Inspired by a recent Facebook post by a friend, who recounted the extraordinary events of 1995.
The year was 1996 or 1997, but that is immaterial to the timelessness of the subject of this post.
Fresh with my Ph.D, and as most young couples in USA do with tiny bank balances, we lived in an apartment in a city on the east coast, but that too is immaterial to the context of this post.
And we had frequent weekend parties. On one such weekend, several young couples of Indian origin, most with Ph.Ds or post-doctorates from Ivy-league universities, or post-graduates, were in deep conversation about anything and everything scientific and the advances being made in different areas.
The conversation drifted to the greatest miracle of the times — Ganesha Vigrahas that were drinking milk offered by devotees over a 9-day period in 1995.
Several at the time tried to clarify that it was nothing more than capillary action that caused milk to rise in narrow tubules in the Vigrahas. Devotees couldn’t care less, firm in their faith that a miracle was underway, and they were overwhelmed and dazed witnesses and happy participants in the extraordinary phenomenon.
Our party of rational minds declared how foolish people were, with little understanding of science and rationality. After hearing a few rounds of such self-comforting echoes around the small apartment, I decided to test the limits of rationality of the group.
“But what if this is true? Is there a siphon effect here, or purely capillary action? Doesn’t cohesion prevent fluids from dripping out after rising due to capillary action, unless siphoning takes over? How did those Vigrahas imbibe so much more milk even after super-saturation? Can we explain why the phenomenon stopped? On what basis can we reject alleged miracles that suspend laws of physics?”
Deathly silence followed this. This wasn’t meant to be. Wasn’t this chap a Ph.D and from IISc? Is he serious? Why is he not rejecting this outright?
Cue to a doctorate lady, who barely disguising her smug smirk ignored the question, motioning her post-doc husband that is was time to leave — clearly the party was getting over.
“Now look here”, advised a junior professor, “we can measure, model and explain all phenomena with our laws of physics”. They were clearly Buddhist in philosophy who only saw the reality of change between time-instants, and that all change that could be measured, appeared to follow the known laws of causal physics. In this world-view, there was no need for a permanent reality, and no room for a miracle.
“But Newtonian physics, so real at the time for horse-buggy speeds, fails astronomically when we push the speed to cosmic limits, relatively illuminated by Einstein, isn’t it? With what confidence do we accept the certainty and reality of our gross models and measurements made on time-samples that ignore higher order phenomena?” I continued to the discomfort of several.
“Everything is predictable — if we had sufficient information about its initial state and a high-order model to describe its continuum dynamics”, said the somewhat ruffled scientist, “randomness is meaningless in the causal cosmos, and is merely a theoretical concept”.
This was getting better. I said, “Einstein had to deal with more than unkempt hair when confronted with super-fast time-phenomena — such as an electron absorbing a quanta of energy, and doing a round-trip dance-step between orbital states in a flash of light — is the reality of existence a continuum or is it discrete? What does quantization do to your continuum model based on conservatism? And is randomness merely a theoretical concept, in a universe where causality appears to reign? And if quantization happened at all possible time-instants in the universe, would the law of averages imply conservation of energy in the quantum world too? What conservatism are we talking about when we track an individual particle and not the ensemble? The Universe exists. We exist. That is the greatest miracle of all, unexplained by laws of conservation of mass and energy, isn’t it?”
“It was the Big Bang that gave rise to our Fine-Tuned Universe that obeys all currently known laws of physics, chemistry and biology” said one. “But what came before the Big Bang?” asked another, echoing a question asked to Hawking who posed that as a meaningless query that discounts the start of Time from only the instant of the Big Bang — a modern creation story. “Must be multiverses or prior universes or Big Bounce” mumbled another. “All phenomena — continuous or discrete, conservative or not, stationary or not, can be explained in a sufficiently well-constructed abstract mathematical space, which might not have been defined yet”, stated another.
And the most honest answer: “All our models, measurements, hypothesis and laws are our best approximations of reality that is sufficiently constrained to make our models work. There is much we are clueless about — such as Existence or Consciousness. We don’t normally see laws of physics getting suspended for supernatural macro phenomena, but we also know that our current understanding of the physics in the microcosm might be inadequate. The technological world works well with our macro-constraints. But we cannot sit in our bubble of constraints where our models work, and cast incorrect judgement on phenomena that fall outside our models. We should seek rational, scientific explanation for every phenomena that we encounter, constantly generalizing our laws and unifying them towards a Theory of Everything.”
Pretty soon, it was time for me to leave too — the room had emptied sooner than can be explained by Brownian motion: unquestionable signs of superior directed intelligence at work (sic), that has little patience with existential questions.
Little do we understand what happened for those 9 days in 1995, and why that phenomenon has not repeated since.
Is it a manifestation of collective conscious minds that caused this to happen, or merely mass hysteria? The Observer Effect is known in quantum mechanics to cause a decohered outcome out of a superposed state of possibilities. The Quantum Zeno effect can maintain that decohered outcome by rapid repeated observation. Can mass observation amplify quantum phenomena to coherent macro phenomena? I am not aware of any works that claim so.
It is intriguing that the Bhagavadgita (Ch.17) says Shradda is critical for all activities, and how the quality (Sattva, Rajas, Tamas) of Shraddha of a person defines them. Can the Shradda-laden focused activity of thousands of devotees amplify a desired outcome — sheer collective willpower creating a reality? Many “faith-based prayer” groups would like to think so.
The best we can offer in terms of a causal explanation is capillary action on one side and some combination of atmospheric pressure, humidity, temperature, gravity on the other extremities of the capillary tubes causing the imbibed fluid to ooze out.
So the Big Question: If the Universe intrinsically has Non-Causality, would we be able to detect or make sense of it with our theories and laws based on Causality? Or would we try to fit all phenomena using “rationality/causality” alone? How would we harness Rationality in a Non-Causal world, or what tools would we use to navigate a non-causal universe?
Seekers we are, and so also were our ancestors infused with the innate curiosity that has driven our spirit of enquiry over thousands of years.
But our civilization is illiterate about the methods of the past, and poorly informed on the revival of those methods in the present. We readily believe phenomena on one end as miracles, and on the other extreme, readily destroy all insights and knowledge of the civilization as “superstition”.
In both cases, we lament the loss of knowledge on how to pursue true knowledge, removing one assumption at a time, abstracting and forming bridges from the known to the unknown.