Heinz Pagels Quotes

As Heinz Pagels has said, The challenge to our civilization which has come from our knowledge of the cosmic energies that fuels the stars, the movement of light and electrons through matter, the intricate molecular order which is the biological basis of life, must be met by the creation of a moral and political order which will accommodate these forces or we shall be destroyed. It will try our deepest resources of reason and compassion.

Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the young but never the actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event.

The most important questions of life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability. —MARQUIS DE LAPLACE       A

Gravity is the curvature of space.

The work of the late Heinz Pagels provoked Ian Malcolm.

Uncertainty and Complementarity It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature. —NIELS BOHR       DETERMINISM—THE

Nature knows nothing of imperfection; imperfection is a human perception of nature. Inasmuch as we are part of nature we are also perfect; it is our humanity that is imperfect. And, ironically, because of our capacity for imperfection and error we are free beings—a freedom that no stone or animal can enjoy. Without the possibility of error and real indeterminacy implied by the quantum theory, human liberty is meaningless. The God that plays dice has set us free.

Meanwhile there was work to do: raising our children, wading through a mass of legal papers, finances, and taxes, and recovering the professional life that was now our sole support, while, at a subterranean level, feeling adrift in dark, unknown waters. And though I'd flared with anger when the priest at Heinz's funeral had warned not to be "angry at God" because of his sudden and violent death, I struggled not to sink under currents of fear, anger, and confusion that roiled an ocean of grief.

Physicists, irrespective of their belief, may invoke God when they feel issues of principle are at stake because the God of the physicists is cosmic order.

Randomness It is remarkable that a science which began with the consideration of games of chance should have become the most important object of human knowledge. —MARQUIS DE LAPLACE       A

What quantum reality is, is the reality marketplace. The house of a God that plays dice has many rooms. We can live in only one room at a time, but it is the whole house that is reality.” He

A real magician makes no claim to violate physical laws; he only appears to do so. However, when pseudoscientists make claims to discover dramatic new phenomena, going beyond current physical theory, like telepathy or mental metal bending, then, like children, we must insist on seeing how the trick is done or as adults sit back and enjoy the entertainment.” As

When one cannot think of how to do things better one simply makes things bigger. The construction of the great pyramids in Egypt marked the end of the Old Kingdom. Bigger and bigger cathedrals and temples were built when the faithful became secure and comfortable. Dinosaurs, too, were an evolutionary dead end: the huge reptiles were replaced by small, energy-efficient mammals.

The final story of randomness—utter chaos—has not yet been told to us by the mathematicians. It seems remarkable that something so fundamental for probability theory has not been defined and even more remarkable that we can go so far in mathematics lacking a definition. By simply assuming randomness exists, mathematicians assign elementary probabilities to events, and that is their starting point. But they have not captured chaos and looked it in the eye.

the consciousness that joins self and world is analog, and the energetic potential for exchange between them might be named the analog axis. In the way that analog audio technology leans on the vibrating source—the music—and enables its waveform to shape the groove in the LP, the analog axis allows our sensitivities to lean on the One Source—the present—and receive the impression of all the subtle waveforms of Being. Taken together, those waveforms, those currents of exchange, are the one reality. On the subatomic level, even so-called ‘particles’ can be understood in those terms. Physicist Heinz Pagels explains, The electron is not a particle … it is a matter wave as an ocean wave is a water wave. According to this interpretation … all quantum objects, not just electrons, are little waves—and all of nature is a great wave phenomenon.199 We might also say that Being is a great wave phenomenon—and that its every ripple conveys information.

distance, a holistic concept if ever there was one. (Incidentally, there is an excellent book on the new physics—Heinz Pagels’s The Cosmic Code21—which is the only book I can unreservedly recommend on the topic.

According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, it is the observer who both decides which aspect of nature is to be probed and reads the answer nature gives. The mind of the observer helps choose which of an uncountable number of possible realities comes into being in the form of observations. A specific question (Is the electron here or there?) has been asked, and an observation has been performed (Aha! the electron is there!), corralling an unruly wave of probability into a well-behaved quantum of certainty. Bohr was silent on how observation performs this magic. It seems, though, as if registering the observation in the mind of the observer somehow turns the trick: the mental event collapses the wave function. Bohr, squirming under the implications of his own work, resisted the idea that an observer, through observation, is actually influencing the course of physical events outside his body. Others had no such qualms. As the late physicist Heinz Pagels wrote in his wonderful 1982 book The Cosmic Code, “There is no meaning to the objective existence of an electron at some point in space… independent of any actual observation. The electron seems to spring into existence as a real object only when we observe it!” Physical theory thus underwent a tectonic shift, from a theory about physical reality to a theory about our knowledge. Science is what we know, and what we know is only what our observations tell us. It is unscientific to ask what is “really” out there, what lies behind the observations. Physical laws as embodied in the equations of quantum physics, then, ceased describing the physical world itself. They described, instead, our knowledge of that world. Physics shifted from an ontological goal—learning what is—to an epistemological one: determining what is known, or knowable. As John Archibald Wheeler cracked, “No phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” The notion that the wave function collapses when the mind of an observer registers a new bit of knowledge was developed by the physicist Eugene Wigner, who proposed a model of how consciousness might collapse the wave function—something we will return to. But why human consciousness should be thus privileged has remained an enigma and a source of deep division in physics right down to today.

The visible world is neither matter nor spirit but the invisible organization of energy.

The theory of general relativity implies the existence of gravity waves, undulations of the curvature of space that propagate at the speed of light across any distance. It would be exciting to detect actual gravity waves, but most of the means of generating gravity waves from catastrophic cosmic events like stars exploding or colliding will generate gravity waves too weak to detect here on earth. One potential source of gravity waves could be black holes consuming stars at the core of our galaxy. Maybe, in a few decades, if there are strong enough gravity waves, we will detect them. Recently

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. —OSCAR WILDE       WE

Without the possibility of error and real indeterminacy implied by the quantum theory, human liberty is meaningless.

It seems as if the relativity of time poses a paradox—for how can both the passenger on the train and the person on the platform both see each other’s watches slow down? What happens if now these people meet and compare the time; whose watch has really slowed down? To emphasize this paradox (often called the twin paradox), imagine twins who each set their watches before one of them gets on the train. The train speeds up to nearly the speed of light—at which point each twin will see the other’s watch running slower—and then the train slows down and returns to the station. Which twin is older? From the point of view of the twin on the platform, the one on the train has made a round-trip journey, while for the twin on the train, the twin on the platform is the one who has made the round trip.