[News] Particle physics opens up new sense of purpose for Africa

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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 Einstein’s model gives us a more 
complete description of cosmic phenomena. 
Nonetheless, Einstein saw his model as amplifying 
and extending Newton’s 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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