THE WORLD OF SCIENCE

[Ms Tercy Lonan]

THE WORLD OF SCIENCE
Sri Swami Krishnananda
The effect, in the end, of the process of knowledge which posits an external world, is, that,
for all practical purposes, the world and the individual are independent entities, a position that is
affirmed by sense-perception and corroborated by a judgment of the mind. To live in a world which
is not vitally connected with oneself may involve a curious moment-to-moment adjustment to suit
the moods and the vagaries of the world, which has its seasons, its winds and storms, its rains and
droughts, its quakes and tornadoes rising from the sea which covers the whole earth as a belt, and
several other inscrutable behaviours of Nature, with which the individual has to put up, somehow.
The insecurity consequent upon having to live in a world standing outside the knowledge and
capacity of the individual keeps everyone restless, wonderstruck and curious as to how the physical
world behaves in the manner it does. What is it that motivates the changes in Nature, the precise
movements of the solar and stellar systems, the wide galaxies and the endless space with an endless
time attached to it? Here comes the effort of the individual to make a scientifically calculated study
of Nature and its ways.
Commonsense has it that the world is just a large mass of earth-stuff with water, air and heat
as well as light coming from the sun. Originally, it was thought that the earth was flat and the sun
moved round it in a circular fashion. If the earth had been really flat like a pancake, the rise of the
sun at one end of the world would have illumined the entire world in one instant. But, the sun does
not illumine the earth that way. The fact that the mornings and the noons and the evenings of some
part of the world need not be such to certain other parts of the world, would be enough to tell us that
the earth is perhaps round in its shape and is not flat. Ancient astronomers in India like Aryabhata
and Copernicus in the West maintained that the sun does not go round the earth, but that it is the
earth that goes round the sun. Indications to this effect can be found even in the mass of literature
known as the Vedas with their Samhitas, Brahmanas, Aranyakas and Upanishads.
Even advanced scientists like Newton held the view that space is like a vast receptacle in
which the entire material world is contained, with no living connection between the content and the
container. Objects in the world were considered to attract each other with a pull known as
gravitation with reference to their mass and distance. It took a long time to discover through the
further history of science that the material world is not just contained in space as in a cup but there is
an inseparable relation between matter on one hand and space and time on the other. It was observed
that space and the world of earth, water, fire and air are internally related and the whole thing
constitutes an endless electromagnetic force, as it were, with more or less pressure in different parts
of this field which has its undulations like waves, causing concentration of substance in different
areas, gradually concretising itself as gas, heat, liquid and solid. We may notice here, perhaps, the
first step in the world of science to visualise a universal continuum, man himself not standing
outside it but included in it, thus the entire Nature being a self-contained whole.
Also, matter was originally said to be constituted of minute particles called molecules
which are chemical in their nature, differing from one another because of their chemical
composition. Researchers held that the molecules are made up of a minuter body of stuff called
atoms, which, in turn, were noticed to be tiny centres of force rather than things in themselves,
gyrating with velocity, with a nucleus within and wavelike particles moving around, known as
electrons. The solar system with the sun in the centre and the planets revolving round the sun can be
compared to the structure of the atom, wherein the sun would be the nucleus of this larger ‘atom’ of
the solar system and the planets would be in the position of electrons, thereby indicating, again, that
even the bodies of planets may not be the large bundles of heavy material as they appear to ordinary
perception, but are immensely large packets of force concentrated in varying extensions of the
pressure of force. This sub-atomic substance became the object of more and more concentrated
investigations as to its true nature. The quantum theory of physics proclaimed that matter is a series
of wave patterns or particles of light which behave like waves, and matter is convertible into light
and energy. It may be that light and energy, too, can be converted into matter as it seems to have
happened when gases became liquids and liquids became solid substances with heat involved in the
process of motion and friction. The world stood before the scientist as a gigantic miracle of power
and radiance, rather than as a stuff looking like dead matter and unintelligent crudity.
It is the Theory of Relativity that actually shook the world of science from its very roots,
which, while it accepted that matter and energy are interconvertible (E = mc2), rose up to the
necessity to investigate the very structure of Space and Time in its relation to Gravitation. The
Relativity position is difficult to explain in a few words, but suffice it to say that it discovered that
Space is not like a sheet spread out in a three-dimensional fashion, and Time is not just linear
motion. Space and Time go together to constitute what may be called Space-Time and form a
four-dimensional continuum, very uncomfortably breaking down all the rules, laws and regulations
of the three-dimensional world of common perception. Even the Space-Time continuum should not
be regarded as a substance somewhat like a tangible something. Rather, the Space-Time of
Relativity is a conceptual field of mathematical point-events, reducing staggeringly the whole
world to the nature of a universal mind-stuff. “The stuff of the world is consciousness,” said Arthur
Eddington, and “God is a cosmic mathematical Thought,” said James Jeans. We have gone too far
from the rural conception of a farmer’s field of harvest and plantation to the field of universal
relativity, which looks more like God thinking His own Thought, rather than anything else, if we
could be permitted to employ this phrase which we cannot avoid one day or the other.
The interconnectedness of phenomena in the so-called events of the world taking place not
in Space or in Time, but in a four-dimensional Space-Time continuum, was taken up with its more
advanced implications for consideration by Alfred North Whitehead. In his philosophy of the
‘Organism’, Whitehead arrived at the conclusion that there are no set causes producing set effects,
but anything can be an effect or a cause in a symmetrical manner of action and reaction, since the
world as it is discovered by the Theory of Relativity is an organism with its parts integrally related
to it. Cause and effect are continuous, the absence of which continuity would sever any possible
relation between cause and effect. Things in the world are called ‘actual occasions’, the potential
concentrated points of force whose very existence as well as structure are conditioned by the
existence and structure of other ‘actual occasions’ which fill the cosmos as its constituents. The
world is not a solid substance but is more like a field of law and order, an idea of total inclusiveness,
a system of internal give-and-take policy obtaining among the individualities known as ‘actual
occasions’, transforming the location of individuals into a fluid movement of a liquefied
connection, as it were, with everything else also in the world. Super-individual intentions, known as
‘eternal objects’, in the language of Whitehead, like the ‘Ideas’ of Plato, ‘ingress’ into the body of
the ‘actual occasions’ and make them appear to be what they are. Even the God of religion,
according to Whitehead, exists as a determining factor of the determination of ‘actual occasions’ by
the ‘eternal objects’, and He Himself stands, therefore, determined in a way by the prehensive and
apprehensive activities of the ‘actual occasions’, thus bringing about a mutual action and reaction
process between God and the individuals. The far-reaching thought of Whitehead would not forbid
the conclusion that God has, at the same time, to be transcendent to the world of the ‘actual
occasions’, though they are there just because He Himself is.
The specially religious import of modern physical science is highlighted also in the system
of Samuel Alexander, which he purports to explain in his book entitled “Space, Time and Deity”.
According to Alexander, Space-Time is the matrix of all things, the very substance of the universe,
a clue that he gathers from the Theory of Relativity. The Space-Time matrix causes motion and
force, and brings about the three-dimensional picture of what are known as primary qualities, like
length, breadth and height, substance, volume and content. The perception of these primary
qualities happens to be through the secondary qualities arising as a sort of action-reaction process
obtaining between the object of perception, namely, a primary quality, and the perceiving mind. To
cite an instance, a leaf looks green in colour not because there is such a thing called greenness in
Nature itself, but because of an abstraction of properties automatically taking place in the internal
structure of the leaf excluding all other characteristics in Nature apart from what looks like green.
So is the case with other colours and forms of objects. Sensations of every kind form, again, a set of
secondary qualities, that is to say, no one can know what the world is in itself as a set of primary
qualities. Mind, intellect and reason are the further manifestations or evolutes of the Space-Time
continuum or matrix, which point to the manifestation of a controlling principle called Deity, and
every succeeding stage can be regarded as a Deity to the preceding stage. According to Alexander,
the final Deity is yet to be manifested completely, which, when achieved, will be the end of the
cosmic process. Perhaps, here, Alexander intends to say, which he actually does not, that the end of
the cosmic process of evolution is the attainment of God. Also, a God who is yet to be will not have
the character of eternity, and God, then, would cease to be God.