Jane: Can we begin by talking about the idea of unity, which is the central principle with which Beshara Magazine is concerned. My understanding of your work is that you start with the concept of unity – wholeness – and explain how particular phenomena emerge from it, rather than deriving unity from the parts. Can you say something about how you came up with this idea?
David: If we go back to Newtonian concepts, Descartes, etc., the whole idea of physics was analysis into separate parts which are eternally related. That worked quite well for a long time. But in more modern physics, like relativity and quantum theory, it is clear that if you attempt to define these point particles, you cannot do it in the classical way; we cannot regard them as independent separate things, like billiard balls, which interact with each other only in the exterior.
One idea for getting around the problem in relativity is to try and make them into extended points, but there is no consistent way of doing that because the theory dictates that they cannot be rigid. The other idea is to imagine them as dimensionless points, but that leads to other problems. Therefore it is not possible to conceive of the whole as being made out of a collection of separate parts in Einstein’s theory; the idea of unbroken wholeness is implied.
With quantum mechanics, there are all sorts of new properties which do not cohere very well with relativity, but lead you to unbroken wholeness in another way. You have the notion of quantum jumps of energy that are said to be discrete and unanalysable – in other words, the basic energy comes in the form of quanta – and the idea is that everything is connected by those. Therefore in the final analysis, it is again all one unbroken whole.
Secondly, there is the phenomenon of wave-particle duality: that an electron going through two slits behaves like a wave, and yet it arrives at the detector like a particle. So it appears to have a nature that depends upon its context, and this again suggests that the particle does not have its own separate nature entirely, but is internally related to the whole, or at least to its environment. And a third thing is quantum non-locality, in which under certain conditions you can find a close connection between things which are physically distant. This violates classical ideas, and provides another way in which a system of particles unites into a whole which has an objective feature of wholeness, meaning that it is not reducible to actions of parts.
It was clear to me that there are problems in bringing relativity and quantum theory together because relativity demands strict causality, strict continuity and strict locality, whereas in quantum mechanics the behaviour of individual particles is basically unpredictable, and there are also these issues of discontinuity and non-locality. So the basic concepts of the two theories do not cohere, although there are certain mathematical algorithms and experiments that make them work together. Therefore, it seemed to me that in order to bring them together you would have to say that the common ground is undivided wholeness...
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