here is a major revolution under way in science today, a transformation that is both profound and fascinating. It changes our view of the world, and our concept of life and consciousness in the world. It comes at a propitious time.
We know that the world we have created is unsustainable: we need new thinking to avert a collapse and set us on course for a sustainable and thriving society. The inspiration for the new thinking can come from science but not, or not only, from science as a source of new technologies. Rather, we need to view science as a source of orientation and guidance, as a wellspring of trustworthy ideas for rediscovering our relations to each other and the universe. The revolution under way in science offers a paradigm that can fill this need.
A New Paradigm Well Beyond Science
A paradigm in science is the sometimes tacit but always effective foundation of the way scientists conceive of the world, including the objects and processes they investigate. A new paradigm is an important innovation in science: it allows scientists to piece together the emerging elements of scientific knowledge and perceive the meaningful whole that underlies this complex mosaic of data, theory, and application.
A new paradigm has meaning and interest well beyond science. It provides a holistic, integral view of life and universe, lifting these vistas from the realm of speculation into the domain of careful observation and rigorous reasoning. Although based on sophisticated theories and wide-ranging observations, the now emerging paradigm is basically simple and inherently meaningful.
Conceptual Foundations ?of the New Paradigm
The paradigm emerging in the welter of observation, exploration, and debate in today’s revolutionary period in science is a path-breaking innovation, but not an ad hoc novelty. The new paradigm is solidly based on what science and scientists already know about the nature of reality: it recognizes the validity of the accumulated storehouses of scientific knowledge.
But the new paradigm pieces together the elements of scientific knowledge in a fashion that is more consistent, coherent, and meaningful than that possible in the light of the old and still influential paradigm. It offers a new gestalt, a new way of organizing the dots of scientific knowledge, connecting them with optimum simplicity and coherence. And it does so with a measure of the elegance that scientists and philosophers have always sought in their theories.
Science Is Not Technology; It is Understanding
Einstein remarked, “We are seeking the simplest possible scheme of thought that can tie together the observed facts.” This phrase encapsulates the quintessence of the project known as science. Science is not technology: it is understanding. When our understanding of the world matches the nature of the world, we discover more and more of the world and have more and more ability to cope with it. Understanding is basic.
Genuine science seeks the scheme that could convey comprehensive, consistent, and optimally simple understanding of the world and ourselves in it. That scheme is not established once and for all; it needs to be periodically updated. The observed facts grow with time and become more diverse. Tying them together in a simple yet comprehensive scheme calls for revising and occasionally reinventing that scheme.
A New Scientific Revolution
In recent years the repertory of observed facts has grown and has become highly diverse. We need a new scheme: a more adequate paradigm. This, in the language of Thomas Kuhn, means a new scientific revolution.
In his seminal opus The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn (1962) noted that science grows through the alternation of two radically different phases. There is the relatively enduring phase of “normal science,” and there is the phase of “scientific revolutions.”
Normal science treads water: it is only marginally innovative. It ties together the observed facts within an established and consensually validated scheme, and if it encounters observations that do not fit that scheme, it extends and adjusts that scheme.
This, however, is not always possible. If the attempt is not relinquished, the established scheme becomes unmanageably complex and opaque, as Ptolemaic astronomy did through the constant addition of epicycles to its basic cycles to account for the “anomalous” movement of the planets. When that critical point is reached in the growth of science, it is time to replace the established scheme.
We Need A More Adequate Paradigm
There is a need for a new paradigm that could ground the theories and interpret the observations to which they refer. The relatively calm phase of normal science comes to an end and gives way to the turbulence that hallmarks a period of scientific revolution.
In the natural sciences the turbulent phase of a revolution has already started. A number of unexpected, and—for the dominant paradigm—critically anomalous observations have come to light. They call for a basic paradigm shift: for a fundamental revolution that reinterprets science’s most basic assumptions about the nature of cosmos, life, and consciousness.
The series of critically anomalous observations can be traced to an experimental finding in the early 1980s. A paper by French physicists Alain Aspect and collaborators (Aspect et al. 1982) reported on an experiment carried out under rigorously controlled conditions. This experiment demonstrated that when particles are split and the split halves are projected a finite distance from each other, they remain connected despite the space that separates them. Moreover their connection is quasi-instant. This contradicts a basic tenet of relativity: according to Einstein’s theory the speed of light is the highest speed at which any thing or signal can propagate in the universe.
Aspect’s experiment was repeated, and it always produced the same result. The science community was baffled but finally dismissed the phenomenon as without deeper significance: the “entanglement” of the split particles, physicists said, is strange, but it does not convey information or “act on” anything. But this, too, was placed in question in subsequent experiments.
It turned out that the quantum state of particles, and even of whole atoms, can be instantly projected across any finite distance. This came to be known as “teleportation.” Instant, quantum-resonance-based interactions have been discovered also in living systems, and even in the universe at large.
A related anomalous fact came to light in regard to the level and form of coherence found in complex systems. The observed coherence suggests instantaneous interaction between the parts or elements of the systems: interaction that transcends the recognized bounds of space and time. In the quantum realm, entanglement—instant connection among quanta (the smallest identifiable units of “matter”) at any finite distance—has recently been observed not only across space but also across time. It has been known that quanta that at any one time had occupied the same quantum state remain instantly correlated; it now appears that quanta that had never coexisted at the same time (as one of the particles had ceased to exist before the other came into being) also remain instantly entangled.
Challenging The Very Foundations of Science
This kind of entanglement is not limited to the quantum domain: it surfaces also at macroscopic scales. Life would not be possible in its absence. In the human body, for example, trillions of cells need to be fully and precisely correlated to maintain the organism in its physically highly improbable living state. This calls for quasi-instant multidimensional connection throughout the organism.
Yet another finding that cannot be explained by the current paradigm is that organic molecules are produced in stars. The received wisdom is that the universe is a physical system in which life is, if not an anomalous, at least an uncommon and very likely accidental phenomenon. After all, living systems can evolve only under conditions that are extremely rare in space and time. However, it turns out that the organic molecules on which life is based are produced already in the physical-chemical evolution of stars. The molecules are ejected into surrounding space; they coat asteroids and clumps of interstellar matter, including those that subsequently condense into stars and planets. It appears that the laws that govern existence and evolution in the universe are fine-tuned to produce the kind of complex systems we associate with the phenomena of life.
Observations of this kind cannot be accounted for by patching up the dominant paradigm: they challenge the very foundations of the basic scheme with which scientists have been tying together the observed facts. This was the case also at the turn of the twentieth century, when the science community shifted from the Newtonian to the relativity paradigm. It was the case in the 1920s as well, with a shift to the quantum paradigm. More limited paradigm shifts have unfolded in specific domains since then, with the emergence of transpersonal theories in psychology and the advent of non-Big Bang “multiverse” models in cosmology.
The paradigm emerging in science in the second decade of this century signifies a major shift in the worldview of science. It is a shift from the dominant paradigm of the twentieth century, where events and interactions were believed to take place in space and time and were considered local and separable, to a twenty-first century paradigm that recognizes that there is a deeper dimension beyond space and time and that the connection, coherence, and coevolution we observe in the manifest world are coded in the integral domain of that deeper dimension.
©2014 by Ervin Laszlo. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted with permission of Inner Traditions, Inc.
www.innertraditions.com
Article Source:
The Self-Actualizing Cosmos: The Akasha Revolution in Science and Human Consciousness
by Ervin Laszlo.
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About the Author
Ervin Laszlo is a Hungarian philosopher of science, systems theorist, integral theorist, and classical pianist. Twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, he has authored more than 75 books, which have been translated into nineteen languages, and has published in excess of four hundred articles and research papers, including six volumes of piano recordings. He is the recipient of the highest degree in philosophy and human sciences from the Sorbonne, the University of Paris, as well as of the coveted Artist Diploma of the Franz Liszt Academy of Budapest. Additional prizes and awards include four honorary doctorates. Visit his website at http://ervinlaszlo.com.
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