Mathematics and Physics(NP)

Let me first deal with banter of Prof. Carlo Fonseka as it is relevant to our discussion. I am younger now than when I went to the UK to write that thesis, does not mean that I am younger due to the air travel. After coming back to Sri Lanka I grew older until about the year 1980, repeating like many others what the westerners had taught me. My so called research confined to some peripheral problems in western science without challenging its concepts or theories. However, after that year new ideas came to me in a “procession” and it is generally believed that it is the young who are endowed with new ideas. I have been able to think a fresh creatively since then, and I am happy that I am growing younger, though many, especially in the academia may not like my original ideas. Prof. Carlo Fonseka does not belong to that category and that is one of the reasons I respect him.

Prof. Fonseka does not seem to have grasped the essence of time dilation in Special Relativity. It is essentially regarding the time interval between two events as measured by observers moving relative to each other. In special relativity objects cannot travel with velocities faster than light though there appear to be evidence recently to the contrary. For a particle travelling with a velocity less than that of light the time as measured by a clock moving with it (proper time) increases and a person does not become younger by going in an airplane. The clocks that were taken round the earth referred to by Prof. Fonseka registered different times due to general relativistic effects and rotation, and is not related to the so called twin paradox in special relativity. In any event my being younger now has nothing to do with traveling in airplanes with or without that young lady called Bright.

What I said on imposing ideas is the following. “After coming back from the UK to Sri Lanka then known as Ceylon in another Air Ceylon airplane (could have been the same airplane) I have realized that the westerners have imposed their needs on us through colonialism.”. Prof. Fonseka states that “In any case, my position has nothing to do with westerners having "imposed their needs on us through colonialism’ as claimed by Prof. Nalin”. Prof. Fonseka is of course entitled to think that way but it is not a secret that the schools we attend, the universities where we study and of course the books we read have an immense influence on us unless we for some reason or other make a deliberate attempt to break away from that influence and succeed. What are (western) schools and universities for if not for imposing not only western needs, but also western attitudes, western knowledge, western culture etc.? Personally I am aware how I changed from my semi rural and semi urban knowledge and attitudes to western scientific knowledge and attitudes at schools and the universities, and then how I went back to my cultural identity having realized the inadequacies, weaknesses, inconsistencies, inhumanness etc. in the western Chinthanaya that gave rise to western science. There are many people who talk of Principle of Superposition in Quantum Physics without realizing that it cannot be explained in western thinking. Quantum Physics may be working but as Feynman has said nobody (in the western sciences – my emphasis) understands it. How does one understand that a particle can exist at two or more places simultaneously in Aristotelian logic? At home and the village temple I was brought up in a culture that did not seek comfort but emphasized on avoiding “kamasukhallikanuyogaya” and also “attakilamtanuyogaya” and taught me of “alpecca” and sallahuka” form of life. My upbringing as a child did not allow me to be “bahubhandika”, and today I have no problem in traveling by bus and sparingly using my old car bought in 1978 (before 1980). Full option cars are not for me now, and I am reminded of the “nembiliya” in this regard. “Nembiliya” is used to separate rice from other material found in rice and having constructed and developed it to a certain level, Sinhala people did not want to “improve” it to a full option nembiliya, wasting energy and resources. The concept of comfort is determined by culture and it is not only the bodhisathva who find “dukkha” in comfort. In my series on so called scientific knowledge I will go into detail on this and show how a Science based on Sinhala Buddhist culture or Tamil Hindu culture is different from western science.

Prof. Fonseka says “For my part, my understanding of what the Buddha taught about the way to achieve well-being and happiness through the elimination of greed, hatred and delusion is quite compatible with my understanding of the modern scientific outlook.”. However, greed, competiveness, sensory pleasures etc., are behind modern western consumerism and living in general and more and more possessions will not guarantee happiness to people. It will only destroy the natural resources, increase competitiveness, and I do not think that I have to elaborate on this. In connection to what Buddha had taught there are many scholars who would be happy to show that Buddhism is (western) scientific and rational meaning conformity with Aristotelian logic. It is not so, and I remember Prof. Fonseka himself trying to present Kalama Sutta as evidence for the so called scientific method. However, he has now realized that there is a Part II to Kalama Sutta referring to the Vinnus .

Prof. Fonseka states: “Prof. Nalin’s answer to his question about the effectiveness of western physics based on western mathematics is their ‘abstractness’”, and that in his view “the effectiveness is the outcome of their concreteness and empirical nature.” However the question I asked was "why western mathematics ‘the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true’ has been so effective in western physics" It is different from Prof. Fonseka’s formulation. Western Mathematics is very abstract and western Physics is abstract to a very high degree. It is said that we do not know what we are talking in Mathematics nor whether what we are saying is true, but I presume that Physics is trying to arrive at truth. How can Mathematics with those properties be so effective in Physics as such? On the other hand, if I were to ask Prof. Fonseka why western Mathematics is not effective in Physiology what would his answer be? Concreteness was and is not the hallmark of western science that looks for generalized theories. Even the patients in western medicine are generalized patients and not concrete patients. Finally this talk of empirical nature becomes a travesty when it is claimed that if the appearances (what is grasped through the sense organs) are true, then there is no need for a science. It is said that one starts with observations (experiments, controlled experiments,) then theorize and come back to observations to test the theories. Observations are appearances and how does one know that the theories are true or let us say approaching the truth by comparing the deductions from theories with observations?

Copyright Prof. Nalin De Silva

Wave-particle duality of nature challenged at Kelaniya University

In 1807, Thomas Young demonstrated that light had wave properties by using a simple experiment now famously known as the Young’s double slit experiment. Young showed that the pattern of bright and dark fringes that forms on a screen when light passes through two narrow slits can be explained using the wave theory. Since Young’s revelations, the wave theory of light (of electromagnetic radiation in general) took firm root and dominated the physics world for nearly a century. Until Max Plank, in 1901, showed that the energy of the radiation emitted by heated objects was discretized as if light was actually composed of particles! Since the wave nature of light as demonstrated in the Young’s experiment could not be discarded, scientists reconciled that light had both wave-like and particle-like properties. As it turned out just as light possess particle like properties, particles such as electrons, neutrons and even large molecules like fullerenes possess wave like properties. In 1989 experiments conducted by Tonomura demonstrated that a beam of electrons passing through a double slit, as in Young’s experiment, actually forms a dark and bright fringe pattern on a screen next to it. It is believed that these interference patterns, as they are called, arise because of the wave nature of electrons.

Young’s double slit experiment is still an active research topic among physicists as they have not fully embraced the strange behavior of nature implied by it. Physicists have been particularly bothered by the fact that when a single electron, instead of a beam of electron is sent through the double slit what is observed on the screen is not a faint interference pattern but a single dot on the screen depicting an electron striking the screen. If an electron represented a physical wave of some sort then one would expect a series of bright and dark fringes, however faint it might be on the screen but not a single dot. This unexplained phenomenon is the focus of recent theoretical and experimental work conducted by Dr. Nalin de Silva and his student Suraj Chandana at University of Kelaniya.

Dr. de Silva rejects the wave nature of particles. According to him what gives rise to a bright and dark fringe pattern in the Young’s double slit experiment is not the so called wave nature but the particle nature itself though not necessarily those of ordinary classical particles. Dr. de Silva theorizes that each particle that hit the screen on a double slit experiment appears at both the slits simultaneously prior to reaching the screen. This view contrasts with what physicists believe to date. They believe that particles come thorough one of the slits in the Young’s experiment but not both. But particles coming through individual slits cannot explain the bright and dark fringe pattern forming on the screen. Therefore to account for the fringe pattern they theorize that particles behave like waves. However this so called wave property cannot be inferred when only a single particle is fired through the double slit, which results in a single dot on the screen and not a fringe pattern.

In the case of the double-slit experiment, quantum physics dictates that at the level of the slits, a particle is in a superposition of states corresponding to the position of the two slits. The particle is in this superposition as long as it is not disturbed. Placing a screen causes to collapse the superposition into one single state (position). Dr. de Silva interprets the superposition of positional states to mean that the particle actually exists at multiple positions prior to striking the screen. Using the super-positional states quantum physics can predict the probability of finding the particle at the screen or anywhere else between the screen and the double slits. The fringe pattern merely corresponds to the probability of finding the particle at various points of the screen. Dark fringes are where there is a zero probability of finding the particle and bright fringes are where there is higher probability of finding the particle. According to this interpretation, there is no interference of sort taking place as there are no waves to be considered. Why there is only a dot on the screen when a single electron is fired through the double slit is simply because the superposition of positional states collapses into one single position at the screen.

To prove that quantum particles do not have wave properties, Dr. de Silva designed an ingenious yet a simple experiment using a laser beam and double slit apparatus. Here, a series of aluminum sheets are placed along the zero probability positions as predicted by quantum physics, between the slits and the screen. Since light cannot penetrate aluminum sheets, no interference pattern should form on the screen if light behaved like a wave. On the other hand if light behaved as quantum particles, placing aluminum sheets at zero probability positions should not affect the fringe pattern since there is no particle present at those positions to interact with the sheet. The experiment was carefully set up by his student, Suraj Chandana. When the laser was turned on, the fringe pattern appeared on the screen as they had expected confirming the hypothesis that light consists of particles that did not have wave properties.

Physicists had to artificially attach a wave property to quantum particles to explain the fringe pattern in the Young’s experiment because they did not think that the superposition of positional states meant particles were at both the slits at the same time. According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics formulated by Niels Bohr and others, nothing can be said about the superposition of positional states before a measurement is made; it is the act of measurement that creates the knowledge of the position of the particle. According to Dr. de Silva’s interpretation or Vidyalankara interpretation as he prefers to call it, a particle actually exist at number of positions in superposition until the superposition is disturbed by an observer. Western physicists could not have considered this possibility since according to the Aristotelian logic a particle is either here or not here. But for people of many eastern cultures it is not a problem to believe that a particle can be at multiple locations at the same time, as they can relate to certain deities and supernatural beings that can manifest at different places at the same time. Today, the existence of such superposition of states is not just a legend but is supported by experiments. In 1996 Monroe and his colleagues had demonstrated the simultaneous existence of two spin states of Beryllium cation. Since then similar experiments have been carried out by others to prove the existence of superposition of states.

The Vidyalankara interpretation also resolves other paradoxes in quantum physics such as the Schrödinger's cat, the results of “which way” experiment and the Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment. For long physicists have been forced to understand quantum physics using particle and wave properties which are essentially classical ideas. Dr. de Silva expels these and introduces a nature that is more akin to quantum physics. He has created a paradigm shift in the knowledge of quantum nature.

Janaka Wansapura, Ph.D.