科學偉人眼中的宗教及神秘主義‘Quantum Questions – Mystical Writings

of the World’s Greatest Physicists’, Edited by Ken Wilber (Shambhala, Boston, 2001).

朱明中

香港中文大學物理系

“Ken Wilber is a national treasure.” – R. Kegan, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Here is collection of writings that bridges the gap between science and religion. Quantum Questions collects the mystical writings of each of the major physicists involved in the discovery of quantum physics and relativity, including Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and Max Planck. The selections are written in nontechnical language and will be of interest to scientists and nonscientists alike.

科學偉人眼中的宗教及神秘主義

• 現代物理與神秘主義• 現代物理學宗師的看法• 科學研究的原動力

現代物理• 現代物理–人類開始掌握對宏觀及微觀宇宙的認知

• 微觀世界的基本法 : 量子力學 (Quantum Mechanics)– 影響深遠 : 物理、化學、天文、份子生物、新技術 - 如納米科技、半導體、激光、核能‧‧‧

• 宏觀宇宙法則 : 相對論 (Relativity)– 影響深遠 : 物理、天文、宇宙學、新技術 - 如太空科技、核能‧‧‧

• 現代物理的飛躍進步，對人類思想帶來 少衝擊

• 現代物理證明神的存在？支持東方神秘主義？

Xe on Nickel

Fe on Cu

「大球場」

製造新化學合成物

核能• 以核反應提取能量 E = mc2

每克物質 = 9x1013 焦耳 (Joules)!~ 二千萬公斤黃色炸藥

温度達三億度 !

激光融合

利用大型望遠鏡觀測宇宙遠方（早期）

神秘主義 (Mysticism)

• Mysticism: “is the pursuit of achieving communion with or conscious awareness of ultimate reality, the divine, spiritual truth, or God through direct, personal experience (intuition or insight) rather than rational thought; …Mystics claim to experience intuitive knowledge of transcendent dimensions, beyond the phenomenal or material concrete objects of ordinary perception.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysticism)

通過直觀的而非理性的思考，追求與真理的共融交流。

量子力學與神秘主義• 量子力學的一個基本假設 : 物理態之叠加

(superposition of states)• 例如 : 粒子位置為一物理態 ; 經典物理→粒子同一時間只有一個位置 ( 態 )

• 量子物理→粒子同時可有多個位置，以或然分佈

xx1 x2

|x1> 或 |x2>

a |x1> + b |x2> + c |x3> +…

只可預測機率， 能確定 ! 非決定論 !

量度時或然揀選其中一態→觀測者與被觀測者不可分割 !

量子力學與神秘主義• 量子粒子相互重叠，甚至可以有很强的關連

• 萬物皆由基本粒子組成→萬物不可分→天地萬物與我合一？

Fritjof Capra, ‘The Tao of Physics’ (Shambhala, Boston, 2000); Gary Zukav, ‘The dancing wu li masters : an overview of the new physics’ (Morrow, New York, 1979).

玻爾選用的族徽

玻爾的互補原理(Complementary Principle) 及海森堡的測不準定理(Uncertainty Principle) 常被視為量子物理「證明」或「發現」神秘主義。

相對論與宗教• 相對論 : 時間與空間為一體 ( 四維 ) ，可相互轉化 ; 時空被質量扭曲，做成萬有引力 ; 質量和能量本質相同，可相互轉化→第四維乃靈性之門？能量（光）即是神？

• 宇宙時空膨脤→宇宙萬物源於極小空間 :大爆炸理論→神創造宇宙？

現代物理學宗師們的看法

• 物理（科學）與宗教無關 ! 可用科學來驗證宗教 !

• 科學與宗教是不同範疇的思想。• 科學只對論實驗／感觀見到的「現實」，只是真理 完整的投影，並不是真理。

• 科學手段是用數學模擬及歸納現象，並不直觀真理 !

Einstein, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Eddington, Pauli, de Broglie, Jeans, Planck

Niels Bohr Erwin SchrödingerWerner Heisenberg

Max Planck Louis de Broglie Wolfgang Pauli

Arthur Eddington

Eddington: “I do not suggest that the new physics ‘proves religion’ or indeed gives any positive grounds for religious faiths… For my own part I am wholly opposed to any such attempt.”

Jeans: “… But the final harvest will always be a sheaf of mathematical formulae. These will never describe nature itself… [Thus] our studies can never put us into contact with reality.”

Eddington: “We should suspect an intention to reduce God to a system of differential equations. … We have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating.”

Schrödinger: “Please note that the very recent advance [of quantum and relativistic physics] does not lie in the world of physics itself having acquired this shadowy character; it had ever since Democritus of Abdera and even before, but we were not aware of it; we thought we were dealing with the world itself.”

Eddington: “The materialist who is convinced that all phenomena arise from electrons and quanta and the like controlled by mathematical formulae, must presumably hold the belief that his wife is a rather elaborate differential equation, …”

Jeans: “…the outstanding achievement of twentieth-century physics is not the theory of relativity with its welding together of space and time, or the theory of quanta with its present apparent negation of the laws of causation, or the dissection of the atom with the resultant discovery that things are not what they seem; it is the general recognition that we are not yet in contact with ultimate reality. We are still imprisoned in our cave, with our backs to the light, and can only watch the shadows on the wall.”

Heisenberg: “The philosophic content of a science is only preserved if science is conscious of its limits. Great discoveries of the properties of individual phenomena are possible only if the nature of the phenomena is not generalized a prior. Only by leaving open the question of the ultimate essence of a body, of matter, of energy, etc., can physics reach an understanding of the individual properties of the phenomena that we designate by these concepts, an understanding which alone may lead us to real philosophical insight.”

科學的局限 !

Eddington: “… both the old and the new physics were dealing with shadow-symbols, but the new physics was forced to be aware of that fact – forced to be aware that it was dealing with shadows and illusions, not reality.”

Pauli: “The most satisfactory course, it seems is to introduce at this point the postulate of an order of the cosmos distinct from the world of appearances, and not a matter of our choice. Whether we speak of natural objects participating in the Ideas or of the behavior of metaphysical, i.e., intrinsically real things, the relation between sense perception and Idea remains a consequence of the fact that both the soul and what is known in perception are subject to an order objectively conceived.”

Pauli: “… But, contrary to the strict division of the activity of the human spirit into separate departments – a division prevailing since the nineteenth century – I consider the ambition of overcoming opposites, including also a synthesis embracing both rational understanding and the mystical experience of unity, to be the mythos, spoken or unspoken, of our present day and age.”Eddington: “My conclusion is that, although for the most part our inquiry into the problem of experience ends in a veil of symbols, there is an immediate knowledge in the minds of conscious beings which lifts the veil in places; what we discern through these openings is of mental and spiritual nature.”

超越理性的認知Planck: “…The pure rationalist has no place here.”

科學研究的原動力

「我堅信科學研究最强烈及最高尚的動力，源自人類與天地共通的宗教感覺。」 - 愛因斯坦

“I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.” - Albert Einstein

Einstein: “The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.”

畢達哥拉斯 (Pythagoras) 的宇宙

• 完美的和諧• 數學與音樂的統一 : 弦線長度與音符的關係

• 數學 (幾何 ) 規律宇宙的和諧

J. James, “The Music of the Spheres – Music, Science and the Natural Order of the Universe” (Springer-Verlag, New York, 1993).

Monochord

單弦

畢達哥拉斯的哲學 / 科學

宇宙的和諧

音樂

數學

科學哲學

天文學

2

2i V

t x

2E mc

畢達哥拉斯的宇宙論• 星體（包括地球）為球體• 行星運動發出的聲音合成諧聲

“The motion of bodies of that size must produce a noise, since on our earth the motion of bodies far inferior in size and speed of movement has that effect. Also, when the sun and the moon, they say, and all the stars, so great in number and in size, are moving with so rapid a motion, how should they not produce a sound immensely great? Starting from this argument, and the observation that their speeds, as measured by their distances, are in the same ratios as musical concordances, they assert that the sound given forth by the circular movement of the stars is a harmony.” from Aristotle, On the Heavens, describing Pythagoreans Cosmology.

阿里士多德對畢達哥拉斯宇宙論的描述

C, D, Eb, E, G, A, Bb, B, D

地 月 水 金 日 火 木 土 恆星

• 畢氏的宇宙論以不同形式留傳，包括阿里士多德 Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) 的地心說 Geocentric model

地

月 水星

金星

太陽

火星

Saturn

恆星

Jupiter木星

土星

• 及哥白尼 Copernicus (1473 – 1543 AD) 的日心說 (Heliocentric model)

革命 Revolution!

地球在高速運動 !

開普勒 Johannes Kepler (1571 - 1630)

現代天文學之父- 從第谷的觀測數據歸納出三條行星運動定律-“The Harmony of the Universe” 畢氏系統之推廣 (單音 → 多音 )

-發揚以數學 /音樂去理解宇宙 ! “What Kepler attempted here is, simply, to bare the ultimate secret of the universe in an all-embracing synthesis of geometry, music, astrology, astronomy, and epistemology.” – Arthur Koestler

開普勒的交響樂• 比較行星近日點及遠日點移動角度的比例

• 例如土星比例為 5:4, 剛好為三度音階 (d-m)

• 火星 : 五度 , 木呈 : 副調三度 , 水星 : 八度 + 三度 , 地球 : 半音階

• 每行星不斷變音，共同譜出交響樂 水星

“the movements of the heavens are nothing except a certain everlasting polyphony” – Kepler, The Harmony of the Universe

土星

Planck: “He [Kepler] had to suffer disillusion after disillusion and even had to beg for the payment of the arrears of his salary by the Reichstag in Regensburg. He had to undergo the agony of having to defend his own mother against a public indictment of witchcraft. But one can realize, in studying his life, that what rendered him so energetic and tireless and productive was the profound faith he had in his own science, not the belief that he could eventually arrive at an arithmetical synthesis of his astronomical observations, but rather the profound faith in the existence of a definite plan behind the whole of creation.”

Pauli: “The process of understanding in nature, together with the joy that man feels in understanding, i.e., in becoming acquainted with new knowledge, seems therefore to rest upon a correspondence, a coming into congruence of preexistent internal images of the human psyche with external objects and their behavior. This view of natural knowledge goes back, of course, to Plato and was … also very plainly adopted by Kepler.”

Heisenberg: “… At the end of his [Kepler’s] work on the harmony of the universe, he broke out into this cry of joy: ‘I thank thee, Lord God our Creator, that thou allowest me to see the beauty in thy work of creation.’ Kepler was profoundly struck by the fact that here he had chanced upon a central connection which had not been conceived by man, which it had been reserve dot him to recognize for the first time – a connection of the highest beauty.”科學之美 !

牛頓 Isaac Newton

• “The soul of the world, which propels into movement this body of the universe visible to us, being constructed of ratios which created from themselves a musical concord, must of necessity produce musical sounds from the movement which it provides by its proper impulse, having found the origin of them in the craftsmanship of its own composition.” – Isaac Newton, Royal Society scholia

Sir Isaac Newton

科學偉人眼中的宗教及神秘主義

• 現代物理與神秘主義• 現代物理學宗師的看法• 科學研究的原動力

科學偉人眼中的宗教及神秘主義‘Quantum Questions – Mystical Writings

of the World’s Greatest Physicists’, Edited by Ken Wilber (Shambhala, Boston, 2001).

朱明中

香港中文大學物理系