Tuesday 5 September 2017

The boundaries of matter

Is matter all there is in the universe? And, for that matter, what is matter? I found these two quotes by scientists who have thought deeply about the laws and forces which shape our physical reality:

'All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force. We must assume behind this force is the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.' Max Planck

'Anyone who becomes seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that there is a spirit manifest in the laws of the universe, a spirit vastly superior to that of man.' Albert Einstein

Since science has meanwhile revealed ever more unlikely properties of matter, the boundary between 'matter' and - ? something other? something beyond physical reality, another wave length? - has become rather blurred and ambiguous, as in the discovery that different particles (the smallest entities of matter) react to each other, appear to be somehow connected while this is physically, according to the law of causality, impossible:

'It thus appears that one particle of an entangled pair "knows" what measurement has been performed on the other, and with what outcome, even though there is no known means for such information to be communicated between the particles, which at the time of measurement may be separated by arbitrarily large distances.'

There seems to be a relationship between such findings and C.G. Jung's proposal of synchronicity:

'Jung coined the word "synchronicity" to describe "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." In his book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Jung wrote:
How are we to recognize acausal combinations of events, since it is obviously impossible to examine all chance happenings for their causality? The answer to this is that acausal events may be expected most readily where, on closer reflection, a causal connection appears to be inconceivable.'
Also one thinks of the hypothesis of 'morphic resonance' by Rupert Sheldrake, like Jung's a  controversial and contested idea, but possibly these theories are some intelligent attempts to come to terms with aspects of reality which cannot be convincingly 'explained' by science exclusively informed and defined by material laws.


 


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

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