Cosmic Marxism

In one sense, the popular Marvel movie Dr. Strange represents the bourgeois cosmic view perfectly. The Marvel universe here is one where both magic and science exist mashed together. Here, magic is ‘real magic’, in the sense that it is not mere tricks, illusions or special effects. This is because other dimensions allow for this in the infinite multiverse, and it is possible to cross between these universes, and to gain powers from these. Science, however, is not as capable as magic, because it is limited. Usually it is limited, however, only by the limited thought capabilities of the human subject in question in the movie, the hero, who slowly comes to see the light.

What rules this multiverse, on the other hand, is really a simpler logic than that of our Earthbound science: it is the Manichaean law of good versus evil. And, in fact, here we find the logic of journalese writ large as the usual array of competing ideas, some of which are taken to be good ideas and some of which bad. Nevertheless, science and cosmology also underpin this multiverse with its magic and good and evil forces and so on, in this case here by the apparently scientific theory of the infinite multiverse itself. Such theories are produced by ‘the world of philosophy’ and ‘the world of physics’ where they meet up.

To manage this meeting point there is a reliance on certain figures and organs to act as the intermediaries, the popularizers of science in the media. These intermediaries themselves require a body of knowledge that they can draw from, knowledge that has been, so to speak, pre-vetted to be politically safe and fit for purpose. Today, Marxism and dialectical materialism, naturally, has been totally left out of our understanding of the cosmos and physical reality in the media. Yet today we have quantum entanglement (or “spooky action at a distance”), black hole singularities, wave/particle duality, multiple dimensions, the uncertainty principle and probability, and all these things seem to show up dialectical paradoxes like never before. In fact, if you knew anything about Marxist philosophy you could be forgiven for thinking that what we are seeing is a dramatic proof of the dialectics of nature.

Yet when the theory of uncertainty is called the theory of indeterminacy, the critical aim is undoubtedly pointed at Marx and his apparently old-fashioned deterministic materialism. What seems to be justified in the modern world therefore is not Marx, or Hegel for that matter, but Kant’s ‘uncertainty principle’ over the status of our knowledge, which it presented as if it is a good match with Heisenberg’s principle. Just as we cannot know the position and the velocity of an electron at the same time, according to Heisenberg and quantum mechanics, likewise in modern ideology we also cannot know the “Thing in itself” according to Kant, and these things are supposed to be more than just analogous to each other. In the popular world they are the foundation stones of both the multiverse and the doubt of the possibility of any exact knowledge, so we have infinite possibilities coupled with infinite doubt. At the same time, the fact that we can know this, that we know the structures upon which everything is built at the smallest scales probabilistically, is in any case treated as very valuable knowledge. Yet, as any Marxist knows, Kant still does not get past Hegel’s refuting argument in his Logic: that to know that you cannot know is knowledge. Arguably, it is precisely because today’s world provides in physics and astronomy dramatic proof of the truths of dialectical materialism that this philosophy is so proscribed.

To make our point, let’s just focus on one phenomenon: Black holes.

Leonard Susskind can help us. We will ignore, in his book on the subject, his awkward analogy in his introduction of ‘biological hard wiring’ though; - suffice it to say we think it is the relative lack of instinct that makes humans different to other animals, and that we can all think of some pretty strange things with our imaginations, and have been able to do so for a long time, in fact in the past I suspect it may have been easier for us (such as the Pre-Socratic ancient Greek philosophers) than it is today, given the amount of ‘help’ we have from the media.

Black holes are objects in space, collapsed or imploded stars, which have so much mass and density that the gravity they produce is so strong that at some point even light, which travels at 186,000 miles per second, cannot escape its pull, and therefore they appear black  (to our eyes, the absence of light registers as the color black). The object at the focus of the black hole is called a singularity, because it represents the location where the density and mass are infinitely great, and its size is infinitely small. Nevertheless, and this is the paradoxical bit, different black holes can have different characteristics based on the amount of mass they had initially or that they later pull in. For instance, if more mass should fall into a black hole their mass gets larger, so this changes the size of what is called their event horizon. The event horizon is the limit where the gravitational attraction of the black hole becomes so great that any object that passes this point will be unable to escape the fate of ending up in the singularity.

Now, the area of the event horizon is always proportional to the mass of the black hole. One might reasonably expect all black holes to be the same, given they are all infinitely small and infinitely dense etc. and all infinities must be equally infinite, yes? But being of different mass changes them (also their rates of spin but we will leave this aside). If you think about it, the mass of an infinitely small and dense object seems strange, because it seems both infinitely heavy, and to have no mass at all because it is infinitely small, simultaneously, and how could such a volume, as a thing, generate different sizes of event horizon? Only the event horizon’s area is changed, the singularity remains a singularity, a point with no dimension.

Physical objects which come near to the event horizon of a black hole behave strangely. Near to the event horizon, because of the greater gravity and its relativistic effects, everything slows down relative to those things more distant from it. This slowing down is not just clocks, which would tick slower (or at fewer intervals), but also the whole structure of matter, e.g. it includes the atomic motions. This shows us that it is not just light that is here affected by gravity, but all electromagnetic radiation and in fact all of matter in motion. Its relative rate of motion is slowed by the intense gravity. This also means that time is affected, or space-time. Therefore, a person near a black hole (if they could survive) would age less relative to a person more distant from it. This is true in normal life of the effects of gravity on our planet too, but the effects are usually so small we do not notice them, for instance a clock at sea level ticks slower than one at the top of a high mountain.

The paradoxical nature of the black hole is understood by a common ‘thought experiment’ performed by physicists: We imagine a person, Bob, falling into a largish black hole, and another person, Alice, observing at a safe distance, say, on a circling space station (I have switched the usual roles for Bob and Alice as I got fed up with Alice always dying). Alice will see Bob slow down as he approaches the event horizon, and the light that she sees from him will become redder, because it is shifted to the ‘red end’ of the spectrum because light is slowed and so the wavelengths are longer; and then, as he approaches even nearer, he is smeared out and disintegrated. But, although this must inevitably happen, Bob does not experience this. Because of the equivalence principle, where in free fall the effect of gravity is totally abolished, he sails on through the event horizon and does not get disintegrated, he is still fine. Therefore, two things happen that contradict each other, Bob is both alive and dead, he is in a relativistic state, like Schrodinger’s famous cat.

We will come back to black holes in a moment, first something else needs to be said.

The probabilistic nature of electromagnetic radiation (or all matter in motion as such) is shown in the famous dual/particle wave experiment (that has been repeated many ways) that shone a beam of light of variable intensity through two slits and onto a phosphorescent board which recorded the result. Light shone at very low intensity through the left slit with the other blocked produced the effect of a single particle, a photon, hitting the board, but at a location which could not be accurately determined, i.e. it was uncertain. However, when the intensity of the beam was raised (more photons), a pattern was revealed, a blob a little to the left side. The same happened for the right slit, but the blob was a little to the right. But what happened when both slits were opened was that there was not a simple synthesis of the blobs but, instead, a pattern emerged of stripes with gaps in between where no hits or blobs of light were recorded, even though those positions were previously covered by light (see Susskind 2008 p.102-3).

In short, light, which previously acted like particles in the experiment, now acted like waves, and after going through the two slits was interfering with itself; this is called an interference pattern. Some waves were reinforced by synchronizing with other waves positively, but some were cancelled for the same reason but negatively (peaks clashed with troughs), and thus produced no hits on the board.

Although the above might seem to prove that the wave theory had won the day, electromagnetic radiation also clearly acts like quanta, as Einstein found. In fact, we know that the intensity of light ramps-up by discrete steps, the smallest being one photon: Hence Quantum Theory. The behavior of these discrete particles or quanta can be studied; their laws of motion, combination and change can be understood. Therefore, we have matter acting at the same time in two distinct ways, as a wave and as quanta.

Planck’s constant (commonly denoted by h) is the smallest a product of mass and the uncertainties of position and velocity can be. Planck determined that it was possible to define the unit of the speed of light, unit of mass, and unit of time each as 1, and the same as the Planck constant.

Coming back to black holes, the smallest a black hole can be (Susskind 2008) is defined by the Planck length, time (half-life) and mass (or energy).

Susskind tells us how Jacob Bekenstein worked out something important in relation to bits of information, entropy, and black holes. - We will forego the mathematics and just say that he calculated that for every one-bit photon added to the black hole the area of the event horizon increased proportionally by one square Planck unit. So, in effect, the information that was presumed lost (at one point by Hawking) by being swallowed up in the singularity still exists in the area of the event horizon.

(Stephen Hawking had proposed that black holes radiate a certain amount of energy, by paired particles being separated, one going inside and one coming out, at the event horizon, which eventually evaporates them over a gargantuan period of time. With this evaporation the information that fell into the black hole was thought to be lost forever, breaking the fundamental rule of physics of the conservation of energy, or, which amounts to the same thing, information; Susskind showed how this was not correct.)

So, we are seeing here two paradoxes that are similar: The paradox of wave/particle duality and the paradox of what happens when Bob falls into the black hole. Indeed, these two do become related in the investigation of black holes, because any attempt to try to examine what is happening to Bob as he gets close to the event horizon, say to look at him with a light beam, would require under those conditions of extreme gravity a beam of such intensity that it would also destroy him.

When Bob is past the event-horizon he can no longer provide any information to the outside world because nothing can go faster than the speed of light, such as radio, and light cannot escape the event horizon of the black hole. Although he is still OK (equivalence principle), his fate is sealed, and he will eventually be destroyed presumably at the singularity, although really, we do not know for sure because nobody knows, and the laws of physics break down inside this domain. In any case, no outside observer can receive a message from Bob to determine what state Bob is in. As far as they are concerned, he was destroyed at the event horizon. However, to the thought experimenter, Bob seems to be, really, in two opposed states, both alive and dead, at the same time. But this thought experimenter now thinks that this is impossible because, naturally, no person can be both alive and dead at the same time. Perhaps, either she is imagining the situation and communicating this to the rest of us from a third position somehow ‘outside’ the two events, or this thought experimenter has realized something important about certain contradictions through the imagination.

This paradoxical state of matter in motion is already described in physics as complementarity, and as belonging to the principle of complementarity (Niels Bohr; it is ironic that the famous meeting in September 1941 during WWII between Bohr and Heisenberg, the latter who was acting for the Nazis, is uncertain as to its actual content), which holds that objects have certain pairs of complementary properties which cannot all be observed or measured simultaneously. Using this term, the paradoxical nature of the phenomena is obscured, even though the way in which the thought experimenter (the physicist) arrived at such a determination was via the concept of paradox or contradiction, e.g. just as Susskind demonstrates in his book.

So, it seems to us that the concept-term ‘complementarity’ displaces the concept-term contradiction in this place (and, actually, in all science), even though the concept-term contradiction proved the most useful concept during the actual process of scientific thinking about the problem. And, in fact, the concept of ‘complementarity’ does not add any explanatory power regarding the phenomena.

What function does this term serve, therefore? The decision to favor the pragmatic term complementarity over contradiction (consciously or not) we suggest has a reflexive action back on the imagination that produced the thought experiment that helped the investigation of the phenomenon in the first place. It is as if it is saying that the thought experiment’s objects, contradictions, were somehow bad or wrong, and so noticing them as paradoxical was wrong.

But think, if the experimenter had at first only seen ‘complementary’ phenomena, it is highly unlikely that the same sense of urgency would have prevailed over the analysis of what was going on. The term ‘complementarity’ seems to close the debate by answering the question too quickly. But nobody ‘saw complementarity’, they saw contradiction (it is noteworthy here that in color science color opposites are also usually described as complementaries).

Consider Bob and Alice in their relation to that black hole: A lot rests on the location of the third observer, i.e. the narrator of the thought experiment, who is able, in their imagination (which we follow in ours), to think themselves in both places simultaneously, in both Alice and Bob’s positions, whatever space-time they may occupy. Bob from his position, close to the event horizon, seems to the narrator to be in both an alive and a dead state, because this narrator can see and understand Bob doing well, but can also see and understand from Alice’s position, who sees Bob destroyed. If we call the narrator Charlie, it might be said that Charlie cannot exist and therefore the problem of the contradiction of Bob being both alive and dead does not arise, since Bob and Alice occupy different ‘relativistic light cones’ and are unable to experience things from each other’s point of view. Does this mean that the simultaneous position of our observer Charlie is impossible? No. Charlie’s position is imaginary as we said, and therefore can be outside the space-time continuum that Bob and Alice are understood to be occupying.

This imaginary position is nevertheless ruled suspicious, or even inadmissible, within Bob and Alice’s (and Frege’s, I suppose) political universe, because it shows a dialectical materialist frame of mind. Yet Bob and Alice are also a part of our imaginary and not really in the real universe, - but for the sake of the argument, we can make this distinction in our imagination: That Charlie does not exist in the same space-time as Alice and Bob. Then the question becomes: Is it possible for Charlie to see Alice and Bob simultaneously? Or, to put it more accurately: Is all simultaneity ruled out in Alice and Bob’s universe if you do not occupy the same space-time location? If so, Charlie can do something that is impossible in the universe of Bob and Alice. However, we know that any imaginary Charlie (any imaginary narrator of a thought experiment) can also perform this feat of imagination within the same universe as Alice and Bob (i.e. ours). So, the thought experiment is possible, and in that thought experiment it is possible to do impossible things. In fact, the ability to do impossible things in the imagination has led us to a lot of real knowledge.

But, even if it is impossible (experimentally) to simultaneously observe both Bob and Alice, i.e. to be with Alice as she watches Bob get destroyed and be with unharmed Bob as he sails through the event horizon whistling, does this represent a condition that is truly impossible in the universe of any real Bob and Alice in relation to a real black hole? - Is our imagination merely pretending that we can be in both Bob and Alice’s shoes at the same time, but this is not possible, because (in reality) there is no simultaneity? To achieve this in our actual universe, Charlie would have to be both Bob and Alice at the same time, which would require Charlie being in two places at once. The problem is time: in this case study there is no mention of ‘same time’ so the apparent problem, the contradiction, does not arise. Yet the imaginary situation arose in the thought experiment in our universe for good reason. Alice can see Bob fall into the event horizon and get destroyed, but if we think of Bob, we know from science that he will be OK, because in his frame of reference his time is slowed and so he will remain unharmed. Our imaginary circumstance, which this still is admittedly, is not conflicting with the laws of nature.

Even though we cannot be in both shoes, so to speak, simultaneously and for real, we can still understand this as a contradiction in much the same way we can witness the dual particle/wave nature of light in actual experiments. Alice’s time, which is speeded up, can see what to Bob represents an eternity, so she may see his destruction. But if time is slowed down for Bob, this is only relative to Alice’s time which seems speeded up to Bob. We can imagine that Bob could observe Alice’s speeded up time, and Alice could observe Bob slowed down and almost frozen time, but we cannot say that we see both observing each other ‘at the same time’, precisely because they are in different time frames, although in fact this is what we have just imagined in order to think this scenario. On the other hand, we do know that Bob can pass through the event horizon unscathed, while Alice will see him destroyed. So, the latter scenario does not depend upon the thought experimenter’s unique position of observation, even though this may be what we do in the thought experiment. The two things are true, Bob can be both alive and dead, but we cannot really say that this condition of being in both states happens at the same time, it is potentially correct but not actually correct. It would be more correct for Charlie to conclude that we may not say that she is both alive and dead at the same time we may only say that she is in a potential state of aliveness and deadness. This is similar for Schrodinger’s cat in the famous thought experiment. The cat is potentially both alive and dead until we find out exactly what state the cat is in by looking in the box. This potentiality is ‘at the same time’, because for the entire period in which we do not know the actual state we still know the potential and the whole period can be as long a duration as we want.

Does this mean that the contradiction is solved for Bob’s condition? No. Because we can calculate from the black hole event horizon the amount of energy (information …) which would now include the dead Bob’s body, but we still know that Bob would be OK. No matter how hard we try, the paradox still asserts itself and appears to be fundamental rather than ‘only imaginary’.

What is the status of the paradox? Clearly the contradiction is not the same as one which finds two different answers from a simple phenomenon, such as Susskind gives in his example of two thermometers placed into boiling water and one reads cold and the other hot. That is not a contradiction in our sense but a simple error. But because there is some similarity between this kind of contradiction (error) and our kind, and because problems like this can give rise to further knowledge, the two can be and are often confused and conflated. Wave/particle duality is not an error, both can be observed, and both form a very important part of physical science. Is it simply that the instruments used to interrogate the phenomenon in question are too crude that they cannot provide the answer (position and velocity)? No, because although it is true that using light e.g. to study light changes the experiment, what this shows is that at this level we are dealing with our embeddedness to matter in motion, which cannot be changed. Observation and recording require physical processes like those happening in the objects being studied. Does this mean that we cannot have absolute knowledge of anything? It does mean that we cannot get beyond the universe to observe it in a detached position like a god, but the answer to that question is no, we can have absolute knowledge in the sense that science has determined that we cannot do this, and this is absolute knowledge, or in simpler terms, it is scientifically true.

Engels (1941, from his book, written between 1872-1882) gives us a way to understand the paradoxical (dialectical) and apparently counter intuitive principles of quantum mechanics, which exhibit all the features amenable to dialectical materialist thought, including the Uncertainty Principle:

“Chance and Necessity. – Another contradiction in which metaphysics is entangled is that of chance and necessity. What can be more sharply contradictory than these two thought determinations? How is it possible that both are identical, that the accidental is necessary, and the necessary is also accidental?”

(…)

“In contrast to both conceptions, Hegel came forward with the hitherto quite unheard-of propositions that the accidental has a cause because it is accidental, and just as much also has no cause because it is accidental; that the accidental is necessary, that necessity determines itself as chance, and, on the other hand, this chance is rather absolute necessity (Logic, II, Book III, 2: Reality). Natural science has simply ignored these propositions as paradoxical trifling, as self-contradictory nonsense. And, as regards theory, has persisted on the one hand in the barrenness of thought of Wolffian metaphysics, according to which a thing is either accidental or necessary, but not both at once; or, on the other hand, in the hardly less thoughtless mechanical determinism which by a phrase denies chance in general only to recognise it in practice in each particular case.”

A note (by J.B.S. Haldane) to the above) says:

“Science is now beginning to tackle these questions in connection with quantum mechanics, and will doubtless find a way of expressing them less paradoxically than Hegel’s. Meanwhile there seems to be little doubt that many of the laws of ordinary physics are statistical consequences of chance events in atoms. But these chance events are necessary, because, though we cannot predict what a given atom will do, we can predict how many out of a large number will go through a given process.”

It is interesting to note that a less paradoxical account is presented as desirable when in fact such a paradoxical dialectical account obviously provides, as we have said, such a productive impetus to the thought experiments that have led us to such knowledge.

What we are seeing therefore is the detrimental influence of bourgeois politics on science.

Gary Tedman