Scientist or Technician?

Excerpt:
The Dancing Wu Li Masters
An Overview of the New Physics
By Gary Zukav

When I tell my friends that I study physics, they move their heads from side to side, they shake their hands at the wrist, and they whistle, "Whew! That's difficult". This universal reaction to the word "physics" is a wall that stands between what physicists do and what most people think they do. There is usually a big difference between the two.

Physicists themselves are partly to blame for this sad situation. Their shop talk sounds like advanced Greek, unless you are Greek or a physicist. When they are not talking to other physicists, physicists speak English. Ask them what they do, however, and they sound like the natives of Corfu again.

On the other hand, part of the blame is ours. Generally speaking, we have given up trying to understand what physicists (and biologists, etc.) really do. In this we do ourselves a disservice. These people are engaged in extremely interesting adventures that are not that difficult to understand. True, how they do what they do sometimes entails a technical explanation which, if you are not an expert, can produce an involuntary deep sleep. What physicists do, however, is actually quite simple. They wonder what the universe is really made of, how it works, what we are doing in it, and where it is going, if it is going anyplace at all. In short, they do the same things that we do on starry nights when we look up at the vastness of the universe and feel overwhelmed by it and a part of it at the same time. That is what physicists really do, and the clever rascals get paid for doing it.

Unfortunately, when most people thing of "physics", they think of chalkboards covered with symbols of an unknown mathematics. The fact is that physics is not mathematics. Physics, in essence, is simple wonder at the way things are and a divine (some call it compulsive) interest in how that is so. Mathematics is the tool of physics. Stripped of mathematics, physics becomes pure enchantment.

…

I was trying to find out what a "Master" is. The dictionary was no help. All of its definitions involved an element of control. This did not fit easily into our image of the "Dancing Wu Li Masters". Since Al Huang is a T'ai Chi Master, I asked him.

"That is the word that other people use to describe me," he said. To Al Huang, Al Huang was just Al Huang.

Later in the week, I asked him the same question again, hoping to get a more tangible answer.

"A Master is someone who started before you did," was what I got that time.

My western education left me unable to accept a nondefinition for my definition of a "Master", so I began to read Huang's book, Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain. There, in the foreword by Alan Watts, in a paragraph describing Al Huang, I found what I sought. Said Alan Watts of Al Huang:

He begins from the center and not from the fringe. He imparts an understanding of the basic principles of the art before going on to the meticulous details, and he refuses to break down the t'ai chi movements into a one-two-three drill so as to make the student into a robot. The traditional way … is to teach by rote, and to give the impression that long periods of boredom are the most essential part of training. In that way a student may go on for years and years without ever getting the feel of what he is doing.

Here was just the definition of a Master that I sought. A Master teaches essence. When the essence is perceived, he teaches what is necessary to expand the perception. The Wu Li Master does not speak of gravity until the student stands in wonder at the flower petal falling to the ground. He does not speak of laws until the student, of his own, says, "How strange! I drop two stones simultaneously, one heavy and one light, and both of them reach the earth at the same moment!" He does not speak of mathematics until the student says, "There must be a way to express this more simply."

In this way, the Wu Li Master dances with his student. The Wu Li does not teach, but the student learns. The Wu Li Master always begins at the center, at the heart of the matter. This is the approach that we take in this book. It is written for intelligent people who want to know about advanced physics but who are ignorant of its terminology and, perhaps, of its mathematics. The Dancing Wu Li Masters is a book of essence; the essence of quantum mechanics, quantum logic, special relativity, general relativity, and some new ideas that indicate the direction that physics seems to be moving. Of course, who can know where the future goes? The only surety is that what we think today will be a part of the past tomorrow. Therefore, this book deals not with knowledge, which is always past tense anyway, but with imagination, which is physics come alive, which is Wu Li.

One of the greatest physicists of All, Albert Einstein, was perhaps a Wu Li Master. In 1938 he wrote:

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison.

Most people believe that physicists are explaining the world. Some physicists even believe that, but the Wu Li Masters know that they are only dancing with it.

I asked Huang how he structures his classes.

"Every lesson is the first lesson," he told me. "Every time we dance, we do it for the first time."

"But surely you cannot be starting new each lesson," I said.

"Lesson number two must be built on what you taught in lesson number one, and lesson three likewise must be built on lessons one and two, and so on."

"When I say that every lesson is the first lesson." he replied, "it does not mean that we forget what we already know. It means that what we are doing is always new, because we are always doing it for the first time."

This is another characteristic of a Master. Whatever he does, he does with the enthusiasm of doing it for the first time. This is the source of his unlimited energy. Every lesson that he teaches (or learns) is a first lesson. Every dance that he dances, he dances for the first time. It is always new, personal, and alive.

Isidor I. Rabi, Nobel Prize winner in Physics and the former Chairman of the Physics Department at Columbia University, wrote:

We don't teach our students enough of the intellectual content of experiments - their novelty and their capacity for opening new fields…. My own view is that you take these things personally. You do an experiment because your own philosophy makes you want to know the result. It's too hard, and life is too short, to spend your time doing something because someone else has said it's important. You must feel the thing yourself…

Unfortunately, most physicists are not like Rabi. The majority of them, in fact, do spend their lives doing what other people have told them is important. That was the point Rabi was making.

This brings us to a common misunderstanding. When most people say "scientist," they mean "technician." A technician is a highly trained person whose job is to apply known techniques and principles. He deals with the known. A scientist is a person who seeks to know the true nature of physical reality. He deals with the unknown.

In short, scientists discover and technicians apply. However, it is no longer evident whether scientists really discover new things or whether they create them. Many people believe that "discovery" is actually an act of creation. If this is so, the distinction between scientists, poets, painters and writers is not clear. In fact, it is possible that scientists, poets, painters and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call commonplace and to re-present them to us in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded. Those people in whom this gift is especially pronounced, we call geniuses.

The fact is that most "scientists" are technicians. They are not interested in the essentially new. Their field of vision is relatively narrow; their energies are directed toward applying what is already known. Because their noses often are buried in the bark of a particular tree, it is difficult to speak meaningfully to them of forests.

Click here to see the book The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav.

Gary Zukav has written "the Bible" for those who are curious about the mind-reeling discoveries of advanced physics, but who have no scientific background... read more