Frame-by-Frame: How Early 20th Century Physics Was Shaped by Brownie Cameras and Early Cinema.
By Robert Hanna
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Frame-by-Frame: How Early 20th Century Physics Was Shaped by Brownie Cameras and Early Cinema
I. Introduction
We create and use tools to change the world, for better or worse; but in so doing, our tools also change us, for better or worse. An important elaboration of this truth is what Otto Paans and I call The Theory of Thought-Shapers, aka TTS.[i] TTS says this:
Necessarily, all human thinking is partially determined, formed, and guided by essentially non-conceptual mental representations of allegories, analogies, blueprints, catechisms, diagrams, displays, icons, images, lay-outs, metaphors, mnemonics, models, outlines, parables, pictures, scenarios, schemata, sketches, spreadsheets, stereotypes, symbols, tableaux, and templates,[ii] featuring egocentrically-centered, action-poised temporal representations and spatial representations as fundamental, in a way that’s not only causal but also irreducibly normative, and inherently external-context-sensitive or indexical, for better or worse.
In this essay, I don’t want to present and defend TTS — Paans and I do that elsewhere[iii] — but instead to apply it to early 20th century physics, and in particular to the revolutionary new physics provided by relativity theory and quantum mechanics. My proposal is that these revolutionary physical theories, as created by the revolutionary thinking of physicists like Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, were partially causally determined, formed, and normatively guided, in their historical context, and ultimately for the worse, by a small set of thought-shapers that primitively represent causation. In turn, I’ll call this set of thought-shapers high modernist causal thought-shapers. By “high modernist,” I’m referring to what James C. Scott has aptly called “a high modernist ideology,” or high modernism for short:
[High modernism] is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.[iv]
In the grip of high modernism, the revolutionary early 20th century physicists created physical theories that postulate systems of deterministic or indeterministic mathematical natural laws, but the meanings of the theory-bound statements of those laws are strictly underdetermined by their conceptual and propositional content, hence high modernist causal thought-shapers are required to fix their meanings.
II. John Locke’s Big Idea: From Human Intentional Action to High Modernist Causal Thought-Shapers For Early 20th Century Physics
Now for what I’ll call John Locke’s big idea: that we get cognitive access to causal thought-shapers by generalizing from our own primitive subjective experience — i.e., our phenomenology — of mental causation in rational human intentional action.[v]
For the purposes of classical/Newtonian physics, our phenomenology of rational human intentional action provides a classical causal thought-shaper that mimics intentional acts that manipulate objects in our local environment, within a single overarching container-space and using a single overarching time-frame/clock, for example, playing billiards, shaking apple tree limbs until the apples fall down, etc. Then this classical causal thought-shaper is conservatively extended via conceptualization and generalization to all of macrophysical reality, at all distance-scales, time-scales, size-scales, and force-scales, according to The Force Law F=MA and also The Inverse Square Law for gravitational attraction.
For the purposes of Einsteinian relativity physics, our phenomenology of rational human intentional action provides a high modernist causal thought-shaper that mimics intentional acts using local causal intermediaries, for example, light signals, and also rulers/measuring rods, clocks, and classic Brownie film-roll cameras of the kind Einstein would have known circa 1905, used as measurement devices. Then, taking light-signals, and the speed of light operating as an absolute and universal causal intermediary-and-constraint, we derive relativistic causal operationality, aka “locality.” In turn, this high modernist causal thought-shaper is conservatively extended via conceptualization and generalization to all of macrophysical reality, at all distance-scales, time-scales, size-scales, and energy-scales, according to The Energy Law E=MC2, inherently limited, however by light-signals and the speed of light as an absolute and universal causal intermediary-and-constraint.
For the purposes of classical Bohrian quantum mechanics, our phenomenology of rational human intentional action provides a high modernist causal thought-shaper that mimics intentional acts with absolutely synchronous (aka “non-local”) body-movements — for example, the intentional performance of raising my arm — as captured on film by means of a classic hand-cranked movie camera loaded with classic 35 mm filmstock, 16 frames per second, used in silent films of the kind Bohr would have known circa World War I, and then represented mathematically. In this cinematic high modernist causal thought-shaper, each frame in the film stands for a single quantum state. Then, further exploring the internal stucture of this cinematic high modernist causal thought-shaper, let’s consider the position of any proper sub-part (and let us call that a “particle”) of the picture within a given frame, say, the particle of a framed picture that contains an image of a finger on one of my hands. There is a certain probability as to where that particle will appear in the picture in the next frame, and as to what its black-white pointilliste quality (energy-state quantity: say charge, momentum, or spin) will be. But its particular position and its black-white pointilliste quality (energy-state quantity) in that next frame will also depend on all the positional configurations and black-white pointilliste qualities (energy-state quantities) of all the particles in that frame, and there is an irreducible causal gap or jump (quantum leap) between frames, no matter how many frames per second the film contains.
Now let’s even further consider the film rolling, frame by frame, whether forward or backwards (it ultimately makes no difference in an equilibrium, time-reversible system), in a way that that represents the deterministic evolution of the wave function according to the Schrödinger equation. The standpoint of the film viewer/experimenter, who “intervenes” by watching/measuring, is the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. And the “god’s-eye” standpoint of the film editor, who can cut frames, insert/splice bits of film, or doctor individual frames (call those “hidden variables”), is the post-classical Bohmian hidden-variable interpretation.[vi] But above all, the Bohmian editor-physicist sees the whole “movie,” the physical universe, as nothing but a single “film roll,” the deterministic evolution of the wave function, laid out flat on the editing table (or wound up in the Moviola,[vii] a classical movie editing device invented in 1924) as a series of essentially static individual “frames,” quantum states) with inherently mechanical clock-time development from any given “frame”/quantum state or set of “frames”/quantum states to later “frames”/quantum states, but also with (i) merely probabilistic relations between positions and energy-state quantities of particles between any given “frame”/quantum state and the next “frame”/quantum state, (ii) causal “gaps” or “jumps”/quantum leaps from “frame”/quantum state to “frame”/quantum state, (iii) holistic non-locality inside each frame, and (iv) the in-principle reversibility of the entire film roll of the movie”/physical universe, together with enantiomorphic/mirror-reflected flips of the positions of all particles inside the “frames”/quantum states.
III. We Murder to Represent
As Lee Smolin rightly points out, the cosmological primitive fact of real, asymmetric time (as immanent, for example, in my bodily performance of raising my right arm and hand, as subjectively experienced by me, which was being “captured on film” in the cinematic high modernist causal thought-shaper) has been completely edited out by quantum cosmology.[viii] So too, although Smolin overlooks this, the other cosmological primitive fact of real, orientable global space with object-embedding-and-local-centering in which, for example, right-handed particles inherently cannot be made congruent with left-handed particles within the same global orientable 3-dimensional space, has also been completely edited out.
Wordsworth wrote, in “The Tables Turned,” that
[s]weet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things: —
We murder to dissect.[ix]
Thus by means of the 19th century mechanistic biologist’s “meddling intellect,” we murder to dissect by turn living organisms into nothing but ordered heaps of dead organic material mysteriously related by deterministic causal and mathematical connections, natural machines. Homologously, but now in an infinitely expanded way, and with cosmological scope, in relativity theory and classical or post-classical quantum mechanics, we murder to represent. And thereby, by means of our early 20th century high modernist mechanistic physicist’s equally “meddling intellect,” we turn real, asymmetric time (and especially the real, asymmetric time of our lives) into nothing but the operational tick-tock of clocks measuring light signals recorded by Brownie-style cameras, “captured” in non-Euclidean geometry ascurves in a fourth dimension of space (thereby spatializing time — but it is also crucial to note that the temporalization of space would be equally mistaken[x]), or into ordered heaps of quantum states, each of which is an essentially static holistic configuration of entangled, handed particles in a single frozen “now,” comprehended from the platonic god’s-eye standpoint of The Great Quantum Cosmology Film Editor, cranking His cosmic Moviola — whether forward or backwards, and whether with mirror-reversed frames or not, it does not really matter — and extra-cosmologically contemplating (for example) The Implicate Order.[xi] Genuine but still epicyclical advances in quantum cosmology like quantum gravity block-universe theory, or quantum field block-universe theory, make no essential difference to this fundamentally chronocidal or real-time-murdering and geometrocidal or real-space-murdering cosmological picture: namely, the cinematic high modernist causal thought-shaper, the ultimate franchise in 20th and 21st century quantum-mechanical movie-making.
The scientific revolution in physics that happened in the early 20th century came about because physicists learned that by operationalizing our access to manifest reality in terms of the experimental means we use to measure it, we can apply mathematical physics to these experimental means of measurement themselves, and thereby generate many true predictions. But although, via his theory of transcendental idealism for human sensibility,[xii] Immanuel Kant taught us that necessarily, the manifestly real or phenomenal world conforms to the structures of our sensible cognitive capacities for representing that world, and not the other way around, whether the world is phenomenal or noumenal, nevertheless Kant’s Copernican Revolution does not extend EITHER to the thesis that necessarily, the manifestly real world conforms to our experimental means of measuring it, OR to the thesis that necessarily, the manifestly real world conforms to the mathematical physical theories we apply to our experimental means of measuring it. On the contrary, it’s a fundamental fallacy to hold either of these theses: the fallacy of confusing the (means, or mode of) representation with (the real thing, or real world) represented, aka The Representation–>Represented Fallacy, for short.
The discovery and critique of The Representatio–>Represented Fallacy are made possible and rationally justified by the fact that essentially embodied, essentially non-conceptual thought-shapers not only provide direct cognitive access to the manifestly real world, but also are essentially independent of (i) all concepts and conceptualization, (ii) all measurement, which always and only proceeds under some or another concept of a unit, scale, or system of measurement, and (iii) all theories, which are built out of propositions and logical relations, which in turn are built, respectively, out of concepts and logic. Now, please do not get me wrong: Mach, Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Bohm, Wheeler, Hawking, and all the other the creators of and contributors to the Standard Models of cosmology and particle physics (aka SMC and SMPP) were absolutely brilliant intellects. I’m not denying that in the slightest! It’s just that they all committed The Representation–> Represented Fallacy, and that they’ve all also had their thinking partially causally determined, formed, and normatively guided by high modernist causal thought-shapers, ultimately for the worse.
IV. Conclusion
If we look back 250 years behind the early 20th century scientific revolution in physics and its endemic tendency to commit The Representation–>Represented Fallacy, we can see that synchronous/non-local causation already appears macrophysically in Newtonian physics: for example, The Force Law F=MA says, in effect, that acceleration acts absolutely synchronously/non-locally on mass in order to produce force. But even leaving aside Newton and just focusing on the commonsense or manifestly real world, whenever, for example, you turn a corner to the right in your car, the rotation of the steering wheel and steering column act absolutely synchronously/non-locally in a global orientable space with object-embedding-and-local-centering, on the rotation of the wheels relative to the pavement; and absolutely synchronous/non-local causation applies to the ordinary operations of rotation-devices more generally. Indeed, the minded human animal body is itself a living rotation device that’s constantly and spontaneously in action throughout its life-span, whether in repose or in self-initiated movement, embedded and locally centered in a global orientable space, and proprioception in rational human intentional bodily performances, is an essentially embodied, essentially non-conceptual, pre-reflective or non-self-consciously conscious awareness of that lifelong ongoing absolutely synchronous/non-local action, always embedded and locally centered in global orientable space.
What’s radically different in Standard Models-style quantum cosmology and particle physics, however, is that the macrophysical cinematic high modernist causal thought-shaper that, via The Representation–>Represented Fallacy, murders the real asymmetric time and real asymmetric space of nature and of our lives, and is then conservatively extended via conceptualization and generalization, so that absolutely synchronous causation/non-locality applies to all entangled/complementary microphysical wave-particle phenomena anywhere in the universe, hence at all distance-scales, size-scales, and energy-scales. All the paradoxes of quantum cosmology and particle physics flow from cinematic high modernist causal thought-shapers, together with the original sin of The Representation–>Represented Fallacy, including, of course, paradoxical quantum uncertainty/indeterminacy in the two-slit experiment (and other two path experiments), and Schrödinger’s not-so-very-practical, yet also highly paradoxical, tragical cat.[xiii]
Again, however, it’s crucial to see that non-locality is not paradoxical — on the contrary, it is a commonsensical and phenomenological mainstay of the manifestly real world, and our “human, all-too-human” rational intentional life-careers in and through that world. But a particle or cat whose statistically-openended life/death, or momentum/position, in the next cosmological film frame/quantum state depends either on the “intervention” of the viewer/experimenter-measurer or on the Moviola/hidden variable crankings of The Great Quantum Cosmology Film Editor is highly paradoxical. Non-locality appears to be paradoxical only if you have already dogmatically internalized the Einsteinian/special relativity assumption that, necessarily, all causal efficacy in the natural world rides the rails of photons or surfs the undulations of light-waves. But it just ain’t so, as non-local causation in the manifestly real world self-evidently demonstrates. The honest-to-goodness truth, then, is that some causal efficacy in the natural world conforms to the physical properties of light, namely, deterministic relativity-constrained causation, whereas other causal efficacy in the natural world does not, namely indeterministic quantum causation, and non-deterministic, non-indeterministic natural rational human self-determination, aka deep freedom.[xiv] But purveyors of the Standard Models simply cannot see this, because their thinking has been partially causally determined, formed, and normatively guided, for more than a century, and ultimately for the worse, by high modernist causal thought-shapers like mental representations of Brownie cameras and early cinema.
NOTES
[i] R. Hanna and O. Paans, “Thought-Shapers,” (Unpublished MS, 2021), working draft available online at URL = <https://www.academia.edu/45687798/Thought_Shapers_Co_authored_with_Otto_Paans_April_2021_version_>.
[ii] This list isn’t intended to be complete, but instead only to be a working list of paradigm cases to be explained by TTS. Indeed, given the precise characterization of thought-shapers worked out in Hanna and Paans, “Thought-Shapers,” the list could in principle be extended according to those criteria. Moreover, allegories, catechisms, and parables differ slightly from the other items on the list, in a way that Paans and I briefly describe in section 1 of that essay.
[iii] See Hanna and Paans, “Thought-Shapers.”
[iv] J.C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1998), p. 4.
[v] See J. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), book II, ch. xxi; R. Hanna and M. Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), esp. chs. 3–5; and R. Hanna, “Will-Power: Essentially Embodied Agentive Phenomenology, By Way of O’Shaughnessy,” in C. Erhard and T. Keiling (eds.), Routledge Handbook: The Phenomenology of Agency (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 312–333.
[vi] See, e.g., D. Bohm and B. Hiley, “On the Intuitive Understanding of Nonlocality as Implied by Quantum Theory.” Foundations of Physics 5 (1975): 93–109; D. Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2007); and S. Goldstein, “Bohmian Mechanics,”in E.N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 Edition). Available online at URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/qm-bohm/>.
[vii] See, e.g., Wikipedia, “Moviola” (2021), available online at URL = <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moviola>.
[viii] See, e.g., L. Smolin, Time Reborn (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), ch. 7; and L. Smolin, “Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe” (2014), available online at URL = <http://www.realtechsupport.org/UB/SR/texts/Smolin_TimeReborn_summary_2014.pdf>.
[ix] W. Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” (1798), available online at URL = <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45557/the-tables-turned>.
[x] Indeed, temporalizing space is Smolin’s equal-and-opposite mistake to Einstein’s mistake of spatializing time, insofar as Smolin “murders” real space by turning it into a derivative, purely relational fact that emerges from the primitive fact of asymmetric time at some point after The Big Bang, by means of “geometrogenesis”; see Smolin, Time Reborn, ch. 15.
[xi] See Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, esp. chs. 5–7.
[xii] See, e.g., R. Hanna, “Directions in Space, Non-Conceptual Form, and the Foundations of Transcendental Idealism,” in D. Schulting (ed.), Kantian Nonconceptualism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 99–115.
[xiii] See, e.g., Wikipedia, “Schrödinger’s Cat” (2021), available online at URL = <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat>.
[xiv] See, e.g., R. Hanna, Deep Freedom and Real Persons: A Study in Metaphysics (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 2) (New York: Nova Science, 2018).
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