Thusness · John Tan

After Anatta · Explorations · Science and the Dharma · Zoom in

Science and Physics

Is energy the last substance?

A zoom-in of the exploration Science and the Dharma.

Science finds regularities of astonishing precision. It has not found, and does not need, a last substance underneath them. This page respects both, and claims no more from physics than physics says.

The question

On a building site a steel beam is solid, a surface that will carry many tonnes. At the scale of atoms the same beam is mostly empty space, held in shape by electromagnetic forces. Look closer, and the atoms are particles, and the particles are excitations of fields. It is natural to think that physics is peeling back layers, and that at the bottom something must finally be there.

Energy seems the best candidate. It changes form, chemical into heat, heat into motion, mass into light, while the total stays the same. Surely that is the something that persists through every change: the modern successor to substance. Or perhaps it is fields, or information, or the wavefunction behind the clicks of the detector.

The substance reading

Stated fairly, the substance view says: science works by digging down to building blocks that exist by themselves. Their intrinsic natures explain why the regularities hold. Each new layer is closer to what is really there.

a table atoms fields a last substance Each layer pictured as closer to what is really there.
The substance picture of science.

What the tradition says

Here the voices that matter most are the physicists' own.

Physics has no picture of energy as blobs of anything. It has only a calculation that keeps balancing.

Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. 1, ch. 4 · paraphrase

There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description.

Niels Bohr, as recalled by Aage Petersen, "The Philosophy of Niels Bohr" (1963)

Analysis of the ultimate refutes only what is posited as existing by its own nature. It excludes a primal matter or a creator, never a convention that claims only conventional validity.

Tsongkhapa, as read in Book 1, Chapter 15 · paraphrase

Applying the logic

1 · What would a substance view say?At the bottom of physics something exists by itself: particles with fixed properties, a field, energy that persists through change, information, or the wavefunction as the real backstage.
2 · What does dependency say instead?Each candidate is identified through measurement, frame and interaction. Energy is a quantity whose total balances; how much a moving ball has depends on the frame, and its conservation follows from a symmetry (Noether's theorem). Most of a proton's mass is the energy of the interaction that binds its quarks. A bit of information is only a difference between two states.
3 · What is affirmed conventionally?All of science: experiments, laws and predictions. Bridges still built with Newton's laws, valid within their domain. Conservation of energy is a regularity of the highest reliability. Theories are overturned by further experience, not by fiat, so this is not relativism.
4 · What is never found?A last substance. Not energy, not fields, not structure, not information. Not the "net of interactions" taken as the fabric of the world. And not consciousness made fundamental either.

Not overstating it

The convergence is real, and it is easy to oversell. Science has not proven the Dharma, and the Dharma did not anticipate physics. My books do not rest on physics; theories are frameworks, valid where they predict and open to revision. What can be said is modest: the long search for a final substrate has again and again found that the supposed bottom was defined by relations.

Two popular moves go too far. A particle in superposition is not "both here and there, and neither": a superposition is a perfectly definite state in the mathematics, not Nāgārjuna's four corners (Step 5). And "consciousness creates reality" simply makes mind the new ground, as Mind and Consciousness shows. The plain case is better than the mystical one. Measure the coast of Britain with a ruler a kilometre long and you get one length; with a ruler a metre long, a longer one. At any chosen scale the length is exact and repeatable. It has no length from its own side. Any scientist can check that.

Conservation is a designated regularity of the highest reliability. It is not a passenger.

Two traps

Too much: eternalism

"Energy, fields or information are what everything is really made of." Or, more subtly, a store of potentials behind appearances, the openness of things given a home in Hilbert space. Each is the old substrate in a quieter form: one made of numbers or possibilities instead of stuff.

Too little: nihilism

"Science is only convention, so any theory is as good as another," or "the table is mostly empty space, so it isn't real." The table holds the lamp. Theories hold up or fail in experience, and the difference matters.

In practice

  • When a match burns, "chemical energy becomes heat and light" is correct. Look for something leaving the match head and travelling into the flame. Nothing is found.
  • Read a science article and notice where the language slides from "the model predicts" to "reality is made of". That slide is the habit, not the physics.
  • Let wonder stay. The world the best instruments show is vivid, exact and reliable, and nowhere found from its own side.

In the chain: this page goes with Vivid and Nowhere (4 of 7); The Logic of Dependency (6 of 7). The chain starts at Seeing Comes First.

In the books

Talks

Words to know

Substrate
A supposed bottom layer that exists by itself and holds everything else up.
Conservation of energy
The total of a computed quantity stays the same in a closed system. A regularity, not a stuff.
Framework
The concepts, scales and instruments within which something is measured and named.
Plasticity
Appearances showing differently under different conditions. Exactly as open as their conditions allow, and no more.
Unobstructed (ma 'gags pa)
Nothing blocks the display. Not a store of potentials behind it.