|
The Force
The Force in Star Wars as described by a mysterious phenomenon, that had
befuddled the minds of the best scientists of the Republic, whose feature
is that it binds everything in the Universe together.
The nature of the binding was never explicitly discussed but in actual
fact is made quite explicit in virtue of being the central theme of the
entire story line. All throughout the story cycle one sees interwoven
this common theme of two happenings whose outcomes are hauntingly correlated
to one another and in such a way that, despite their remoteness, their
correlation is inevitable.
The last and most profound one occurs in the last story in which the
darkest of the Dark Lords experiences a sudden transformation for Good up
in a huge space station orbiting a planet below just when it seemed that
Good has lost forever. Meanwhile down below, just when it seemed that the
forces of good were about to be snuffed out, along comes a group of
belligerent teddy bears (I see a parody that needs to be written :)) who
likewise had just experienced a conversion that completely turned the tide
'down below.
The conversions are not portrayed as being causally related to each other
but they are shown as being inevitably CORRELATED to one another as if
somehow facets of an overall, Universal, change of state. And it's the
Universality of that change that bespeaks and even defines the Force in
the storyline.
Remarkably, a lot of people seemed miss that point.
What's interesting and revealing is the debate that occurs in one of
the stories concerning this Force.
"I'd call it luck."
"In my experience there is no such thing as luck, my young friend -- only
highly favorable adjustments of multiple factors to incline events in one's
favor."
"Call it what you like."
Is this debate and description starting to sound a little familiar?
In 1952 two papers were published in Physical Review titled "A Suggested
Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of 'Hidden' Variables" in
which the non-realivistic Schroedinger equation was directly reduced to
a form consistent with known Physics pre-Quantum Era, but with the addition
of a universal force, mediated by what the author, Bohm, called the Quantum
Potential.
One of its readers, a young experimenter named Bell, admitted to being
dumbstruck by these papers. In later years he decided to get at the
root of the matter and it did not take long to conclude that "locality"
was the root of the issue.
While Bohm's theory did indeed reproduce the results of non-relativistic
Quantum Theory (a transformation that was later extended to the Relativistic
domain by Hestenes in the mid 1980's with rather remarkable interpretative
results) is did to at a price -- the introduction of non-local correlations
mediated by this universal force.
Bell in a lament referred to it as "hideously nonlocal" in which (to
use Bohm's term) "quantum mechanical forces", singularily characteristic
of the quantum domain, were instantaneously "transmitted" over vast
distances.
He commented "his theory was nonlocal. Terrible things happened in the
Bohm theory. For example, trajectories that were assigned to the
elementary particles were instantaneously changed when anyone moved a
magnet anywhere in the universe." In other words, this Force seemed to
bind the outcomes of events remotely situated with respect to one another.
He went on "I decided to find out if this was a defect of his particular
picture or is somehow intrinsic to the whole situation", situation meaning
any endeavor one attempts to carry out to try and explain the seeming chance
occurences of the Quantum world by hidden variables must ALWAYS result in
some
kind of non-localism creeping in.
By an ingenious conceptual construction, Bell proceeded to DERIVE this
fact from the basic axioms of Quantum Physics. The result was the famouns
Bell Theorem and its outcome was to forever put an end to anyone's endeavor
to
explain the seemingly random happenings of the Quantum world by LOCAL
variables, as Einstein had gone out of his way to try and do for the rest of
his life from the 1920's and on. Einstein was at last conclusively proven
wrong in this matter.
Several years later in 1969, Clauser saw the article and proposed an
experimental setup to test the axiomatic underpinnings of the proof. This
was actually a version of the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment
that was outlined by none other than Bohm himself in 1951 a year before his
now famouns conversion to the Force Paradigm (to coin a new phrase).
Clauser's published article was the beginning of a burgeoning of
activity that led ultimately to the famous Aspect experiments of the
1980's which verified the assertions of Quantum Theory (and hence of Bell)
in a spectacular manner that represented the first time ever that
Physicists succeeded in producing two events in a systematic manner whose
outcomes were completely correlated though completely disconnected -- the
first non-local correlations ever directly seen. To this day, debate
still goes on over the significance (and even veracity) of the findings.
These ideas had spread with amazing speed into the popular culture from
the time of Bell on, leading to (among other titles) the Tao of Physics
by Capra (and his sequel, the Turning Point), and the dancing Wu Li
Masters by Zukav in 1979, which ended its discussion concentrating
heavily on the philosophical import of Bell's Theorem.
Another influence, far more pervasive, but whose connection to all of
this was not noticed until today occurred when a young filmmaker from around
1974 and on had decided to construct an elaborate story line centered in the
Orient and heavily imbued in the Zen tradition concerning an epic struggle
between Good and Evil and focusing on this mysterious universal non-local
entity known as the Force.
The influence on his was not intentional but was definite and was the
result of osmosis from the deliberations above, as these pervaded the spirit
of the times (as anyone who was alive then should remember). Over a period
of
a few years, the story line was transformed into a more universal and cosmic
setting and evolved into what we now know as Star Wars.
The dramatic appeal of the film, exceeding even the expectations of the
author, can be directly linked to the equally remarkable appeal of this
underlying notion of the Non-Local Correlation and the Universal Force
binding
events across the Universe together. In other contexts, we use the term
Synchronicity.
And so it is that we come back full circle to the Force.
-----------------
There are currently two schools of thought concerning the ultimate nature
of this Quantum randomnness that seems to pervade the world of the
microscpoic
(and perhaps the world of the macroscopic far more than we realise). One
school of thought somewhat parallels the contention
"I'd call it luck."
and actually goes further and declares that ALL possibilities happen. It is
truly a matter of luck which of the outcomes happens to occur in this
"branch".
This is, ironically, the camp that the science fiction story cycle known
as Star Trek has fallen squarely in, especially in recent years with its
portrayls of parallel timelines that intermix and get terminated and
sometimes restarted in an almost chaotic fashion.
Currently, this is by and large the mainstream view amongst those
Physicists who care enough about fundamental issues to explore them to this
depth.
The other, which is really the minor school of thought by comparison,
holds to the contention:
"In my experience there is no such thing as luck, my young friend -- only
highly favorable adjustments of multiple factors to incline events in one's
favor."
This is the theme that underlies the other major Sci Fi story cycle, Star
Wars.
These two points of view are, of course, known as the Many Worlds
Interpretation of Quantum Physics by Everitt, and the Quantum Potential
interpretation by Bohm, which later evolved into the philosophby of the
Implicate Order and later into the divergent Zitterbewegung Interpretation of
David Hestenes and the group of people who regularily contribute to the
Foundations of Physics Journal (which included Bohm).
How remarkably parallel the Bohm's Implicate Order is to Lucas's Force
can be decisively noted by their equally remarkable parallel description. In
the second Star Wars film, Yoda had explained the nature of the Force to his
disciple Luke:
"My ally is the Force. And a powerful ally it is. Life creates it and
makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are
we, not this crude matter."
Two years later, in a conversation Bohm had with Renee Weber in the
article "The Physicist and the Mystic" (in the Holographic Paradigm) he
describes the Implicate Order:
"What I am suggesting is that in the macroscopic world, such a thing as
a tree is built out of the implicate order -- indeed, IS the implicate
order, which makes possible its living qualities. If we perceive the tree
in this way, rather than as a bunch of dead particles into which property of
life is somehow infused when the seed is planted, then its aliveness ceases
to be a mystery."
This is synchronicity.
At the exact instant I wrote that, by the way, a brief interview on the
2/28/95 edition of ET with Lucas suddenly came onto the TV in which he was
discussing for the umpteenth million time his coming creation of a next
Star Wars.
Anyway, I digress... and so it that the Force is not just some fictional
entity that exists in a popular but mythical storyline, but is in reality an
entity that is believed by those in the Bohm camp to actually exist under the
various rubrics of the Quantum Potential and the Implicate Order and whose
deliberations ultimately filtered down into what became that fictional
portrayal running in parallel to the actual speculations.
For the record, I do not accept Bohm's philosophy.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Like the Clinton Clock, the hands on the Rush Limbaugh Clock also go
counterclockwise. But the numbers go clockwise."
sent to me by Rempy (rempy@aol.com)
|
