[News] Particle physics opens up new sense of purpose for Africa
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Thu Apr 29 14:39:31 EDT 2010
Particle physics opens up new sense of purpose for Africa
Horace Campbell
2010-04-29, Issue <http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/479>479
<http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/64060>http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/64060
Since the dawn of time, Africans have had a
conception of the universe in which there was no
separation between spirit and matter and it was
impossible to develop ideas of domination over
nature, writes Horace Campbell. While this world
view was considered backward and primitive in
comparison with Western materialism and the
perceived objectivity of enlightenment
approaches, ecological crises and new
developments in physics suggest that African
theories on the relationship between spirit and
matter are not backwardness after all.
Since the dawn of time, Africans had a conception
of the universe where there was an understanding
of the different forms of energy. There was also
an understanding that there was no separation
between spirit and matter. Meanwhile, the crude
materialism of Western modernity emanated from
an understanding of the world where rational man
developed capitalism. The definition of the
essence of the human was determined by the extent
to which these humans believed that human life
was based on the accumulation of material wealth
and this material wealth as the basis for progress.
Humans who did not internalise this understanding
of the accumulation of wealth a form of
accumulation that took perverse and genocidal
forms when it matured into the capitalist mode of
production were considered backward and
primitive. The Western enlightenment approaches
to life were considered scientific and hence objective and neutral.
Western modes of economic organisation engendered
a tremendous boost in the production of goods,
and this unprecedented production of goods was
worshipped to the point where commodity fetishism
was like a new religion. Spirituality and
commodities were conflated to lay the basis for a
robotic society, where cloning and bioengineered
creatures were the promise of the future.
Like many of the old and indigenous cultures in
the world, the African peoples had resisted this
robotisation of persons and held onto a link
with the wider universe. This understanding of
the ancestors and the infinite universe gave the
majority of African people a deep sense of
humility and a relationship with the universe
where it was impossible to develop ideas of
domination over nature. This humility is best
expressed in the African links to the ancestors
and the links to animals through totems. It is
this humility that inspired and influenced the
African ideation plane and held the societies together.
In the middle ages, Europeans developed a new
sense of themselves and created conceptions of
the universe and of nature that placed humans at
its centre. This mechanical world view meant that
humans could determine the future of all life and
that humans could dominate nature.
This view of life has brought humanity to a
tipping point where the future of the planet is
threatened. Global warming and the threats to
life are forcing new ways of thinking and new
ways of knowing. Africans who had organised their
life based on a spiritual energy and based on an
understanding of the geometry of nature had
resisted the rational and mechanical point of
view and this resistance retreated waiting for
the moment to re-emerge. It was as Amilcar Cabral
noted that African cultures and ideation system
was like a seed awaiting the conditions for germination.
African peoples at the grassroots are now
reflecting on whether the convergence of the new
breakthroughs in particle physics and the
challenges of the threats to the planet have
created the conditions for a break with mechanical thinking.
On Tuesday 30 March 2010, Western European
scientists moved one step further in seeking to
understand the building blocks of life. At CERN,
the <http://public.web.cern.ch/public/>European
Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland,
scientists who have been building the
<http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/LHC-en.html>Large
Hadron Collider advanced the experimentation to
the crack the fundamental laws of physics said
they had recreated in miniature the conditions
just after the start of the universe. In what has
been called a groundbreaking moment, the
researchers combined two opposing beams of
sub-atomic particles travelling at almost the
speed of light, as they attempted to simulate
events in the fraction of a second after the Big
Bang, the most widely accepted theory. Ever
since the time of Albert Einstein when he
developed the theory of relativity, scientists
have been seeking to expand and develop
experiments to test the basic laws of quantum physics.
According to a newspaper report in the New York
Times (30 March), after two false starts due to
electrical failures, protons that were whipped to
more than 99 percent of the speed of light and to
record-high energy levels of 3.5 trillion
electron volts apiece raced around a 17-mile
underground magnetic track outside Geneva a
little after 1 p.m. local time. They crashed
together inside apartment-building-size detectors
designed to capture every evanescent flash and
fragment from microscopic fireballs thought to
hold insights into the beginning of the universe.
This collision of protons at 99 per cent the
speed of light marked a new epoch in the ability
of humans to recreate new forms of energy. The
breakthrough heralds the beginning of a new era
in efforts to try to understand profound
scientific questions, including whether the
sub-atomic particles quarks inside the
protons and neutrons can be freed; and why these
latter particles weigh some 100 times more than
the quarks of which they are composed.
As the scientists said in the newspaper
interviews, We are really starting physics.
This admission by the scientists is an actual
wake-up call that the old is dying and the new is about to be born.
For two hundred years mainstream western
physicists used a mechanistic view of the world
to develop and refine the conceptual framework
known as classical physics. Matter was thought to
be the basis of all existence, and the material
world was seen as a multitude of separate objects
assembled into a huge machine. Like man-made
machines, the cosmic machine was said to be made
of multiple parts. Consequently it was believed
that complex phenomena could always be understood
by reducing them to their basic building blocs
and by looking at the mechanisms through which they interacted.
It was a form of materialism internalised by both
capitalists and some socialists.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritjof_Capra>Fritjof
Capra, in the book
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turning_Point_%28book%29>The
Turning Point more than thirty years ago, alerted
humans to the great possibilities if humans broke
the mechanical conception of the world.
Scientists who took the time to understand the
African world view had understood that Africans
did not make the separation between sprit and
matter. What is now called energy is what is
understood as great spiritual forces.
Ordinary Africans had learnt long before modern
astronomy that the universe was immense and that
there were as many stars as grains of sands in
the Sahara desert. The Dogon people of West
Africa were one of the many African societies who
possessed deep astronomical knowledge. This
knowledge of the Star Sirius B series had
confounded western anthropologists and
astronomists. Charles Finch, author of
<http://bit.ly/a6oHx3>The Star of Deep
Beginnings, sought the authority of one of the
pre-eminent physicists to make his point on the
importance of the spiritual energies of the African village community.
Thus Finch argued: The Newtonian model is one
valid for the objects and events of everyday
experience but Einsteins model gives us a more
complete description of cosmic phenomena.
Nonetheless, Einstein saw his model as amplifying
and extending Newtons not replacing it. But
quantum mechanics challenges the basic Newtonian
model, in effect; things are not what they seem.
In this century, scientists now have to deal with
the realities of uncertainties and the fact
that things may not be what they seem. The
explorations in relation to fractals, particle
physics and chaos theory are manifestations of
the search for a grasp of the forces of the
universe and demonstrate a search for new
insights into the interconnections between humans
and all aspects of the universe. This is the
force behind a new appreciation for the spiritual
forces at work in the universe. The physicists
and scientists of the period of the enlightenment
would have dismissed much of what is going on in
the realm of theoretical physics in this era as
superstition. The fact that there was uncertainty
and elements of the unknown had inspired a level
of humility in pre colonial villages for it was
understood in the village that there were other
ways of knowing other than observation. Finch in
discussing the elimination of the distinction
between reality and illusion and between objectivity and subjectivity added:
In quantum theory, the properties of an electron
or a photon do not exist until they are perceived
and measured. Thus, what a photon is going to be
wave or particle depends on how and when it
is measured; it comes into existence as one or
other by virtue of being measured. If the most
neutral, unencumbered experiment imaginable could
be designed, the results of the reaction would be
altered by the very act of observing it.
This means that the perceiver and the thing
perceived, are indissolubly linked, absolute
objectivity is impossible. Moreover, from the
quantum point of view, things exist because they
are perceived. This realisation has created an
intellectual crisis that is still to be worked
out. What many scientists seem reluctant to face
is the fact, in some sense; consciousness itself
is infused into the stuff of space-time. The
positivistic rationalism, imbued with assumptions
of realistic objectivity that has dominated
science for the last two centuries is a paradigm requiring radical revision.
The experiments at CERN are an attempt by Western
scientists to work out the intellectual crisis
that emanated from the separation of spirit and
matter. African epistemology and ontology on the
relationship between spirit and matter are not
backwardness as the Western ideation system and
modernisation theorists have claimed. The CERN
experiment was an acknowledgement that the old
myths of modernity and progress, in short,
capitalism, must give way to the new.
African peoples must be engaged to give birth to
the new society and a new sense of human purpose.
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