For Every Action There is an Equal and Opposite Reaction

Forces always occur in pairs. For example, when you push a cart, the cart pushes back against you; when gravity pulls you down against the ground, the ground pushes up against your feet. When you fire a rifle, you feel the recoil. When gravity pulls down on a neck in a noose, the rope pulls up. Whether it’s a jet plane, a rowboat or a baseball bat, Newton’s Third Law of Motion shapes just about everything in our lives that can be touched or felt.

This is a basic law of physics; it’s not a philosophical or theological principle. Nonetheless, it can give us some insight for understanding why the world is moving backwards at the same pace it’s advancing. At the same time that spacecraft travel beyond the outer reaches of the solar system and cancer is treated through genetic engineering, the Islamic Caliphate is fighting the same brutal wars as a thousand years ago. At the same time that the United States has its first black President, it experiences the same, or worse race riots as fifty years ago. This time though, it can’t be blamed on the powerlessness of black people. A black President, Mayor, Prosecutor, Congressional Representatives and policemen in Baltimore all attest to force being exerted, pushing the lives of black people. Is racial progress pushing upwards? One can certainly make a strong argument that black people in high positions are in control of black lives in Baltimore. Yet there seems to be an equal force pushing down.

Schrödinger’s cat / drug dealer

Sir Isaac Newton first presented his three laws of motion in 1686. By the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, scientists realized that really, really tiny things didn’t obey Newton’s Laws.  The rules used to understand the motion of a bullet or cart couldn’t be used to explain how an electron or atom works.

A thought experiment (one that was not performed, but took place only in the experimenter’s mind) was devised by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who imagined a quantum experiment with a cat:

A cat is placed in a steel box along with a Geiger counter, a vial of poison, a hammer, and a radioactive substance…  Until the box is opened, an observer doesn’t know whether the cat is alive or dead—because the cat’s fate is intrinsically tied to whether or not the atom has decayed and the cat would, as Schrödinger put it, be “living and dead … in equal parts” until it is observed.  In other words, until the box was opened, the cat’s state is completely unknown and therefore, the cat is considered to be both alive and dead at the same time until it is observed.

This is counter-intuitive; it defies reason. Cats are either dead or alive. One can say that Schrödinger used the experiment to highlight the limits of Quantum Mechanics when applied to practical situations. The cat is actually either dead or alive, whether or not it has been observed.

Let’s consider a variation on the experiment. The steel box will be the back of a police van. The Geiger counter, the poison, hammer and uranium will be an unused seat belt, drugs, and protruding bolts. Instead of a cat, we’ll place Freddy Gray, a convicted narcotics dealer in the box, possibly busted in the midst of a drug deal. To increase the uncertainty we’ll add a witness who did and did not see Gray deliberately trying to injure himself.

Was Gray both dead and alive in the box? What took his life: was he poisoned by drugs, killed by a protruding bolt. Was it decay from a beating? Did someone hammer him with a police baton? The box has been opened, his death as been observed.  Though we lack crucial information, a verdict has been demanded in the name of justice; in the name of blind justice.

Back To The Future of Lynch Mobs

Lynching is the execution of an offender by a mob without due process of law. In the United States approximately 4,742 individuals were killed this way between 1882 and 1968; of the victims, 3,445 or 73 percent were Black. Some of the lynchings were preceeded by trials, but angry crowds, often stirred up by the press, could tip the hand of justice against the accused. Newspapers provided graphic and grizzly reports, using language that implied that the victim was indeed guilty, and deserving of his fate.

With very few exceptions the practice had pretty much died out by World War II. It was no longer socially acceptable. Although the American justice system is far from perfect, it does offer advantages over mob rule. In theory, evidence is gathered to determine guilt, appropriate charges are laid, and a judge or jury issues a decision based on the evidence.

Have we gone through a time warp, or is it Newton’s inexorable law of motion? Great racial progress has been made in the American justice system. There’s a black Attorney General, black Supreme Court Justice, black prosecutors, black police… Rarely is a black person tried by an all-white jury.

Yet despite this progress, we have lynch mobs in Ferguson, Miami, and Baltimore. Stirred up by the media, motivated by race-baiters such as the President, the mayor and the prosecutor, sympathy riots spread throughout the United States. Justice can only be served, they all said, when the police are convicted. When the people whose job it is to uphold justice have determined the desired outcome before the trial, there is no justice system, there are lynch mobs.

Entropy

Entropy is a function of thermodynamic variables, with cosmological and social implications. It’s a hypothetical tendency for the universe to attain a state of maximum homogeneity in which all matter is at a uniform temperature (heat death). Based on this, in 1854, Hermann von Helmholtz made what is probably the gloomiest prediction in the history of science, that the universe is dying. Physicists of the day presumed that the underlying laws of physics (then assumed to be Newton’s laws of mechanics) are symmetric in time. Such laws, which made no distinction between past and future, gave rise to a directed arrow which we know as time.

There are many explanations, many discussions around this enigma (all beyond the scope of this essay). We should ask though, is humanity working towards a state of maximum homogeneity, in which all people are uniform? Racial equality, the end of discrimination is a worthy ideal, but when it’s all we focus on, we reverse time’s arrow, and re-create the lynch mobs of a century ago. Are we bringing ourselves to a social equivalent of heat death, with government officials promoting lynch mobs?

 Schrödinger’s Lynch Mob

In a previous essay, we cited Schrödinger’s association of consciousness with learning; adapting to change, learning from experience, transforming humanity. The racial upheaval that’s taken place in the United States shows a society that hasn’t learned, hasn’t adapted, not even to the changes it has wrought upon itself. A society that has lost consciousness. A society that has yet to realize that the election and elevation of people merely based on race rather than qualification will have an equal and opposite effect, that is the degradation of all races, the degradation of that society. The relentless push towards homogeneity will result in the heat death of burning communities, and of order and organization in society.

Note:

Dr. Amanda Peet (the physicist, not the actress) recounts the joke that sociology is applied psychology, psychology applied biology, biology applied chemistry, and chemistry applied physics.  Physics is a fascinating field, which grows more so with each new day. Quantum and cosmological weirdness provide a basis for philosophizing on many grand ideas. But people are not quantum objects (though they are made of them). Societies are not governed by the laws of thermodynamics. Physics concepts are applied in this essay as metaphors, not scientific statements.  They are used to illustrate.

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Our four-billion year old world came into being 5,781 years ago, with the creation of man.  So… Happy New Year.

A Scientific Explanation

This Friday evening, September 18 , 2020, marks the five thousand, seven hundred and eighty first year since the creation of the earth.  This celebration may be a little problematic for many people, because there’s a great deal of solid evidence that our planet is an awful lot older than that.  On the other hand, who wants to miss a good New Year’s party?

Don’t fret: there are two ways to deal with this scientifically.

The first is that time ain’t what it used to be.  The physicist Gerald Schroeder points out that the “days” mentioned in the Biblical story of Creation were not the same twenty four days we know now.  Those are a function of having a sun, and that was only created on the fourth day.  Using relativity theory to explain cosmic time, Schroeder explains that the modern science is in sync with the Creation account of Genesis, provided one doesn’t view the latter from an extreme literal perspective.

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, on the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven. (Genesis 2:4)

Keep in mind that the original text was in Hebrew.  Holding literally to a translation opens you up to problems, including the inability to cope with a non-literal approach, or one that appreciates the subtleties of the Hebrew original.  Two fire and brimstone rabbinic preachers recently declared that fourteen leading rabbis deserve to be executed because they cite the teaching of a great medieval sage that the biblical story of creation is a deep, complex allegory.  How can we untangle this, without being executed?

Amit Goswami, a physicist from another religious tradition, uses quantum mechanics and the Uncertainty Principal:

Suppose we ask, Is the moon there when we are not looking at it?  To the extent that the moon is ultimately a quantum object (being composed entirely of quantum objects), we must say no—so says physicist David Mermin.  Between observations, the moon also exists as a possibility form in transcendent potentia.  (p. 59)

Goswami explains that ultimately the components of the material world exist as a probability function.  It takes a conscious observer to collapse the probability, so those components seem to us as a real, material universe.

What’s consciousness?

Does a cat have consciousness?  It is only in material realism that consciousness is something merely to be possessed.  Such a consciousness would be determined, not free, and would not be worth having. (p. 59)

We turn to the cat physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who addresses this difficult question.

Therefore consciousness is associated with those of its (nervous system) functions that adapted themselves by what we call experience to a changing environment…. I would summarize my general hypothesis this: consciousness is associated with the learning of the living substance; its knowing how is unconscious.

It’s not merely looking for a warm cave when the weather gets cold.  Schrödinger sees the conscious mind as one that transforms itself.  “For we ourselves are chisel and statue, conquerors and conquered at the same time.”  Not only did we chisel and conquer our minds: when we became human we began to conquer, or at least subdue the world.  Primitive agriculture  chiseled the earth to our needs.  But some insects, even amoebas are also primitive farmers.  Surely the Bible wasn’t addressing them.

People have farmed for at least ten thousand years; little plots of land that barely fed the people who worked them.  It was only with the use of  metal in the Bronze Age that we began to effectively chisel our world with irrigation and decent tools.  Farming became communal, whether through cooperation or brutal authority.  Humanity became the agent changing the environment which our consciousness adapted to.  Humanity took control, and that control is what defines humanity.  Man was created when he began to create himself in the Bronze Age.  At that point, existence moved forward from being transcendent potentia, to the world we know and subdue.

This happened 5781 years ago, according to the Jewish count.  It happened for Jews and non-Jews alike—for all human beings.

A personal New Year message:

Our consciousness, our lives are our own responsibility.   Our behavior is our own choosing.  On the anniversary of humanity’s taking responsibility for itself, it is appropriate for every single person to examine his actions of the past year, and resolve to make better ones in the coming year.   I wish you a year filled with right decisions.  Although we can never know where our choices will lead, I wish you results that bring health, contentment, and understanding.

Happy New Year.

 Your comments are welcome

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