Word Gems: Quantum Mechanics: Bohm and Sheldrake

David Bohm was an eminent quantum physicist. As a young man, he
worked closely with Albert Einstein at Princeton University. With Yakir
Aharonov he discovered the Aharonov-Bohm effect. He was later professor
of theoretical physics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and was
the author of several books, including Causality and Chance in Modern
Physics and Wholeness and the Implicate Order. He died in 1992.

This dialogue was first published in ReVision Journal, and the editorial
notes are by Renée Weber, the journal’s editor.

Bohm: Suppose we look at the development of the embryo, at those
problems where you feel the present mechanistic approach doesn’t work.
What would the theory of morphogenetic fields do that others don’t?

Sheldrake: The developing organism would be within the morphoge-
netic field, and the field would guide and control the form of the organ-
ism’s development. The field has properties not just in space but in time.
Waddington demonstrated this with his concept of the chreode [see figure
5], represented by models of valleys with balls rolling down them toward
an end point. This model looks mechanistic when you first see it.

But when you think about it for just a minute you see that this end
point, which the ball is rolling down the valley toward, is in the future,
and it is, as it were, attracting the ball to it. Part of the strength of this
model depends on the fact that if you displace the marble up the sides
of the valley, it will roll down again and reach the same end point; this
represents the ability of living organisms to reach the same goal, even if
you disrupt them—cut off a bit of embryo and it can grow back again;
you’ll still reach the same end point.

Bohm: In physics the Lagrangian law is rather similar; the Lagrangian
falls into a certain minimum level, as in the case of the chreode. It’s
not an exact analogy, but you could say that in some sense the classi-
cal atomic orbit arises by following some sort of chreode. That’s one
way classical physics could be looked at. And you could perhaps even
introduce some notion of physical stability on the basis of a chreode.
But from the point of view of the implicate order, I think you would
have to say that this formative field is a whole set of potentialities, and
that in each moment there’s a selection of which potential is going to
be realized, depending to some extent on the past history, and to some
extent on creativity.

Sheldrake: But this set of potentialities is a limited set, because things
do tend toward a particular end point. I mean cat embryos grow into
cats, not dogs. So there may be variation about the exact course they can
follow, but there is an overall goal or end point.

Bohm: But there would be all sorts of contingencies that determine the
actual cat.

Sheldrake: Exactly. Contingencies of all kinds, environmental influ-
ences, possibly genuinely chance fluctuations. But nevertheless the end
point of the chreode would define the general area in which it’s going
to end up. Anyway, the point about Waddington’s concept of the chreode,
which is taken quite seriously by lots of biologists, is that it already contains this idea of end point, in the future, in time; and the structure,
the very walls of the chreode, are not in any normal sense of the word
material, physical things.

Unfortunately Waddington didn’t define what
they were. In my opinion, they represent this process of formative causa-
tion through the morphogenetic field. Waddington in fact uses the term
“morphogenetic field.” Now the problem with Waddington’s concept is
that, when he was attacked by mechanists, who maintained that this
was a mystical or ill-defined idea, he backed down and said, well, this is
just a way of talking about normal chemical and physical interactions.
René Thom, who took up the concepts of chreodes and morphogenetic
fields and developed them in topological models (where he called the
end points “morphogenetic attractors”), tried to push Waddington
into saying more exactly what the chreode was. Waddington, whenever
pushed by anyone, even René Thom, backed down. So he left it in a
very ambiguous state.

Now Brian Goodwin and people like him see chreodes and mor-
phogenetic fields as aspects of eternal Platonic forms; he has a rather
Platonic metaphysics. He sees these formative fields as eternally given
archetypes, which are changeless and in some sense necessary. It is
almost neo-Pythagorean; harmony, balance, form, and order can be gen-
erated from some fundamental mathematical principle, in some sort of
necessary way, that acts as a causal factor in nature in an unexplained
but changeless manner.

The difference between that and what I’m saying is that I think
these morphogenetic fields are built up causally from what’s happened
before. So you have this introjection, as it were, of explicit forms, to use
your language, and then projection again.

Bohm: Yes. What you are talking about—the relation of past forms to
present ones—is really related to the whole question of time—“How is
time to be understood?” Now, in terms of the totality beyond time, the
totality in which all is implicate, what unfolds or comes into being in
any present moment is simply a projection of the whole. That is, some
aspect of the whole is unfolded into that moment and that moment is just that aspect.

Likewise, the next moment is simply another aspect of the
whole. And the interesting point is that each moment resembles its prede-
cessors but also differs from them. I explain this using the technical terms
“injection” and “projection.” Each moment is a projection of the whole,
as we said. But that moment is then injected or introjected back into the
whole. The next moment would then involve, in part, a re-projection of
that injection, and so on indefinitely.

[Editor’s note: As a simplistic analogy, take the ocean and its waves: each wave arises or is “projected” from the whole of the ocean; that wave then dips back into the ocean, or is “ injected” back into the whole, and then the next wave arises. Each wave is affected by past waves simply because they all rise and fall, or are projected and injected, by the whole ocean. So there is a type of “causality” involved, but it is not that wave A linearly causes wave B, but that wave A influences wave B by virtue of being absorbed back into the totality of the ocean, which then gives rise to wave B. In Bohm’s terms, wave B is in part a “re-projection” of the “injection” of wave A, and so on. Each wave would therefore be similar to previous waves, but also different in certain aspects—exact size, shape, etc. Bohm is suggesting that there is a type of “causality,” but one that is mediated via the totality of the implicate ocean, and not merely via the separated, isolated, explicate waves. This means, finally, that such “causation” would be non-local, because what happens at any part of the ocean would affect all other parts.]

Each moment will therefore contain a projection of the
re-injection of the previous moments, which is a kind of memory; so that
would result in a general replication of past forms, which seems similar
to what you’re talking about.

[Editor’s note: This is according to Bohm’s re-
formulations of present-day quantum mechanics. In the following discussion,
Bohm will point out that present-day quantum mechanics, as it is usually
interpreted, completely fails to account for the replication of past forms, or
the notion of temporal process, a failure that in part led Bohm to propose
“ injection” and “projection” via the implicate order.]

Sheldrake: So this re-injection into the whole from the past would mean
there is a causal relationship between what happens in one moment and
what subsequently happens?

Bohm: Yes, that is the causal relation. When abstracted from the impli-
cate order, there seems to be at least a tendency, not necessarily an exact
causal relationship, for a certain content in the past to be followed by a
related content in the future.

Sheldrake: Yes. So if something happens in one place at one time, what
happens there is then re-injected into the whole.

Bohm: But it has been somewhat changed; it is not re-injected exactly,
because it was previously projected.

Sheldrake: Yes, it is somewhat changed, but it is fed back into the
whole. That can have an influence that, since it is mediated by the
whole, can be felt somewhere else. It doesn’t have to be local.

Sheldrake: Well, that does sound very similar to the concept of mor-
phic resonance, where things that happen in the past, even if they’re
separated from each other in space and time, can influence similar
things in the present, over, through, or across—however one cares to
put it—space and time. There’s this non-local connection. This seems
to me to be very important because it would mean that these fields
have causal (but non-local) connections with things that have happened
before. They wouldn’t be somehow inexplicable manifestations of an
eternal, timeless set of archetypes. Morphogenetic fields, which give rep-
etitions of habitual forms and patterns, would be derived from previous
fields (what you call “cosmic memory”). The more often a particular
form or field happened, the more likely it would be to happen again,
which is what I am trying to express with this idea of morphic reso-
nance and automatic averaging of previous forms. It’s this aspect of the
theory that makes it empirically testable, because this aspect leads to
predictions, such as: if rats learn something in one place, say a new trick,
then rats everywhere else should be able to learn the same trick faster.
That makes it different from Goodwin’s theory of eternal archetypes,
which wouldn’t lead to that prediction, because they would always be the same. And this is where what I’m saying grows out of the tradi-
tion of thought that has been around in biology for sixty years, the idea
of morphogenetic fields. These fields have always been very ill-defined,
and have been interpreted either as Waddington did, to be just a way of
speaking about conventional mechanistic forces, or by a Goodwin-type
metaphysical approach.

Bohm: Yes. Now if we were to use the analogy of the radio wave receiver
which you discussed in your book: if you take a receiver, it has the abil-
ity to amplify very small radio wave signals. As you say, we can regard
the radio wave as a morphogenetic field. And the energy in the receiver
(which comes from the wall socket) is being given shape or form by the
information in the radio wave itself, so you get a musical sound coming
out of the speaker. Now in that case you could say the radio wave pos-
sesses a very tiny energy compared to the energy in the radio coming
from the wall socket. Thus, roughly speaking, there are two levels of
energy: one is a kind of energy that is unformed but which is subject
to being formed by very tiny impulses. The other is a field that is very
much more subtle and which has very little energy in the usual sense of
the word, but has a quality of form that can be taken up by the energy
of the radio receiver. The point is that one might look at the implicate
order that way; the subtler levels of the implicate order are affecting the
energy in the less subtle levels. The implicate energies are very fine; they
would not ordinarily even be counted as energies, and these implicate
energies are giving rise to the production of electrons and protons and
the various particles of physics. And these particles have been replicat-
ing so long that they are pretty well determined, or fixed in “cosmic
memory.”

Sheldrake: Yes, I think one could look at it that way. But whether these
morphogenetic fields have a subtle energy or not, I don’t really know
what to think about that. When I wrote my book, I tried to draw a
very sharp distinction between formative causation and the ordinary
kind of causation (energetic causation), the kind that people are familiar with (e.g., pushing things, electricity), for two reasons: first, I wanted to
make it clear that this formative causation is a different kind of thing
from what we usually think of as causation. (It may not be so different
when one takes into account causation through fields, as in physics.)
But the second reason was that it is an important part of my theory
that these morphic fields can propagate across space and time, that past
events could influence other events everywhere else. Now if these fields
are conceived of as energetic, in any normal sense of the word, most
people assume that they could only propagate locally according to some
sort of inverse square law, because most known energies—light, gravity,
magnetism, etc.—fade out over distance.

Bohm: But that doesn’t necessarily follow, you see. One of the early
interpretations of the quantum theory I developed was in terms of a
particle moving in a field.

Bohm: Yes. Now the quantum potential had many of the properties
you ascribe to morphogenetic fields and chreodes; that is, it guided the
particle in some way, and there are often deep valleys and plateaus, and
particles may start to accumulate in plateaus and produce interference
fringes. Now the interesting thing is that the quantum potential energy
had the same effect regardless of its intensity, so that even far away it
may produce a tremendous effect; this effect does not follow an inverse
square law. Only the form of the potential has an effect, and not its
amplitude or its magnitude. So we compared this to a ship being guided
by radar; the radar is carrying form or information from all around. It
doesn’t, within its limits, depend on how strong the radio wave is. So
we could say that in that sense the quantum potential is acting as a
formative field on the movement of the electrons. The formative field
could not be put in three-dimensional [or local] space, it would have to
be in a three-n dimensional space, so that there would be non-local con-
nections, or subtle connections of distant particles (which we see in the
Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment). So there would be a wholeness
about the system such that the formative field could not be attributed
to that particle alone; it can be attributed only to the whole, and some-
thing happening to faraway particles can affect the formative field of
other particles. There could thus be a [non-local] transformation of the
formative field of a certain group to another group. So I think that if
you attempt to understand what quantum mechanics means by such a
model, you get quite a strong analogy to a formative field.

Sheldrake: Yes, it may even be a homology; it may be a different way of
talking about the same thing.

Bohm: The major difference is that quantum mechanics doesn’t treat
time, and therefore it hasn’t any way to account for the cumulative
effect of past forms. To do so would require an extension of the way
physics treats time, you see.

Sheldrake: But don’t you get time in physics when you have a collapse
of the wave function?

Bohm: Yes, but that’s outside the framework of quantum physics today.
That collapse is not treated by any law at all, which means that the
past is, as it were, wiped out altogether.

[Editor’s note: This is the point
where, as earlier mentioned, Bohm discusses some of the inadequacies of
present-day quantum mechanics—in particular, its incapacity to explain
process, or the influence of the past on the present. He then suggests his
re-formulations—injection, projection, the implicate order, etc.—that
might remedy these inadequacies. And these re-formulations, apparently,
are rather similar to Sheldrake’s theories.]

You see, the present quantum mechanics does not have any concept of movement or process or continuity in time; it really deals with one moment only, one observation, and the probability that one observation will be followed by another one. But there is obviously process in the physical world. Now I want to say that that process can be understood from the implicate order as this activity of re-projection and re-injection. So, the theory of the implicate
order, carried this far, goes quite beyond present quantum mechanics. It
actually deals with process, which quantum mechanics does not, except
by reference to an observing apparatus that in turn has to be referred to
something else.

Bohm: Re-injection is exactly what the Schrödinger equation is describ-
ing. And re-projection is the next step, which quantum mechanics
doesn’t handle (except by the arbitrary assumption that the wave func-
tion “collapses” in a way that has no place in the physical laws, such as
Schrödinger’s equation). Now, there’s one other thing that modern quantum mechanics doesn’t handle. Oddly enough, physics at present has no contact with the notion of actuality. You see, classical physics has at least some
notion of actuality in saying that actuality consists of a whole collec-
tion of particles that are moving and interacting in a certain way. Now,
in quantum physics, there is no concept of actuality whatsoever, because
quantum physics maintains that its equations don’t describe anything
actual, they merely describe the probability of what an observer could
see if he had an instrument of a certain kind, and this instrument is
therefore supposed to be necessary for the actuality of the phenomenon.
But the instrument, in turn, is supposed to be made of similar particles,
obeying the same laws, which would, in turn, require another instru-
ment to give them actuality. That would go on an infinite regress. Wigner has proposed to end the regress by saying it is the consciousness of the actual observer that gives actuality to everything.

Bohm: Nor to me, but apparently Wigner feels happy with this, as do
some others. The point is, unless you extend quantum mechanics, there is no room in it for actuality, no room for any of the things you are
talking about. So quantum mechanics as it stands now, I want to say, is
a very truncated, limited, abstracted set of formulae that gives certain
limited results having to do with only one moment of an experiment.
But out of this truncated view, physicists are trying to explain every-
thing, you see; the whole thing simply has no meaning at all. Think
about it: modern physics can’t even talk about the actual world!

Bohm: Well, I think through the implicate order. We have a projection
of the whole to constitute a moment; a moment is a movement. And
we can say that that projection is the actualization. In other words, the
thing that physics doesn’t discuss is how various successive moments are
related, and that’s what I say the implicate order is attempting to do.
If we extended quantum mechanics through the implicate order, we
would bring in just that question of how past moments have an effect
on the present (i.e., via injection and re-projection). At present, physics
says the next moment is entirely independent, but with some probability
of being such and such. There’s no room in it for the sort of thing you’re
talking about, of having a certain accumulated effect of the past; but
the implicate order extension of quantum mechanics would have that
possibility. And further, suppose somehow I were to combine the impli-
cate order extension of quantum mechanics [which would account for
the accumulated effects of the past] with this quantum potential [which
would account for these effects being non-local in nature], then I think I
would get things very like what you are talking about.

Sheldrake: Yes, that would be very exciting! Of all the ways I’ve come
across, I think that’s the most promising way of being able to mesh
together these sort of ideas. I haven’t come across any other way that
seems to show such possible connections.

Bohm: If we can bring in time, and say that each moment has a certain
field of potentials (represented by the Schrödinger equation) and also
an actuality, which is more restricted (represented by the particle itself);
and then say that the next moment has its potential and its actuality,
and we must have some connection between the actuality of the previ-
ous moments and the potentials of the next—that would be introjection,
not of the wave function of the past, but of the actuality of the past
into that field from which the present is going to be projected. That
would do exactly the sort of thing you’re talking about. Because then
you could build up a series of actualities introjected that would nar-
row down the field potential more and more, and these would form the
basis of subsequent projections. That would account for the influence
of the past on the present.

Sheldrake: Yes, yes. Now how do you think this ties in with the alleged
matter waves in de Broglie’s equation?

Bohm: That’s exactly where we started. These matter waves are the
formative cause, and that was what de Broglie originally suggested.
However, he wanted to regard the matter wave as just simply a real
three-dimensional wave in time, and that doesn’t work well. The for-
mative field is a far better interpretation. The quantum potential is the
formative field that we derive from the generalized de Broglie waves.
And we say that the particle is the actuality, affected by the formative
field. The set of particles, the whole structure of all the particles form-
ing a system, is the actuality of that formative field.
But that model by itself still ignores time, so the next step is to
bring in time, to say that there’s a succession of moments of time
in which there is a recurrent actuality. And we would say that what
recurs is affected by the formative field. But then that formative field
is affected by what has previously happened, actually. Now, that would
help to remove most of the problems in physics, if we can manage it.
And it would tie up closely with the sort of thing that you’re talking
about.

See, at present we say that the wave function as potential spreads
out very fast and then it suddenly collapses into some definite actual
state for reasons totally outside the theory. So we say it requires a piece
of measuring apparatus to do so. Then another collapse, and the only
continuity of this system would be achieved by an infinite set of mea-
suring apparatuses that would keep it in observation all the time, and
these observation apparatuses in turn would have to be observed to
allow them to exist actually, and so on. And the whole thing vanishes
in a fog of confusion. Because people take the present mathematics as
sacred, they say these equations in their general form are never to be
altered, and then they say here we are with all these strange problems.
But you see almost no one wants to introduce anything fundamentally
different into this general framework.

Sheldrake: So, the de Broglie interpretation is the way you’re thinking
of developing. You’d have this recurrent actualization of something that
is continually associated with the formative field.

Bohm: And the present formative field is affected by past actualiza-
tions. In the present quantum mechanics there is no way to have the
formative field affected by anything at all, including the past, because
there’s only one moment that you can talk about. You can’t find any-
thing that would affect the formative field, and that’s the problem.

Sheldrake: Yes, I see. Now this is a closely related topic: what I’m talk-
ing about with morphogenetic fields has to do with physical forms
and habitual patterns of behavior. The connection of these ideas to
the thought process itself is not obvious, although they’re certainly
related. If you start framing the whole topic in physical terms, as I do
with morphogenetic fields, then you have to speak in terms of mor-
phic resonance, the influence of past forms on present ones through
the morphogenetic field by a kind of resonance. If, however, you start
using psychological language, and you start talking in terms of thought,
then you’ve got a handier way of thinking of the influence of the past,
because with mental fields you have memory. And one can extend this
memory if one thinks of the whole universe as essentially thought-
like, as many philosophical systems have done. You could say that if
the whole universe is thought-like, then you automatically have a sort
of cosmic memory developing. There are systems of thought that take
exactly this view. One of them is a Mahayana Buddhist system—the
idea of the Alayavijnana, store consciousness, is rather similar to the
idea of cosmic memory. And the Theosophists I think took over some
of that in the idea of the Akashic record. The entire universe is, in one
school of Hindu thought, Vishnu’s dream. Vishnu dreams the universe
into being—it has the same kind of reality as a dream, and because
Vishnu is a long-lasting god, who goes on dreaming for a long time, it
retains a certain consistency. There’s memory within that dream; what
he dreamed about in the past tended to repeat itself, having its own laws
and dynamics. All of those systems of thought have memory built into
them. So you could phrase the whole thing in psychological language.
But that doesn’t really help to make much contact with modern physics
and our modern scientific way of looking at the world. So, in a sense,
notions like the implicate order seem to be a better way of approach-
ing the problem, because implicate order is neutral in connotation. It
is something that can underlie both physical reality and thought. So
it transcends the usual materialist-idealist dichotomy, which says either
all of reality is thoughtlike or all of reality is matterlike. The implicate
order idea has the big advantage of transcending that distinction.

Sheldrake: If we take a broader view of creativity, we have the idea of
the overall evolutionary process; now that’s clearly a creative process.
How do you think that kind of evolutionary creativity is related to this
model?

Bohm: You could speculate that a great deal of life is the constant rep-
lication of forms that are given with small variations, and that’s similar
to our experience of thought: a constant replication of pattern within
variation. But then we wonder, “How does it ever come about that we
get variations—that we get beyond that pattern?”

Sheldrake: Yes, creative “jumps.”

Bohm: “Jumps”—yes; you see we call it “jumps” when it’s projected
into the fixed categories of thought. If you were to say that there’s a
proto-intelligence or implicit intelligence in matter as it evolves, that
it’s actually not moving causally in a sequence but is constantly created
and replicated, then there is room for such a creative act to occur, and
to project and introject a creative content.

Sheldrake: The thing that’s involved in this creativity seems to be
something that links things together, a wholeness that embraces parts
and sets up relationships between them. They’re linked together
within a new whole that didn’t exist before. In this creative realiza-
tion, two previously separate things have been linked together within
a whole.

Bohm: Yes. They’re now seen as mere aspects of the whole rather than
independent existences. You have realized a new whole, and from that
realization you may create an external reality as well.

Sheldrake: So the creative process, which gives rise to new thought,
through which new wholes are realized, is similar in that sense to the
creative reality that gives rise to new wholes in the evolutionary process.
The creative process could be seen as a successive development of more-
complex and higher-level wholes, through previously separate things
being connected together.

Bohm: And being realized now as not only independent parts but also
aspects of a greater whole that has new qualities.

Sheldrake: Right, and that realization of a greater whole is what actu-
ally creates the greater whole—

Bohm: Yes, and it could even propose it, as in imagination, or a flash
of insight, you realize the whole in the mind and you further realize it
outside by work. So you might suppose, say, that somehow nature real-
izes that it’s being presented with various things that now have to be
brought together. Nature realizes this greater whole at a deeper level,
which is analogous to imagination, and then it unfolds it into the exter-
nal environment. In a way, a flash of creative insight occurs in the bio-
logical system.

Sheldrake: Exactly. Now do you think that these relations between
things that make them part of the greater whole could, way back in
time, have given rise to the fundamental forces of physics? For example,
could the gravitational forces that link together all matter have arisen
through an original creative insight that all matter was one?

Bohm: One could say that in bringing together various things that
previously had been disparate, suddenly there was a realization of their
oneness and this created a new whole that is the universe, as we know
it, anyway. We can say that nature has an intent, you see, that is much
deeper than what appears on the surface.

Sheldrake: Now, as to whether natural laws are eternally given or
whether they are gradually built up—how do you see that?

Bohm: I think, in view of the implicate order, that the notion of forma-
tive fields gradually becoming necessary is what is called for. Even mod-
ern physics is pointing to that idea by saying there was a time (i.e., prior
to the big bang) before any of these units (molecules, quarks, atoms),
on which we are basing the necessity, even existed. So, if you said there
were certain fixed and everlasting laws of the molecules and atoms, then
what would you say if you traced it back to the time before the atoms
and molecules existed? Physics can say nothing about that, right? It can
say only that there was a formation of these particles at a certain stage.
So there would have to be an actual development in which the necessity
in a certain field grew more and more fixed. You can even see that hap-
pening as you cool down a substance that liquefies; at first you get little
clumps of liquid that are transient, and then they get bigger and more
determinate. Now physicists explain all this by saying that the laws of
the molecules are eternal; molecules are merely consequences of those
laws, or derived from those laws. But if you follow that back and ask,
“Where were molecules?”: well, they were originally protons and elec-
trons, which were originally quarks, which were originally sub-quarks.
And it goes right back to a stage where none of the units we know even
existed, so the whole scheme sort of fades out. It’s then open to you
to say that, in general, fields of necessity are not eternal; they are con-
stantly forming and developing.

Sheldrake: I think that the current conventional and scientific picture
hasn’t really faced up to this at all. You see, science started with a sort
of neo-Platonic, neo-Pythagorean notion—the idea of timeless laws—
which has been taken for granted in science for a very long time. I
think that when the evolutionary theory in biology came in, it triggered
the beginning of change. We then had an evolutionary view of real-
ity regarding animals and plants, but it was still considered that there
was a timeless background of the physical world, the molecular and
atomic world. Now we’ve gone to the cosmology of the big bang, which
is widely accepted. So now we’ve got the idea of the entire universe as
being a radically evolutionary universe. And this, I think, provokes a
crisis, and should provoke a crisis. The idea of timeless laws that have
always been there, somehow pervading space and time, ceases to have
much meaning when you have an actual historical big bang, because you
then have this problem: where were the laws before the big bang?

Bohm: There is also the belief, commonly accepted, that at the core of
black holes the laws as we know them would also vanish. As you say,
scientists haven’t faced up to it because they are still thinking in the old
way, in terms of timeless laws. But some physicists realize that. One cos-
mologist was giving a talk and he said, “Well, you know, I used to think
everything was a law of nature, and it’s all fixed, but as far as a black
hole is concerned, anything can happen. You see, if it suddenly flashed
a Coca-Cola sign, this would still be a possibility.” [Laughter.] So, the
notion of timeless laws doesn’t seem to hold, because time itself is part
of the necessity that developed. The black hole doesn’t involve time and
space as we know it; they all vanish. It’s not just matter that vanishes,
but any regular order that we know of vanishes, and therefore you could
say anything goes, or nothing goes.

Sheldrake: The interesting thing about the big bang theory is that the
minute you have to address the question of the origins of the laws of
nature, you’re forced to recognize the philosophical assumptions under-
lying any sort of science. People who think of themselves as hard-nosed
mechanists or pragmatists regard metaphysics as a waste of time, a use-
less speculative activity, whereas supposedly they are practical scientists
getting on with the job. But you can force them to realize that their
view of the laws of nature as being timeless, which is implicit in every-
thing they say or think or do, is in fact a metaphysical view. And it’s
one possible metaphysical view, it’s not the only possible one. I talk with
biological friends, and they say, “Oh, what you’re doing is metaphysics.”
So I say, “Wait a minute, let’s look at what you’re doing.” And then you
confront them with the question of where were the laws of nature before
the big bang. And most of them say, “Well, they must have always been
there.” And you say, “Where? There’s no matter in any sense that we
know of before the big bang. Where were these laws of nature, sort of
free-floating?” And they say, “Well, they must have been there some-
how.” And then you say, “Don’t you think this is a rather metaphysical
concept, in any literal sense of metaphysics, because it’s quite beyond
existing physics?” They have to admit it sooner or later. As soon as you
get into that sort of area, the certainty that so many scientists think
their view of the world is founded on simply disappears. It becomes
clear that current science presupposes uncritically one possible kind of
metaphysics. When one faces this, one can at least begin to think about
it rather than accepting one way of thinking about it as self-evident,
taken for granted. And if one begins to think about it, one might be
able to deepen one’s understanding of it.