicable that our solar system (one of many galaxies in many universes) has the very unlikely combination of physical conditions for life to develop. See the discussion in “A multiverse without Gods or Masters”. As with the Many Worlds Interpretation, M theory has an implication of non-local connectedness, where an observer on one end of the universe can spark the formation of a modified replica of the entire universe.

Finally, the existence of further dimensions allows for a possible connectedness unnoticed in the first four dimensions. “If these additional dimensions are appropriately considered spatial, then...processes involving classical springs...would count as (spatiotemporally) nonseparable, even though all particles and their properties conform to spatial separability.”

Chaos theory

A branch of physics involved in “chaos theory” has shown that the universe may be even more spontaneous and resistant to mechanistic explanation than has been understood. As Wikipedia notes, chaos theory considers systems (anything from weather to evolution) to follow “widely diverging” patterns that, while deterministic, are impossible to predict. Edward Lorenz summarizes the theory, “Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.”

“Chaos theory does not deny natural order; it denies static equilibrium, and reaffirms Heraclitus' notion of flux...Both relativity and quantum theory imply that the universe is an unbroken whole, and chaos theory does not undermine such a worldview” writes the anarchist Peter Marshall. Hakim Bey argues that chaos theory implies “that reality itself subsists in a state of ontological anarchy,” since it means reality “has no 'ruler' and 'no laws'”.