from the glacier

referring to my last post, there is a scale issue in modern science, and in human knowing in general. Man occupies the central place. Things that appear to him on this scale of himself include the dichotomy of subject and object, and there is a philosophical tension therein. But classical physics made use of this division to "objectify" the world and explain it in purely mechanistic terms. With the advent of the new Physics, however, this dichotomy vanishes. I will limit myself to two examples, for the sake of (failed) brevity.

First, there is the case where we are dealing with things that are much larger than ourselves, moving much faster, relatively (relativity) speaking. With the advances of general relativity we can see that the measuring stick, the time and the motion can only be described from a frame of reference, not absolutely. Newtonian "absolute time" and "absolute space" have vanished. So we see that in our observations (just thinking of special relativity first) man's own position and speed determines his measure. The object cannot, therefore, be perfectly detached from the measurer, because the state of the measurer affects the measuring of the object. Extending to General Relativity, where gravitation is included, the Geodesics described by moving objects are affected not only by position and speed, but also by the mass of the bodies that they are near. Simply being a massive body creates a curvature in space-time, so again, even on the smaller scale of man, the fact that there is a massive body next to the observable object creates a variation in space-time, creating a variation in measurement. One cannot divorce the two, because relativity shows we cannot.

Secondly, there is the case of objects that are very much smaller than we are. If we look at the "structure" of the atom, as it is described by the quantum physicist, we will see a picture painted much differently from our high school chemistry classes. Instead of a large massive center - made up of protons and neutrons - "orbited" by electrons - like a tiny solar system - we have a much more uncertain picture. Electrons "are" in an orbit, they say, but do not move in orbits. One Physicist describes them as "kangaroo hops". But there is no telling why or how they end up in any particular position. Also, in 1917 Einstein showed that atoms not only collapse under the influence of radiation, but they can - and frequently do - collapse spontaneously of their own accord. There is an indeterminacy in the structure itself. Enter Schrodinger's cat. Suppose we have a closed container with a living cat in it. And we have isolated a system so that within a certain time frame if one atom decays, then Hydrogen Cyanide is released, killing the cat. The odds of the atom decaying are also set to fifty-fifty because of the certain time frame. If the atom decays, dead cat; if it doesn't, live cat. In the world of subatomic particles they can be in both places "virtually" and there are effects from both places. The particles only "fix" themselves if we look at them. Schrodinger concludes that there is a dead and live cat in the box at the same time. (He found it problematic, because he didn't see that indeterminacy on the quantum level would mean indeterminacy in the observable level) Until we open the box and look, there is both - but only in the realm of quantum mechanics. So, subject and object - to make a long story short, do not exist at the quantum level, because observation changes the things observed. (See also Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - the reason for the uncertainty is the viewer)

Recapitulation - once we escape classical mechanistic physics we also avoid objectifying nature as simply the object observed. We can see this from general relativity and quantum mechanics. Read my post on Aquinas and Heisenberg for more thoughts on the possible reason why.