“He was very interested and very open, and he told me something that I think is not known publicly because he never published it. He said that he was well aware of these parallels between quantum physics and Eastern mysticism. While he was working on quantum theory he went to India to lecture and was a guest of Tagore. He talked a lot with Tagore about Indian philosophy. Heisenberg told me that these talks had helped him a lot with his work in physics, because they showed him that all these new ideas in quantum physics were in fact not all that crazy. He realized there was, in fact, a whole culture that subscribed to very similar ideas. Heisenberg said that this was a great help for him. Niels Bohr, who won the Nobel Prize for his contributions to quantum mechanisms, had a similar experience when he went to China.”
In a follow-up book, The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture, Capra went on to apply his philosophical explorations of the new physics to developments in other areas of science, coming to the conclusion that the crises currently afflicting industrial civilization are rooted in scientific beliefs which are now outmoded on the basis of new data and theories across the physical sciences. He later went on to found the Center for Eco-Literacy in Berkeley, a think-tank addressing the social and ecological implications of new developments across the physical sciences.
“What quantum physics has brought, indisputably, is a dissolution of the notion of hard and solid objects, and also a dissolution of the notion that there are fundamental building blocks of matter. When you study the smallest pieces of matter that we know, the subatomic particles, you find that you can only talk about probabilities. That's very well known. Since quantum mechanics we know that all these laws and regularities can only be formulated in terms of probabilities. But then you ask, what are these probabilities of? And you find they are probabilities of making a certain measurement, of these large-scale instruments interacting in a certain way. So whatever you say about the smallest pieces comes back to the large pieces -- can be expressed only in probabilities, in terms of the large pieces. It’s sort of a circular situation. In other words, everything is interconnected, interconnected in such a way that the properties of the smallest pieces depend on the properties of the whole.”
In words that sound uncannily similar to those of health-practitioner Deepak Chopra, Capra argued that “whereas before we believed that the dynamics of the whole can be explained in principle by breaking it down, and from the properties of the parts, now we see that the properties of the parts can only be defined in terms of the dynamics of the whole. So it’s a complete reversal. And that’s become one of the most fundamental scientific insights of our century. In fact, if you go even further and ask, ‘Well what are these parts?’ then you will find that there are no parts, that whatever we call a part is a pattern in an ongoing process.”
Capra believes that this insight, or rather the lack or it, lies at the core of global crises, which as we have argued here are all interconnected as manifestations of a defunct global system. For Capra, the interconnection of these crises is further evidence of a dysfunctional perspective of life underlying that system. “These systemic problems, all interlinked, are in fact reflections of the limitations of an outdated world view.” Given that all our social institutions -- the large corporations, the large academic institutions, the large political institutions -- all subscribe to this outdated worldview, it’s therefore not surprising that they are not able to solve the major problems that we have. “The old system shows us such a spectacular failure that the experts in various fields don’t understand their fields of expertise any longer”, Capra argues. “Researchers, for instance investigating cancer, don’t have a clue, in spite of spending millions of dollars, of the origins of cancer. The police are powerless in face of a rising wave of crime. The politicians or economists don’t know how to manage the economic problems. The doctors and hospitals don’t know how to manage the health problems and health costs. So everywhere it’s the very people who are supposed to be the experts in their fields who don’t have answers any longer, and they don’t have answers because they have a narrow view. They don’t see the whole problem.”
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