Indeterministic metaphors: The popular science books of Fritjof Capra and Gary Zukav

1. Introduction

Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979), a popular science book on the new physics that achieved a cult status, is composed of twelve Chapter 1s. The rationale, seemingly, is to remind the reader of an exchange early in the book:

‘Every lesson is the first lesson,’ he told me. […]

‘But surely you cannot be starting new each lesson,’ I said. […]

‘When I say that every lesson is the first lesson,’ he replied, ‘it does not mean that we forget what we already know.’ (Zukav, 1979: 35–36)

But this paradox of ‘starting new’ while ‘not forgetting what we already know’ is also analogous to Zukav’s presentation of the new physics – i.e. relativity and quantum mechanics (QM) – as a revolutionary overturning of classical Newtonian science. Zukav begins with the relatively equivocal position that ‘quantum mechanics does not replace Newtonian physics, it includes it’; but soon concludes that ‘the physics of Newton was a thing of the past’ (Zukav, 1979: 45, 90).

Depicting the new physics as overthrowing Newtonian physics is standard in popular physics books. Stephen Hawking, John Gribbin, Brian Greene, and many others identify modern physics’ theories of relativity and QM as a fundamental break with Newtonian science. To take just one example, in The Elegant Universe, Greene (1999) describes how QM ‘spell[ed] the downfall of what has come to be known as classical physics’:

By 1927, therefore, classical innocence had been lost. Gone were the days of the clockwork universe whose individual constituents were set in motion at some moment in the past and obediently fulfilled their inescapable uniquely determined destiny. (Greene, 1999: 107)

The two popular science writers that I will concentrate on in this paper go further, however: Gary Zukav and Fritjof Capra depict the end not just of Newtonian physics, but also of determinism and causality. Both Capra’s The Tao of Physics (1975) and Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters became bestsellers; the former has sold a million copies in 23 languages, the latter was awarded a U.S. National Book Award in 1980. As importantly, together they spawned a host of imitations: ‘in the years following the publication of Capra and Zukav’s books, quantum physics emerged from the relative obscurity it had endured’ (Leane, 2007: 34). They have often been considered, and criticised, together (Lederman, 1993; Scerri, 1989; Woit, 2006) as exemplars of the new popularisations of physics that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s.

2. Overthrowing determinism

Zukav writes of ‘the end of the line for classical causality’ as a result of the wave–particle duality and sees ‘the whole idea of a causal universe [as] undermined by the uncertainty principle’ (Zukav, 1979: 88, 135). Capra is equally unequivocal: ‘Quantum theory has thus demolished the classical concepts of solid objects and of strictly deterministic laws of nature’ (Capra, 1975: 68). Conspicuous in these examples is the yoking of distinct concepts. Zukav’s pairing of ‘classical’ and ‘causality’ silently equates the two ideas; a similar slippage is evident in Capra’s implication that ‘deterministic laws of nature’ are a classical concept, irrelevant to modern physics.

Through these conflations Newtonian mechanics comes to stand, metonymically, for determinism and even causality. The process of the scientific revolution of relativity and QM may rightly be represented as exposing the limits of Newtonian mechanics, but for Zukav and Capra the deterministic world-view is identified as a principal casualty. And yet it is unclear quite what this determinism so resoundingly ‘demolished’ by the new physics is: as Jean Bricmont (2002) notes, ‘Determinism is one of those words over which many people get involved in disputes, partly because it is rarely defined’.

For example, Capra, Zukav and others frequently equate determinism with predictability, even though, as Earman stresses ‘[Determinism] is an ontological vision; [it] depends only on the structure of the world, independently of what we do or could know of it’ (Earman, 1986: 7). Hoefer (2010) agrees that ‘in rigorous discussion’ of determinism, the idea of predictability ‘should be eschewed’, and Bricmont (2002) observes that ‘nobody who has ever defended universal determinism (in particular Laplace […]) ever meant it to be true in that sense [of predictability]. Everybody agrees that not everything in the world is predictable’.

However, it is by no means certain that QM requires us to jettison determinism, even considered as an ontological vision: different interpretations of QM give different conclusions. In his overview of the complex debate around causal determinism, Carl Hoefer (2010) sums it up this way:

QM is widely thought to be a strongly non-deterministic theory. […] So goes the story; but like much popular wisdom, it is partly mistaken and/or misleading. Ironically, quantum mechanics is one of the best prospects for a genuinely deterministic theory in modern times! […] [E]verything hinges on what interpretational and philosophical decisions one adopts.

Despite this, there is a reluctance to accept the determinism associated with Newtonian mechanics; as Zukav notes, the laws of motion of the old physics ‘carry within them a very dispiriting logic’ (Zukav, 1979: 51). This is because, as Carl Hoefer observes, ‘what is at stake in determinism [is] […] our fears about our own status as free agents in the world’ (Hoefer, 2010). Bricmont (1995) has noted that people simply cannot swallow the philosophy of determinism since it disagrees with an intuitive sense that we have a conscious choice whether we do X or Y.

This connection between indeterminacy and consciousness is present from the earliest popularisations of the new physics. Gillian Beer observes an ‘acceptance of absence, indeterminacy, and the unknowable’ in the writings of Arthur Eddington in the 1920s and 1930s – in his metaphors and stories, and also in his ‘recognition of human agency’ and his foregrounding of ‘human activity of mind’ (Beer, 1995: 310, 299).

For Zukav and Capra, connecting the new physics with conscious choice supports the argument that the new physics undermines the determinism of classical physics. Zukav, for example, claims that if we

accept the mechanistic determination of Newtonian physics – if the universe really is a great machine – then from the moment that the universe was created and set into motion, everything that was to happen in it already was determined.

According to this philosophy, we may seem to have a will of our own and the ability to alter the course of events in our lives, but we do not. Everything, from the beginning of time, has been predetermined, including our illusion of having a free will. (Zukav, 1979: 51–52)

Note that although the debate ostensibly concerns scientific determinism, the focus shifts through the sudden proliferation of first-person pronouns (five in two sentences), opposing determinism on the one hand to free will and human consciousness on the other.

Elizabeth Leane has shown how Zukav’s anthropomorphic metaphors may ‘generate uncontrolled meaning’; in particular, the idea that ‘quantum mechanics has heralded a return to an anthropocentric world-view’ (Leane, 2007: 105, 83). Clearly, for Zukav and Capra anthropomorphic metaphors sit well with the parallels they endeavour to sustain between Eastern mysticism and quantum physics. I will not rehearse Leane’s arguments here; however, it is important to observe that by shoring up the connection between conscious choice and the new physics, these anthropomorphic metaphors also support the argument that Zukav and Capra advance – that the deterministic world-view (one associated with Laplace and Newton) has been undermined as a consequence of the new physics.

In the rest of this paper I will show how this argument of indeterminacy is supported by their use of two other metaphors. Firstly, I argue that metaphors of exploration and maps generate associations of the ‘unknown’ and the impossibility of science’s perfect representation of the world, uncertainties that for Zukav and Capra militate against the possibility of determinism.

Secondly, I look at Zukav’s and Capra’s metaphors using shadows, and show how they draw on the long cultural history of that metaphor to again emphasise our inherently imperfect knowledge of the world.

These metaphors are obviously not the only metaphors used by these or other popularisers, nor are they even the most common. I have chosen them because they demonstrate how metaphors can play a ‘strategic’ role in supporting an argument, as Gillian Beer (1983) showed. Of course, it is possible to see many metaphors as simply an inevitable consequence of the expository mode of popular science writing – pedagogical metaphors that, albeit imperfectly, convey difficult technical ideas or theories without recourse to the language and mathematics in which the ideas are expressed in their technical form. Readers and critics should remain sceptical of metaphors in popular science, not consigning them too quickly to this category: to recall Richard Whitley, ‘expository practices are not epistemologically neutral’ (Whitley, 1985: 11).

3. Exploring and mapping

Popular science writing on the new physics commonly depicts the developments in relativity and QM as representing a critical moment in scientific progress, as superseding the determinism of classical physics. This progress is often figured as the discovery or exploration of new territory. Many popularisers use this metaphor. To take two representative examples: Brian Greene reports how ‘Physicists focused their initial pathbreaking efforts to merge special relativity with quantum concepts’ (Greene, 1999: 121) ¹ ; and Martin Gardner sees scientific discoveries as ‘“out there” as Mount Everest is, subject to exploration in the way a jungle is explored’ (Penrose, 1989: xv). Gardner’s image of Everest recalls, of course, Einstein’s simile in which he compares creating a new scientific theory with ‘climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections’ and imagines mastering ‘obstacles on our adventurous way up’ (Einstein and Infeld, 1938 :152). Known territory is equated with established scientific theory and exploration stands for pushing back the ‘boundaries’ of existing knowledge. ² On the simplest level, then, metaphors of territory, exploration and maps support the argument that the new physics, as a scientifically more ‘advanced’ theory, supersedes classical physics. In so doing, these metaphors – at the very least – add a normative force to the narrative of scientific progress (Curtis, 1994).

In the implicit comparison made whenever a metaphor is used, attributes of the ‘vehicle’ (the subject described) of the metaphor transfer across to the ‘tenor’ (to which the subject is compared) – to borrow I.A. Richards’s terminology (Richards, 2001: 64). In the exploration metaphor the primary attribute transferred across to scientific progress is presumably simply ‘expansion’: expansion of territory implies expansion of knowledge. But a metaphor always evokes more than one connotation drawn from the vehicle’s ‘system of associated commonplaces’ (Black, 1962: 40, italics in original). In describing scientific progress in terms of exploration, ideas commonly evoked by the image of exploration are transferred to scientific progress. For example, a comparison is also made between the act of exploration and the act of ‘discovering’ a new scientific theory: the endeavour, effort, and a ‘eureka moment’ of discovery. The important point is that these associations are implicit and transferred to the representation of scientific practice even when they are not made explicit by the writer.

When we look at this metaphor as used by Zukav, different ‘associated commonplaces’ appear to be activated: in Zukav’s hands the metaphor evokes the ‘unknown’. Einstein, for example, is described as stepping ‘boldly into the unknown, in fact, into the unimaginable. Already on new territory, he proceeded to explore where no person had ever been before’ (Zukav, 1979: 159). Other physicists are deemed to have ‘slipped the bonds of the known to venture far into the unexplored territory which lies beyond the barrier of the obvious’ (Zukav, 1979: 140).

Here, the exploration metaphor is drawing attention to our incomplete knowledge of the world. But note too that in both instances the metaphor of exploration is associated not only with the as-yet-unexplored, but also with the ‘unimaginable’ and the ‘non-obvious’. These connotations add a certain mystery; but by suggesting the ‘unknowability’ of the world, they also support the argument that the new physics necessitates a non-deterministic world-view (if determinism is associated with predictability, see Introduction).

These associations become even more apparent when we turn to the related metaphors of maps, where terrain generally represents the world and maps our knowledge of that world. It is again important to establish the elements of the ‘system of associated commonplaces’ activated when this ‘vehicle’ is used. When used as a metaphor for scientific knowledge, maps, we may note, are representations of the world that are useful but also limited, partial or imperfect. This last quality is emphasised by Capra (who is fond of this metaphor) as part of the demonstration that the new physics has overturned the determinism associated with classical mechanics, by showing the impossibility of science’s complete knowledge of the world.

The first map analogy in The Tao of Physics makes it clear that this imperfection of representation is at the heart of Capra’s use of the metaphor:

In thinking about the world we are faced with the same kind of problem as the cartographer who tries to cover the curved face of the Earth with a sequence of plane maps. We can only expect an approximate representation of reality from such a procedure. (Capra, 1975: 28)

Capra compares this approximation to the field of science: ‘The limitations of any knowledge obtained by these [scientific] methods have become increasingly apparent in modern science, and in particular in modern physics’ (Capra, 1975: 28). On this level the metaphor is fairly self-explanatory; however, having established maps as repositories of scientific knowledge, their connection with the wider theme of consciousness is brought to the fore. After all, maps are human constructs; or, as Capra puts it, ‘Modern physics has confirmed [that] […] the concepts we use to describe nature are limited, that they are not features of reality, as we tend to believe, but creations of the mind; parts of the map, not of the territory’ (Capra, 1975: 167, italics mine).

Capra frequently uses the philosopher Alfred Korzybski’s distinction between ‘the map and the territory’ to argue that science’s knowledge of the world is imperfect and incomplete. Often this is done explicitly, as in the example above, or when asserting that ‘mathematics […] must be seen as part of our conceptual map and not as a feature of reality itself’ (Capra, 1975: 33). But, just as with the associations of the ‘unknown’ in the metaphor of exploring new territory, this idea of incomplete knowledge inheres in the map metaphor itself: so when Capra notes that ‘Our notions of space and time figure prominently on our map of reality’ (Capra, 1975: 161) only the word ‘notions’ and the metaphor of the map (now thoroughly integrated) indicate that these are, for Capra, not properties of nature, but creations of our consciousness.

4. Shadows on the wall

One of the ways in which Zukav and Capra see Newtonian determinism as undermined is as a result of the inherent limits on our knowledge at a quantum level, as described by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (though, again, see the Introduction for the problem of an epistemological basis for determinism).

Zukav uses a version of one of Heisenberg’s explications of his principle (often called Heisenberg’s microscope), to describe how uncertainty is manifested even in empirical attempts to ascertain measurements of canonically conjugate variables. In doing so, Zukav compares the principle with casting a shadow on a wall:

Since electrons are so small, the wavelength of ordinary light is much too long to ‘see’ electrons […].

If we hold a strand of hair between a bright light and the wall, the hair casts no distinct shadow […] To see something, we have to obstruct the light waves we are looking with […] An electron is large enough, compared to the tiny wavelength of gamma rays, to obstruct some of them: to make a shadow on the wall, as it were. (Zukav, 1979: 133–134)

The comparison draws on a long cultural history in which ‘[f]rom Plato on, projected shadow has intermittently also had to appear in the role of bearer of imperfect knowledge of the object that projects it’ (Baxandall, 1995: 144). The analogy underscores the uncertainty in the uncertainty principle.

Later, Zukav uses the metaphor again when describing the special theory of relativity. In his discussion of Lorentz transformations, Zukav (1979: 163–165, italic in original) calls upon Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which a group of people are ‘chained inside a cave in such a way that they can see only the shadows on the wall of the cave. These shadows are the only world that these people know’:

The equations in the special theory of relativity (the Lorentz transformations) which show a contraction due to motion describe these projections. (Is this beginning to sound like Plato’s cave?)

There is a simple sense in which Plato’s cave is not an accurate analogy: Lorentz contractions are not an optical phenomenon – they are a ‘real’ (i.e. measurable, but frame dependent) effect of near-light-speed motion; but the implication of the comparison with Plato’s cave is that they are simply a visual illusion, an implication supported by a number of phrases: ‘a moving object appears to contract in the direction of motion’; ‘this phenomenon is something like a visual illusion’; ‘it is the projection that contracts’. ³

Almost any analogy reveals flaws when enough pressure is applied; the point, rather, is that Zukav’s use of Plato’s allegory stresses our very partial apprehension and understanding of the world. Just as in his comparison with the uncertainty principle, the shadows on the wall imply an inherent lack of information, a fundamental uncertainty, that is not applicable to relativity. In part, this association inheres in the metaphor itself; and in part our interpretation of the metaphor is altered by Zukav’s use of the metaphor to describe the uncertainty principle.

Something similar can be seen in The Tao of Physics. Capra notes that ‘it makes no sense to ask which is the “real” length of an object, just as it makes no sense in our everyday life to ask for the real length of somebody’s shadow’ (Capra, 1975: 170). At first sight Capra’s comparison between a shadow, whose length varies, and a (moving) object whose length (along its line of motion) also varies, appears slightly more careful. A shadow, as Capra says, is a projection of a 3D object on to a 2D plane; likewise a moving object is ‘the projection of points in four-dimensional space-time on to three-dimensional space’ (Capra, 1975: 170).

The problem is that, as we have seen, shadows frequently connote ‘imperfect knowledge’ of the casting object. In this case the comparison with shadows again implies the inherent incompleteness of our knowledge – we can never know, or calculate, from its shadow one dimension (the depth) of the object, whereas given its velocity we can calculate the ‘real’ length of an object in motion.

But the more significant problem is that elsewhere Capra uses the image of the shadow in a very different way. Asserting a connection between ‘the impossibility of separating the scientific observer from the observed phenomena’ and an apparently similar tenet from Eastern philosophy, Capra claims that ‘all forms we perceive are “mind only”; projections, or “shadows”, of the mind’ (Capra, 1975: 277). By using the image in a context that questions the relationship between an externally ‘real’ world, and our apprehension and description of it, Capra strongly activates the idea of the shadow as a partial representation of the projected object.

Part of the connotative field of the image of the shadow, then, is the lack of information that it contains; a shadow can convey only ‘imperfect knowledge of the object that projects it’. ‘Imperfect’ is precisely the way in which both Zukav and Capra wish to characterise our knowledge of a supposedly non-deterministic world as seen through the new physics.

5. Conclusion

In an essay on the mechanistic metaphor, Mary Ellen Pitts showed how the writings of four scientists, including Capra, reject or question the mechanistic metaphor; her reading of Capra is sympathetic to the shift he makes from ‘a mechanistic to a holistic conception of reality’ (Pitts, 1983). The mechanistic metaphor may indeed be an unhelpful one, but her essay does not attend to the alternative metaphors that Capra establishes in its place, and what the possible consequence of these metaphors might be. I have shown here how these metaphors support an argument that the new physics necessitates an indeterministic interpretation of the world, a representation which overstates the indeterminism of the new physics.

With their interest in New Age ideas, Capra and Zukav are not necessarily representative of other physics popularisers, but they are outliers who have had an important influence. Their rejection of determinism may be more extreme than that found in other writers (though it is still to be found elsewhere), but the success of their books suggests that they have been influential in creating the ‘popular wisdom’ that QM is a strongly non-deterministic theory (Hoefer, 2010).

Moreover, none of the metaphors analysed here – anthropomorphism, exploration, maps, shadows – are used exclusively by Zukav and Capra. Although it is likely that these metaphors are more volatile in their hands (see Leane, 2007: 102) than when used outside the ‘physics and mysticism’ genre, these metaphors will still carry some of the same connotations. Perhaps even connotations coloured by their use by such popularisers as Zukav and Capra.

More generally, this analysis gives further evidence of the way in which metaphors may be used strategically to support argumentative positions, and argues for continued critical attention to the metaphors employed by popular science writers.