The Return (Enigma of Modern Science & Philosophy)

By Des Greene

Using a bare narrative format, the reader is taken on a journey through the labyrinths of modern thinking. Here and there a comfortable nook is reached where understanding shines through brilliantly to reveal aspects of life, thought and existence.
A richly rewarding read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Des Greene
• Release date: Jun 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301073856

Des Greene

In my novels I try to merge the worlds of modern science (quantum theory/relativity/cosmology) with the metaphysical world of philosophy (in particular philosophy of science and theory of knowledge).The characters inhabit this world and struggle with the events of a sometimes brutal reality and the more ethereal reality of the mind.Reading the novels should lead the reader on a journey that is both physically and intellectually challenging and perhaps enlightening.

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The Return

A Novel by Des Greene

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Des Greene

ISBN 9781301073856

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www.desgreene.com

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One

Setting Off

People say you should never go back. The past will have changed. There will be little left to remind you of past glories, or ignominy - thankfully. Yet back I’d decided to go. The memory of my brief sojourn on the island had left a deep imprint on my being. There was, perhaps, unfinished business. At least I hoped there was but I strained to define what was, as yet, incomplete - other than my constant striving for a meaning to my now somewhat solipsistic existence. I had become a total recluse. I shunned the world and cocooned myself in the inner mind where I sought solace in the knowledge that my quest was noble. Noblesse oblige and I had decided to return to the island.

The quay was gray in the autumn sky and a shower was threatening. I searched for the same boat that I had taken on my first visit but it was not there. The season had been poor and the wet October had put paid to any tourists wanting a boat trip to an inhospitable remote island. An old man sitting on the quay wall advised me that the only way out was by fishing boat and that I’d have to negotiate the fare carefully.

‘Those bastards would fleece you if they could.’

His words were bitter. They disturbed me. I felt he was betraying his own. I wanted to berate him but held back wanting more information.

‘They’re not all that bad,’ I ventured. ‘They have a hard life particularly now with the fish stock depleted and all their quotas.’

‘Ay, the fish are gone and why wouldn’t they, with the amount of over fishing that went on.’ He was still in grumpy mode.

‘I take it you are not a fisherman.’

‘A fisherman?’ he growled. ‘Who’d want to be one of them? It’s a hell of a life. No, I never wanted to take to the boats. I swept the roads and made an honest living.’

His hand fumbled in his inside pocket and a blackened pipe emerged. He busied himself, packing it with tobacco, and the sweet scent filled the air. It brought me back in time to when I was a child. There was no particular memory but I felt myself in a child’s body and all around me was filled with enchanting scents: freshly mown grass, damp hay, honeysuckles, cracked chestnut shells. A crowd of scents invaded my memory and the feeling became euphoric. I would have given anything to be back there but time does not allow such self indulgent reversion.

‘No I swept the roads and smoked my pipe through rain, hail and snow. There was the odd good day too.’

His eyes softened as the memories came flooding back.

‘There were some lovely days of a summer - lovely days.’

He became lost in the sweet recall and let the unlit pipe hover before his lips. Then with a deep sigh he flicked his lighter and sucked hard. The tobacco smoke was sweeter still.

‘Ay, that’s better,’ he sighed contentedly.

I envied him his simple pleasure. I let him savor the moment a while before getting round to what I really wanted to ask him.

‘Not being a man of the sea, you probably haven’t been out to the island of late, have you?’

‘I wouldn’t go near the place. It’s bad news.’

His face darkened and his eyes narrowed in suspicion. ‘Why’d you ask?’ His defense was raised.

‘Just out of curiosity. I’m heading out there for a stint. I was wondering had there been many changes since I was last there. It’s over ten years now.’

‘Changes!’ His voice was raised, almost indignant. ‘Sure everything changes. But yea, there have been many changes on the island. Killings are unusual even in this queer locality. I suppose you heard of the murder case?’

I said I had. It was on all the news reports for weeks. I was gutted to hear of the tragedy and felt as if I had lost one of my own. In a way I had. She had been pregnant. That was the likely cause of their tragic deaths. He shot her and then turned the gun on himself. I still feel nauseous at the thought. Time has dimmed my memory of her. I see her framed there in the half door of the cottage, staring at me. Her hand stretches out half in offer of greeting, half in supplication, seeking help. I had sensed there was violence in her life. The silence of our encounters shouted out its presence. Our brief affair was all physical with no making contact of minds. It was never allowed and never, now, will. Time had taken its course. Fate has ruled.

‘Yes, I heard.’ I struggled to keep tears from my eyes. ‘It was shocking - how can anyone get over it?’

The old man looked at me intently. Perhaps he sensed more than I was saying.

‘You’re not one of them shagging reporters are you?’ He gestured at me with his pipe. It was clear that he was closing ranks.

‘No, nothing like that. Just curious about how the island had coped.’

I turned my head away to hide the fact that my eyes had watered. I mumbled a goodbye and moved along the quay towards the fishing boats. I sat on a stone pillar to collect myself. The past had streamed back into my present but it was a ghost that as I stretched out to embrace it, evaporated into invisible ether. Never go backwards, I chided myself, and yet here I was going back to the island. I was testing fate - a fate that had delivered already a strange hand of lust and violence.

I was returning to the island that I remembered. I hoped that the place would not have changed much, yet I knew that that was not possible. Change was such a constant of existence. There is nothing that is purely static - even the physical outlines of the island. The sea will have battered its coast into new scraggly shapes. The wind will have made the few hawthorns even more hunched over. The constant rain will have molded and eroded the soil.

These physical changes are very apparent and sensible. But there is a less obvious change and that is the location of the island in space-time. It is still in the same place in the earth’s relational field - its inertial locale. Yet when viewed from outside this local area, from another solar system within the galaxy, or even from outside the galaxy, the place of the island has changed dramatically. The island is being carried along by the earth and the sun and the galaxy at great speed through the emptiness of the cosmos. It will never re-find a previous position. It never retrieves the past.

These thoughts still plagued me. I had continued my exploration of reality over the intervening ten years. I felt that I was no nearer an understanding but I was coming to terms with the extent of our ignorance of the truly strange world we inhabit.

I pulled my rucksack from my back and found my notebook and started to write.

Two

Astride a Photon

Einstein wondered what it was like to sit astride a photon of light and describe the world from its perspective. The basic assumption was that a photon had a continuous existence. What if it hadn’t?

A photon comes into existence when an atomic electron drops from a level of higher energy to one of lower energy. We envisage either a particle or a wave heading off into space at the speed of light. This speed (300,000 kilometers per second) is way beyond our everyday experience and we have no sense of how fast it is. In fact, Einstein in his Special Relativity Theory set down the axiom that nothing travels faster than light.

There is no real definitive proof of this axiom but the laws based upon it have made predictions that subsequent observations have proven true. This basic postulate underpins all of science in the post Einstein era. Yet can it be falsified? Karl Popper, the Austrian philosopher whose ideas on scientific theory have played a big role in our conception of what constitutes scientific validity, sets great store on the falsifiability of any scientific proposition or theory. If you cannot devise a test that can prove a theory false then it is not a theory that is truly scientific.

Applying this to the speed of light is enlightening, to use a smug pun. Since we use light to measure all phenomena, it obviously puts an upper limit on the scale of what we can measure in terms of speed. We can never prove by experiment that anything travels faster than light until we discover a phenomenon that travels at super-light speeds. This dilemma certainly throws a spanner in the works for the falsifiability of the light speed theory.

It pays to examine critically these base axioms of science. If we were to accept that there is no limit to speed of a phenomenon then the laws of science would undergo a revolution.

Maybe we need to ask quasi-philosophical questions about the reality of light before we undertake our scientific endeavor. What is light? Some say it is a particle-like entity - a photon. This photon is, in some sense, a packet of energy that is concentrated in a tiny volume of space. Again this tiny space is way beyond our normal human sensibility and measurement ability. Yet we can perceive the effect of a single photon as a speck on a photographic plate. It has a real reality. Yet others call light a wave phenomenon. A wave is the polar opposite of a particle in that its presence is spread out in space and keeps spreading as long as the light wave leaves its source behind in space-time. After many billions of years it can cover nearly the entire known universe. It becomes a gigantic wave that yet mysteriously reduces to a speck on a screen, located in a non-special space-time location such as the planet Earth.

There is physical evidence for the wavelike presence of light because we know that light waves interfere with each other, sometimes canceling, sometimes adding. Such interference is a characteristic of waves. The famous two slit interference experiment of light underpins most of the theory of quantum mechanics.

Because it is so important, it is worth going into what actually the experiment tells us. The set up is a single source of light that shines on a screen that has two slits allowing two streams of light to pass through. These two slits allow light pass through to a photographic screen. The image on the screen is one of bands of lightness and darkness. These are areas where the waves have interfered - the dark areas arising from the waves canceling each other out, the bright areas resulting from the waves reinforcing each other. This in itself is pass-remarkable and is something that any kid has often experienced as he whiled away pleasant moments throwing stones into the still water of a pond.

What makes this set up one of the most enigmatic experiments in all of science is that when the source of light is made so weak that only single photons pass through the slit screen, the bands of light and dark still emerge. The single photon acts like a wave - one that interferes with itself. If one of the slits is closed the bands disappear and a uniform dispersion of the light is seen on the screen - the interference disappears.

This experiment has caused both scientists and philosophers endless difficulty. How can light be both a particle and a wave? There was an inbuilt inherent contradiction in reality. The scientists shrugged their rationalistic shoulders and adopted the so called Copenhagen Interpretation and accepted that when you look for a wave - you get a wave, and when you look for a photon - you get a photon. The philosophers toiled away but eventually the associated mathematics and science arising from the developing theory became overpowering and the blatant contradiction was lost in the complexity that even the scientists struggled to follow.

Yet the basic problem remains. One phenomenon can’t assume two realities. The very basics had to be re-examined and perhaps overthrown. Maybe light was not so special after all. Someone had to think outside the box.

Inside the box the development of the theory developed at an unparalleled speed in the short history of science. The Einstein revolution of General Relativity gave way to the weird world of Quantum Mechanics. The latter half of the twentieth century saw the development of the Standard Model of Particle Physics which characterized all the myriad constituents of nature and unified all the forces excluding gravity. Gravity was the link back to Einstein’s General Relativity and colossal attempts were made to include gravity in quantum theory, leading to the monster of String Theory with its many dimensions and infinite universes.

The advances of scientific theory are truly staggering. Yet they stand on some really shaky conceptual foundations. If these foundations fail, as fail they must as Popper asserts, then the whole edifice will come tumbling down.

One of the potential Achilles’ heels of modern scientific theory is the finiteness of the speed of light. It was Einstein’s greatest achievement but it may also be his biggest misconception.

So what is light? As already said, it is a release of energy when an electron drops from a higher energy level to a lower level. This energy then travels outward from the electron in a random direction. This point is an essential premise. There is no way to foretell what direction the packet of energy takes. In this sense the single packet is a photon - a discrete energy packet localized in space that travels at this maximal speed. But how does the packet travel? This is one of the deepest questions we can ask of reality. The other is - what is it that makes an energy packet or what is energy?

We know that light can travel in a vacuum. Now a vacuum of old was considered just that - space with no mass or energy. Yet modern quantum theory does not allow such exactitude. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is another of the basic axioms of quantum theory. One form of it dictates that conjugates properties such as energy and time are limited by a tiny constant called the Planck constant (another of the very basic tenets of quantum theory). This is sometimes written as ΔE*Δt≥h, where ΔE is a tiny increment of energy, Δt is a very small interval of time and h is Planck’s Constant which is a very small number.

Now Einstein in his Special Relativity theory also links energy E and mass m by his famous formula E=mc2 where c is the velocity of light. In a vacuum we say there is no mass but the Heisenberg uncertainty does not allow exactly zero mass so the vacuum must have tiny fluctuations