Breakthrough in the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory 2 I would like to interject what I think must be the resolution of Heisenberg's view of Nazism. He must have felt that Hitler and his regime were being used by the central order to bring about the conditions for its manifestation. He recognized that Hitler was evil, but felt that good was using evil for a purpose, which would soon be revealed, at which point the evil would be discarded and the good would emerge triumphant *and* in control. This was his resolution of the so-called Satanic paradox that either God must not be omnipotent or He must be evil. The resolution is that God does need evil to overcome evil in an evil world by the exercise of evil power, which alone can bring about the transformation of the world in the direction of the good. The more blatant the evil agent is, the more obvious it may be that it is not an indigenous evil but an antidote to the indigenous evil. The primary evils of the world to be overcome by the so-called Anti-Christ, who must precede the Christ, are inertia, apathy, materialism or physicalism, and capitalism or mammon. It is crucial to this scenario that, at the decisive moment, after the Anti-Christ has accomplished the necessary mobilization of the masses and the raising of their energies, good should emerge and evil should be cast aside. The resistance movement, including the Wednesday Club, an elite sixteen-membered think tank which at the time included Heisenberg, would undoubtedly have been instrumental in the coup of good over evil, although it is likely that a supernatural element such as the return of the Christ was involved as well. When Heisenberg remarked how splendid it would have been if Germany had won the War, he undoubtedly had this imagined turn of events in mind. Whether it was realistic, God only knows. Heisenberg apparently viewed the victory of the allies as the triumph of mediocrity and the turning back of both the evil *and* the good that might have emerged had the evil been successful in performing its function. The conception of a God that is both Absolute Evil and Absolute Good is known as Abraxas. The documentation of Heisenberg's decisive remark, mentioned above, is found on p. ix and pp. 402-3 of "Heisenberg's War", by Thomas Powers. At Paul Scherer's house in Zurich in 1944, Gregor Wentzel said to Heisenberg, "You must admit that the war is lost". Heisenberg responded, "Yes, but it would have been so good if we had won". This statement was widely circulated to American physicists by Wentzel, who later regretted damaging Heisenberg's reputation, and it was independently corroborated by a report by American secret agent Morris Berg, who had overheard the statement, to Samuel Goudsmit. The primary interest in the statement had to do with its apparent proof that Germany was NOT about to develop the bomb, but secondarily it demonstrated Heisenberg's seemingly inexplicable attitude. My explanation seems to be the only one that fits the facts and maintains the rationality and decency of Heisenberg. It was widely acknowledged that Heisenberg was the most imaginative of physicists, so it is reasonable to suppose that he would be equally imaginative in his approach to sociological phenomena. Finally, we should discuss the issue of space and motion as conjugate variables, which Bohr has raised in several of the above quotes. This issue really precedes all the other issues discussed here. This discussion started with the notion of the extensive continuum as an unfoldment of the classical attribute of extension. But in reality the first unfoldment from the classical order is not from the objective aspect that contains the attributes, but rather from the subjective aspect that contains the psychological "ego". It involves the subjective point of view that perceives first of all the unfolded phenomenal space, which then unfolds further into the noumenal space. The noumenal space then enfolds back into the higher worlds via the Kantian categories of action, affection, time, and place, where time and place are the higher world correlates of action and affection. It is at this point that noumenal space and time as extension and duration can be compared with phenomenal space and time as extension and duration, all within the sixth or causal world, to produce the formula for motion, v = x_2 - x_1 / t_2 - t_1. So, in our interpretation all motion is holomovement, as Bohm proclaimed. It is only at this point that t_2 can be enfolded up into x_2 to produce the extensive spacetime continuum, which as we have seen is noumenal space and time enfolded into the higher worlds of the phenomenal realm. This extensive spacetime continuum can then be identified with an unfoldment from the objective aspect of extension, as the latter exists within the classical world order. This was the starting point for all of our earlier discussion about the reality principle based on continuity and atomism. So, we see that the considerations of space and motion, arising directly from Cartesian metaphysical epistemology, undercut in a fundamental way the reality principle based on continuity and atomism. This is really true even in classical theory, and the understanding of this fact was inaugurated with the theory of relativity, which allows for the essential definition of the extensive spacetime continuum. Quantum theory goes on to define energy and momentum as mental and physical noumenal realities independent of the phenomenally defined spacetime continuum. It is essential to complementarity that when space and time are defined noumenally, motion is defined phenomenally, and when the spacetime continuum is defined phenomenally, energy and momentum are defined noumenally. Technically minded physicists often get hung up in the resultant definitions and ignore the whole logical development that led to those definitions. This is in fact a superficial and one-sided approach that is contrary to the very principles of quantum theory and modern physics in general. Everything must be seen in development, as part of a grand holomovement, including physics itself. One can only achieve such a comprehensive view by employing an adequate metaphysical framework. |